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This is not a take down piece, I enjoyed Supergirl well enough and James Gunn, Craig Gillespie and Milly Alcock have genuinely created a modern cinematic icon out of the character where others have failed. 

I do have some questions though.

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1. What are the rules about what can and cannot pierce her skin?

I am not getting on board with the ridiculous conversation that is all over the internet right now about how a woman with impervious skin can have pierced ears. The way some people are reacting to it is as though they’ve uncovered Watergate, forgetting that unlike her cousin she did not get her powers as a baby. Of course there also is the whole thing about how she is only invulnerable when she is on a planet with a yellow sun.

My question is how, when she is on one such planet, her skin is punctured by arrows? There is Kryptonite in the arrows but they do not appear to be Kryptonite tipped. Is it just me or that an inconsistency?

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2. If she can’t get drunk, how can she be poisoned?

It is made clear that Kara can’t get drunk on planets with a yellow sun either. Alcohol affects the body in exactly the same way as a poison. In fact medically and scientifically it is a poison; it is a toxin that comprises your central nervous system, impairs your brain function and alters the functionality of your blood. How then can she be drugged? If it was just a matter of the potency of the poison then if she drank enough couldn’t she get at least squiffy?

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3. How did she not know she was landing on a planet with a green sun. 

What, did she not notice the green sun as she was approaching? Granted there are days when you can’t see the sun from the planet’s surface (which this incidentally wasn’t one) but there are not days when you don’t see the sun from space. She is involuntarily teleported there in the comic which makes sense but this does not. On the same point, how did Krem not figure that she’d be back up and fighting when the yellow sun rose later. Is that why he was looking for her? If so, why was he torturing Ruthye so that she’d give up her location when he must have known it was time for the yellow sunrise. 

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4. How many planets have humans and are other species also native to a range of habitable celestial bodies?

I suppose it makes some sense that planets with a similar atmosphere, gravity, temperature, flora and fauna would evolve a dominant species with exactly the same design and specifications. This is presumably why they chose to send Kara and Clark to Earth since it was one such planet with people they could blend in with. Accept Earth doesn’t have the same conditions though does it, else they wouldn’t have superpowers there?

We meet three races in the film that are effectively humans (although Clark says in Superman that he is not a human) yet there are also a whole selection of aliens who clearly are not. Why is our appearance so common on other planets? Don’t even get me started on why English is the ‘common tongue’. 

Star Wars does this too but Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t and neither does Star Trek. In this universe though you can come from a totally different planet and not even apparently have a different range of skin and hair colours. 

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5. What is it about Kryptonians that makes them so responsive to different suns? 

While I’m on this point, why is Ruthye totally unaffected by the different suns, or any of the other alien species come to that? What is it in the genetic makeup up of the inhabitants of this one planet that makes them super strong and able to fly or totally weak and unable to stand when under anything else than a red sun? 

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6. Why does Zor-El seem to be totally okay with the fact that his brother is apparently such a crazed despot?

I liked the twist in Superman that Jor-El had sent his son to Earth to rule and subjugate the population. It made some sense that someone from a master race would have this kind of god complex. It’s only him and his wife though. Now we have met other residents of Krypton they seem kinda nice. Kara’s father even references that Earth is the planet that baby Karl-El is sent to dominate. He seems okay with this so maybe not so nice. Also, knowing this was the plan what did he expect Kara to find when she got there? Was she supposed to rule alongside him, fight against him, live a quiet life? What?

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7. Why doesn’t Lex Luthor hate Supergirl too?

If she’s spent some time on Earth and has evidently helped Superman out on occasion, how come Luther doesn’t even mention her. He seems to think Superman is this terrible threat but not his similarly powered cousin. It is just because she’s a woman because if so I have a whole lot of other questions.

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8. Why didn’t they call this movie Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow as they’d planned.

That is the name of the comic it is based on and for a long time it was the name of this film too, but then they dropped it.

They clearly felt the need to briefly address the fact that Kara is known as Supergirl on Earth even though she is not an adolescent in the script, so why not keep that title. That would have addressed (redressed) it pretty nicely wouldn’t it.

The next Superman movie is apparently going to be called Man of Tomorrow so please don’t tell me they needed him to have this moniker first. The character was first given this title in 1939 around the time that the New York World’s Fair was using the expression World of Tomorrow and when chose to refer to Supergirl in the same way in 2021 it was a nice moment of equality. The epithet had already been attached to Wonder Woman but using it for Kara Zoe-El finally gave her the status she deserved. 

Wouldn’t it have been lovely if she could have had this first this time, without it being a term borrowed from a man? Shame.

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