Calling Supergirl a Guardians of the Galaxy Clone is Kind of Unfair

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A director’s fingerprints are the whole point. Calling Supergirl a Guardians of the galaxy clone is unfair, because the comic this movie is built on might be the best thing DC has put in front of a camera in a long time.

A new trailer drops. It opens on a slow push-in, everything cranked into that thick, syrupy slow motion where a guy walks away from something and never once looks back. The camera swoops low and circles the hero like it’s worshipping them. Golden-hour light pours through the frame, lens flares streak across every shot, and a low orchestral hum builds toward an explosion that feels less like an action beat and more like a perfume ad.

You’ve seen maybe fifteen seconds and you already know who’s behind the camera. That’s Michael Bay. His name doesn’t even need to hit the screen. The spinning shots, the patriotic glow, the chrome-and-fire spectacle cut like a two-minute music video, all of it is a signature you could spot from across a crowded room. And that’s the thing about real filmmakers. They’ve got a fingerprint.

Bay has his Bay-hem. John Woo has his slow-motion gunfights, his doves scattering into flight mid-shootout, his heroes dual-wielding pistols in a standoff that drags out about ten times longer than physics should allow. M. Night Shyamalan has his slow-burn dread, his washed-out palettes, the twist you can feel coming three scenes early, and that little cameo tucked somewhere in the back half. You could rattle off ten more without breaking a sweat. A style you recognize on sight isn’t a weakness. It’s the whole reason these people keep getting hired. So when half the internet looked at the new Supergirl footage and went “that’s just Guardians of the Galaxy,” yeah, I get it. I really do.

The grimy neon dive bar Kara spends half the trailer parked in. The orange headphones. (Star-Lord wants his Walkman back, we’ve all made the joke by now.) A scrappy, junkyard-looking stretch of deep space, a CGI animal sidekick in Krypto, and a soundtrack that sounds like it raided somebody’s parents’ record crate. The first trailer leaned hard on Blondie’s “Call Me.” A later one rolled out Jimmy Ruffin. It’s a whole vibe, and the vibe is loud.

There’s even a delicious bit of irony baked into all this. Supergirl is the first major DCU movie James Gunn isn’t directing, and somehow it still ended up looking like the Marvel movie Gunn did direct. Gunn himself called it a “space adventure” and pointed straight at Guardians in an interview, so it’s not like fans are pulling the comparison out of thin air.

Every great director has a look, and nobody complains when it’s their favorite

But here’s where I think the pile-on starts to go sideways. Take Tim Burton. “Timothy Walter Burton is an American animator, filmmaker, and artist known for a distinctive style that blends dark fantasy and gothic horror with whimsical, surreal touches. He’s regarded as a pioneer of Hollywood’s goth subculture and one of the most imaginative filmmakers the medium has ever produced.” And here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud. You can spot a Burton film from a single frame. The crooked spires, the black-and-white stripes, the spirals, the sad-eyed outsider stuck at the center of it all, the Danny Elfman score doing that creepy-carnival thing it always does. It’s the same toolbox, movie after movie after movie, and we adore him for it.

Nobody storms the comments demanding that Burton stop being Burton. The repetition is the brand, and the brand is comfort food. That’s the double standard sitting underneath the Supergirl discourse. When a beloved director leans into their signature, we call it auteur vision. When a newer film wears an influence on its sleeve, we call it a ripoff. The fair read is that Craig Gillespie, the guy behind I, Tonya and Cruella, has a style of his own, and so does the producer steering this ship. What you’re looking at isn’t theft so much as a shared sensibility, and sensibilities rhyme.

So really, this whole Guardians thing comes down to aesthetics. And aesthetics, as fun as they are to argue about at one in the morning, are the least important part of any of this.

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The story is what’s important, and the source material is a banger

At the end of the day, a movie lives or dies on its story. A trailer can be cut to look like anything under the sun. What matters is what’s sitting underneath it. And what’s sitting underneath Supergirl might be the strongest foundation DC has built on in years.

The film pulls from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s 2022 comic Woman of Tomorrow, and that book is widely considered one of the most beautiful and most emotionally devastating comics of the past decade. It isn’t a cape-and-punch story. It follows Kara on a brutal, slow-cooked revenge trek across the galaxy alongside a young alien girl named Ruthye, who’s hunting down the man who murdered her father. People have described it as a space-western in the vein of True Grit, and that comparison fits like a glove. The art is gorgeous, the color work is unforgettable, and the emotional core is the kind of thing that lingers long after you’ve put the book down. If the movie captures that, then the headphones and the dive bars won’t matter one bit.

So sure, call it Guardians-coded if that’s your thing. I just hope everybody’s still in the room for the part that counts, which is whether they got Kara’s story right. If they did, this might be the one that finally makes the new DCU feel like it’s got a soul.