after learning that one of James Gunn's favorite New52 comics was Red Hood & the Outlaws and hearing that Lobo is supposed to make an appearance in the Starfire cartoon I've decided that actually I'm going to be taking over creative direction for the Titans movie and all DCU Titans projects moving forward okay thank you
saw Supergirl last Thursday and now that I'm not sleep deprived I think I may be able to actually express my thoughts coherently.
non-spoiler review: I liked it! definitely not my favorite movie ever, and I was disappointed with quite a few aspects having read the WOT comic beforehand, but I enjoyed watching it and am excited to see more of the character in the future.
spoilers under the cut
Krem and the Brigands. you don't need your woman-led superhero movie to have a conflict involving child sex-slaves when that's nowhere in the original text btw. IF the girls had been directly involved in the plot, or given any kind of identity outside of Child Sex-Slaves it could have been used as an interesting commentary, but that's not what happened and instead it just felt weird and out of place to me.
Lobo. he did not need to be there at all. you could edit him out of the movie entirely and almost nothing would change. the only scene where he did anything of significance was incapacitating a guy so that Kara had time to recover from Kyrptonite poisoning, which, again, was completely unnecessary. he's on half of the merchandise and advertising, and for what? all it tells me is that they didn't think that Supergirl alone would be enough reason for people to be interested. I know that Tom King originally wanted him to be included in the WOT comic, but it is so much better without him.
Ruthye. I really missed her narration. I think in order to understand and really feel for Ruthye you have to have read the comic because, while I think the actress did a great job, we as the audience aren't actually shown much that allows us to connect with her. we see her family killed by Krem and the Brigands, but we aren't really given a reason why other than "because the Brigands are evil!" which, okay sure, but why them? We know that her dad forged weapons, but that's... pretty much all of the context that we're given. I think that if we were given something akin to her narration from the comic, it would not only allow the audience to connect with her more, but it would also make the story as a whole more cohesive.
breaking the pattern a bit here, but I do also want to talk about the racism for a second. we see only two families that appear humanoid in the same way that Kara is. the first is Ruthye's family, who we see for no more than five minutes before they're killed by the Brigands, and the second is the couple that betray Kara and Ruthye in the hopes that their daughter will be returned to them. both of these families are POC (Ruthye's family is Asian, the other family is Black), and both of these families are killed to further Ruthye's/Kara's story and development. personally, I can't really say that I think this was done intentionally, but at best it's just shitty and biased writing.
Kara, Krypton, and Argo CIty. if you want your Supergirl to be chronologically younger than your Superman, you cannot use Argo City as your origin. the fact that Kara was born before the destruction of Krypton is important to understanding who she is as a character and as well as understanding how vastly her relationship to her culture differs from Clark's. if the fact that she was born after the rest of Krypton had been destroyed had been used in any way other than to tell us that she's younger than Clark, I would have understood it more. I think that there are stories you could tell with that, but none of them were present here.
The Ending. I am very disappointed that the purposefully ambiguous ending of the WOT comic was not used for the movie. I don't necessarily think that killing Krem is out of character for the Kara that we are introduced to in the film, but I don't think it works as well as leaving it up to the audience to decide what they think happened. part of the problem, I think, is that we are not seeing the story specifically from either Kara's POV or Ruthye's POV, but both and neither simultaneously. the ending of the comic worked so well because we get to know Kara through Ruthye's perspective and, like her, we can't be sure of Krem's fate and have to come to our own conclusions based on what kind of hero we believe Kara to be. if the movie had been committed to telling the story from Kara's perspective, the ending that they went with could have made more sense, but instead it just felt jarring.
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