After Superman was successfully rebooted last year, it is fair to say that it doesn’t look like Supergirl is quite going to follow suit, despite positive response to Milly Alcock’s performance. It was a film which clearly suffered from a troubled post-production, with no fewer than three different composers being announced as writing the score at various stages (indeed, Superman had its own difficulties in the music department). The one whose music ended up being heard is Claudia Sarne, scoring her first film with any particular sort of profile (her more notable past projects have generally been for the small screen).
The album opens with a “Supergirl Suite” and this offers some real promise – while quite short, so more of a motif than a theme as such, there is a musical identity established for Supergirl which is quite catchy and engaging, a blend of sass and drive and I really quite like it.
Unfortunately things never quite live up to that opening. The music tends to be doing one of two things – slightly more successful is when it is softer and offering gentle emotional support to the film, such as in the two-part “Argo” early on and then much later in a few cues near the end. While in these moments the music remains surprisingly tentative as if afraid to get anywhere close to being manipulative, and you long for some sort of sweep to take over and a more genuine emotional connection to be sought, it works well enough.
What I don’t like at all is the parade of action music which dominates the score. For whatever reason, this is so exceptionally dark and murky, clearly intended to be aggressively unpleasant (which it manages and then some). There’s a very slight hint of that “rock chick” vibe that Hans Zimmer brought to Zack Snyder’s version of Wonder Woman but you can tread a fine line with these things and in Supergirl we’re on the side of the line where it all becomes a little monochrome, a little up itself. I am always disappointed when a film like this gets music which could easily come from any ordinary modern action thriller too, and sadly that’s what the action sounds like – it’s just not distinctive at all and ends up disappearing from the mind as quickly as it arrives.
The fact that director Craig Gillespie went through three different composers on the film suggests he may have really struggled to identify the tone he really wanted the music to set (though I’ve no idea whether the first two actually wrote anything or not). It seems odd that this is the tone he settled on – with no hint of brightness or colour, no real sense of spark or fight, after that opening three-minute piece, it has to go down as a disappointment.
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