{"id":652923,"date":"2026-06-22T22:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/652923\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T22:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:04:08","slug":"supergirl-stranded-films-first-female-superhero-in-a-teen-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/652923\/","title":{"rendered":"Supergirl stranded film’s first female superhero in a teen comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Women Of Action<\/a>, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.<\/p>\n

There have been plenty of bad superhero movies, but it\u2019s rare that one is so poorly received that it not only staves off more female-led superhero movies for two decades, it also kills off an iconic comic book character for 20 years. Fairly or not, that\u2019s the legacy of 1984\u2019s Supergirl, the first and for a long time only big-screen female superhero in American cinema\u2014at least until Halle Berry\u2019s Catwoman<\/a> arrived to extend that drought even further. Superman\u2019s cousin Kara Zor-El had been a mainstay in DC Comics<\/a> since 1959, but her series abruptly ended two months before her film\u2019s release and then she was killed off in 1985\u2019s Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover event, not to be revived until 2004. No matter how Milly Alcock\u2019s new take on the character does this summer, it can\u2019t be worse than that.<\/p>\n

1984\u2019s Supergirl both does and doesn\u2019t deserve its terrible reputation. Released between the third and fourth installments of the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise, it feels like it was made from a script written in a foreign language and translated back and forth into English at least half a dozen times. The saga opens in the weird, cultish world of Argo City, where Peter O\u2019Toole is asked to deliver buckets of dry exposition about transdimensional space and Omegahedrons, ostensibly to explain how the Guggenheim Museum-esque city survived Krypton\u2019s destruction by hiding away in a pocket of \u201cInnerspace,\u201d although you\u2019ve got to be pretty locked-in on comic book lore to understand any of that. From there, the film jumps to Earth where Faye Dunaway is introduced as the glamorous witch Selena, no further explanation given. By the time Kara (Helen Slater) is manifesting clothes and wigs out of nowhere with her Kryptonian powers, it\u2019s clear that you just have to roll with whatever Supergirl is doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At its best, there\u2019s some camp fun to be had in the story of Kara making her way to her cousin\u2019s homeworld, disguising herself as an orphan named Linda Lee, and joining an extremely queer-coded all-girls boarding school. There\u2019s even a terrific set piece where Kara soaks up the power of the yellow sun and tries out her new flying abilities in balletic fashion. But trying to actually follow the plot or character arcs of this movie feels a bit like what Kara tells O\u2019Toole\u2019s Zaltar when he asks if she knows six-dimensional geometry: \u201cI know the equations. I just can\u2019t see them in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with Supergirl is that it transparently doesn\u2019t find a reason to exist other than because someone thought \u201cSuperman but for girls\u201d might sell well. Producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind wanted the film to be a fresh start<\/a> after the poorly received Superman III, but they failed to find a meaningful take on their central heroine. 1978\u2019s Superman wanted to make you believe a man could fly. Supergirl wants to make you believe a girl can go to math class. It seems like director Jeannot Szwarc and screenwriter David Odell made a list of all the stuff they imagine girls like (Witches! Love potions! Softball! Stuffing their bras! Kissing boys!) and put all those ideas into one movie, with little regard for whether or not they made sense together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ostensibly, Kara hops in a spaceship to Earth because she accidentally sends the all-powerful Omegahedron flying out the window and needs to get it back before Argo City loses power and everyone there dies. But once she actually lands, the movie becomes a fish-out-of-water comedy in which Kara is a wide-eyed babe in the woods \u00e0 la Splash, which came out the same year. It\u2019s not totally dissimilar from what Patty Jenkins did with her much more successful take on another iconic DC heroine. Only where Wonder Woman<\/a> balanced its woman-out-of-time comedy with the stakes of World War I constantly whirring in the background, Supergirl straight-up becomes a 1980s teen comedy for a while.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not a bad pitch for a young adult superhero story. It\u2019s fun to watch Kara befriend her plucky roommate Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy), sister of Lois; use her powers to deal with school bullies; and get a crash course on how to be an American teenage girl. It\u2019s just bizarre to enjoy those comedic tangents when the stakes of the movie are that all the people of Argo City (including Kara\u2019s parents!) are going to suffocate to death if she doesn\u2019t get the Omegahedron back. Yet there she is, playing field hockey, crushing on a hot groundskeeper named Ethan (Hart Bochner), and eating fast food with Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure, the only direct crossover from the Superman films after Reeve withdrew from a planned cameo appearance).\u00a0<\/p>\n

