So I Have watched the Supergirl movie now, and I liked it, don't get me wrong. Solid as a movie. I enjoyed Kara and Krypto for sure. I don't really, like, care for Tom King's work or messaging and so idc about it as an adaptation, and I thought the Supergirl movie did a good job of establishing itself. As a movie, it does what it is meant to do.
There's a kind of... shallowness to the messaging. Yes, Supergirl kills the traffickers and saves the girls, but the girls aren't really characters? They aren't really People, they're McGuffins, they don't have lines. They have a Girl Power move taking over the weaponry, but it's one single shot and again, no lines.
Why did Sarna have to die? Why did her parents have to die? Did they think of the optics around the little black girl who has been running from her captors (with no lines), having her parents and herself murdered in an alleyway? Their bodies discarded? Their deaths are used as a gotcha against the white woman by the child she is protecting, but in the end Kara is right, Ruthye shouldn't kill --so why did Sarna have to die? For shock? We don't even linger on their deaths. Kara's scream scene comes off more as about Ruthye's comments on her character than genuine rage and grief over her failure to protect the young black girl. They are never mentioned again.
Ruthye is a victim of this violence, don't get me wrong, and her story IS important! But that doesn't change that none of "the Brides", the young girls being trafficked, are treated as characters. They are the innocent lambs Kara must free from the wolves, and that is that. No lines, no follow up. We don't know what happened to the girls Kara freed either time.
I have seen this movie described as "kill sex traffickers" and yes, it is that. But it is perhaps too focused on being that catharsis that it loses the core of "protect young girls" (a topic that would most likely require tackling the structures that let this happen). In other words, it starts feeling a bit like all that rhetoric in leftist spaces that focus on aggression against the enemy rather than helping, protecting and shielding the vulnerable among us.