While watching the ostentatiously trashy new movie Supergirl, I could not help but think how the mighty have fallen. Or should I say, how the mediocre have fallen? Not being a reader of any iteration of the Supergirl comic books published by DC Comics, I cannot comment on their quality as compared to the subsequent screen adaptations, but I can say that the 1984 film version, with Helen Slater as Supergirl, was passably diverting and perfectly inoffensive: a piece of Reagan-era hokum somewhat redeemed by practical special effects, a rousing Jerry Goldsmith score, and, though the movie was a British production about a gal exiled from Krypton, its makers’ abiding belief that the Supergirl character represented a continuation of her cousin Superman’s commitment to truth, justice, and the American way.So, yes, while watching Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El (aka Supergirl) maneuver through outer space in a vehicle that more closely resembles an ill-maintained, barely running motorhome than a spaceship, express a preference for remaining in a drunken stupor rather than marshaling her superpowers, and ultimately consent to participate in a series of incomprehensibly brutal and chaotic fights with assorted alien lifeforms, it becomes obvious that even the marginal achievement of the earlier Supergirl movie is preferable to the deadbeat nihilism of this new one.Of course, the present Supergirl — overseen by DC Studios leader James Gunn, directed by Craig Gillespie, and written by Ana Nogueira — has already been subjected to extensive critical pans and equally extensive audience indifference, so it is perhaps a bit redundant to raise further objections two weeks after its release. Yet there is something singularly unbecoming about a franchise as American as Superman (and its adjuncts) being willfully stripped of its patriotism and good cheer.