If that isn\u2019t weird enough, the villain has nothing to do with either Kara\u2019s Kryptonian origins or the school storyline. Instead, the witch randomly happens to come across the Omegahedron when it falls out of the sky into her picnic. (It doesn\u2019t even come to her because she\u2019s a witch, it\u2019s just pure coincidence!) How or why magic exists in this world is never addressed, and because Supergirl can\u2019t think of anything else for its two female leads to do, it makes them battle over Ethan\u2019s affections: Selena gives the hunky gardener a love potion that\u2019s supposed to make him fall in love with her, but instead winds up making him fall for \u201cLinda.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Given that Superman stories have always been steeped in romance, it\u2019s not inherently a bad thing that Kara gets a love interest too. But where Clark Kent\u2019s relationship with Lois Lane adds to the dimensionality of both characters, Kara\u2019s Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream-esque dynamic with Ethan doesn\u2019t do anything for her. If the whole movie had just been a lighthearted teen comedy, the madcap romance might have worked. But as the superhero story bends towards high fantasy, it\u2019s hard for the movie to find a cohesive tone. While Dunaway was dinged in reviews and singled out by the Razzies, the truth is she\u2019s delivering the kind of campy, vampy performance the script asks of her. The problem is that the character just doesn\u2019t make sense in this story. As Roger Ebert put it<\/a>, \u201cWhy even go to the trouble of making a movie that feels like it\u2019s laughing at itself?\u201d<\/p>\n

The mainline Superman movies had their tonal flaws too, of course, but what they had going for them was Reeve\u2019s perfectly honed performance at their center. While 19-year-old Slater is a charming screen presence who gets one genuinely great scene, where Kara has to convince Zaltar to help her escape the Phantom Zone, the movie mostly just asks her to be sweet and doe-eyed, which doesn\u2019t make for a particularly interesting heroine. There\u2019s an early set piece where Kara seems unfamiliar with the concept of sexual harassment or the threat of male violence, which suggests that the movie might do something interesting with her alien perspective on Earth. But after that, her enemies include an enchanted backhoe, a shadow monster, and some haunted amusement park rides, which don\u2019t ever add up to anything cohesive. Around the same time that The Terminator<\/a>, Aliens<\/a>, and even Red Sonja<\/a> defined their female heroes through action, Supergirl struggled to define its female hero at all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Maybe the most interesting thing about Supergirl is that it doesn\u2019t make a big deal about being the first female-led superhero movie\u2014largely because the idea of live-action superheroes as a full-fledged genre didn\u2019t really exist yet. Where Jenkins\u2019 Wonder Woman took its glass-ceiling-shattering responsibilities very seriously in the cinematic universe era, Supergirl clearly wasn\u2019t thinking that way in 1984, where it functioned solely as a sweet, lighthearted spin-off of the Reeve films. If Supergirl contains anything ahead of its time, it\u2019s the sheer number of female characters in its story; something that wouldn\u2019t become the norm in female-led action movies for decades. (If it even is now.)<\/p>\n

Still, even Warner Bros. didn\u2019t believe in the messy film in the end. After the Salkinds and Warners disagreed on whether to go for a summer or fall release date, the studio passed on the film entirely and it was picked up<\/a> by Tri-Star. Released in November, Supergirl opened to middling reviews and a disappointing box office, which was enough for the Salkinds to sell the Superman rights to The Cannon Group, thus paving the way for the somehow even more disastrous Superman IV: The Quest For Peace<\/a>\u2014and the end of the Reeve franchise. Slater never played Supergirl again, although she did pop up on Smallville as Clark\u2019s Kryptonian mom and The CW\u2019s Supergirl TV show as Kara\u2019s adoptive human one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Melissa Benoist\u2019s stellar small-screen work on that latter show now feels like the definitive live-action Supergirl, the 1984 film has its passionate defenders<\/a> too\u2014particularly among those who saw it when they were young enough that Kara\u2019s childlike sense of wonder hit home. A 48-minute behind-the-scenes special<\/a> suggests that the film was at least made with a lot of earnestness. The idea of Supergirl as a child of two worlds and someone perpetually living in her cousin\u2019s shadow are thematically potent ideas for a superhero, female or otherwise, but the original Supergirl arrived too early in the history of superhero cinema to truly capitalize on any of that. Instead, it played it safe in a way that was more disastrous than taking a risk. As a new Supergirl approaches the theaters, however, it thankfully (hopefully) no longer feels like any one female-led superhero story holds the fate of all superpowered women in its hands.<\/p>\n

Next time:\u00a0Tomb Raider\u00a0made Angelina Jolie an action star\u2014and video game movies a hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-652923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}