Supergirl

Jeannot Szwarc's Supergirl sits in a completely different genre to the Christopher Reeve films that preceded it. Whereas the series that Richard Donner kicked-off began as something close to a Biblical epic (before slowly evolving into Richard Lester's sight-gag generator), Supergirl is nearer to magical fantasy. It's flippant, even irreverent in how it presents and organises the iconography of its super-characters, most obviously in how Helen Slater's Kara spontaneously assumes the family costume seconds after arriving on Earth. New identity in place, Supergirl skips around weightlessly, ballet dancing across a tree line. The stakes are immediately lower; this superhero is allowed a moment to enjoy their unfathomable powers. 

Szwarc's film posits a cultural collision: how does a child raised in a sub-atomic commune react to life in a comparatively strange, bra-snapping, boarding school? Helen Slater's Supergirl (barely a character in her own story) is an innocent, the kind of guileless, put-upon, waif you'd see in British girl's comics of the 1970s and early 80s. Her worries, like those of the IPC heroines seen in weeklies like Tammy or Misty, are kept small. Will her human identity hold up to scrutiny? Can she win the school groundskeeper away from Faye Dunaway's much older, and therefore sexually experienced, witch Selena? Real danger, and any of the trauma that would normally linger afterwards, is tidied far away from the main plot.

The wider implications of Kara's public and private dilemmas are drowned out by a meandering storyline far more concerned with Selena bumbling her way into total dominion over a one-horse town. Given that Slater is a newcomer, it's an understandable decision to dedicate so much of the film's runtime to Selena's ascension. Nevertheless, the Supergirl character does offer something conceptually distinct from Reeve's hero. Kara's approach to her superpowers is much more covert than her cousin, she rarely overwhelms obstacles, preferring instead to neutralise them with a well aimed upset. Her adventure also takes her deeper into the Action Comics mythos, briefly stranding her in The Phantom Zone prison proposed during the opening act of Superman: The Movie. Zod's former lock-up is a crumbling landscape filled with swirling, blood red storms and an intoxicating Kryptonite sludge. More importantly though it's a physical and mental trial for Kara that must be overcome without the benefit of Earth's yellow Sun.