‘Supergirl’ Review: A Woman of Tomorrow Trapped in Yesterday’s Superhero Movie
Kara Zor-El deserves her time in the sun. As her cousin did last year, she deserves to bask in the gleaming glory that fuels her being and finally deliver a feature that propels the Woman of Tomorrow to new heights. Unfortunately, that's not Supergirl.
The Craig Gillespie-directed DCU feature based on the Tom King/Bilquis Evely True Grit-inspired comic miniseries Woman of Tomorrow woefully misunderstands its mighty heroine while giving her big-screen debut a completely lackluster effort. Compared to James Gunn’s Superman – colorful, exciting, funny, and hopeful – Supergirl is a Bizarro in feature form: a drab, piss-colored, unfunny slog that arrives like a relic of the deceased DCEU. It’s like a decade-too-late adaptation that’s so cringe-worthy, gritty, and indistinguishable it belongs next to Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad. It’s a mediocre slog that desperately needed a visionary and an experienced screenwriter who understands the character. Milly Alcock is innocent.
Image copyright (©) Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
MPA Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking.)
Runtime: 1 Hour and 48 Minutes (108 minutes)
Language: English
Production Companies: DC Studios, Troll Court Entertainment, The Safran Company
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Craig Gillespie
Screenwriter: Ana Nogueira
Cast: Milly Alcock, Jason Momoa, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, Ferdinand Kingsley, David Corenswet, Diarmaid Murtagh
U.S Release Date: June 26, 2026
Kara (Alcock) is vibing through her 23rd birthday week, doing anything but saving Metropolis, traveling the galaxy with her dog Krypto. Meanwhile, young Ruthye (Eve Ridley) witnesses Space Pirate Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) murder her family, leaving her only a blade. Seeking vengeance, Ruthye arrives at a bar hoping to enlist a warrior. Kara, on a red planet where she can actually get drunk, rejects the call until Krem steals her ship and shoots Krypto (goddamn, that dog has faced more hardships than Jesus) with a poisoned dart. With three days to get the antidote, Kara reluctantly joins forces with Ruthye to track Krem, all while hoping to steer the girl away from vengeance.
Alcock soars even when Supergirl can’t.
Caption: Milly Alcock as SUPERGIRL in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERGIRL”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
For a first-time lead, Alcock does justice to the role in ways the rest of the film doesn’t. She delivers a vulnerable, compassionate portrayal, texturing Kara’s emotional repression with dry delivery and sharp mannerisms. Early on, she’s pure Kaitlin Olson: snarky, insulting, a mean drunk (my brain leaps to The Mick or Dee Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny), but the inconsistent self-serious tone bogs her down. Even at her most frustrating, Alcock commands the screen, especially in the somber flashback sequences. Any intention for Kara to take flight, though, is clipped by every force working against her behind the scenes.
The “Woman of Tomorrow” gets lost in translation.
Caption: Milly Alcock as SUPERGIRL in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERGIRL”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
When Alcock made her crash-landing cameo in Superman, I thought, “Who is this diva? She's electric,” hoping her solo feature would carry that energy. It doesn’t. If anything, it’s cynically infuriating. We’re past the era where female-led movies have to address gender, so it feels like giving brownie points to say at least it didn’t go “rah, rah girl power” and just let her exist.
In her first screenplay, Ana Nogueira dilutes the source’s poignancy and character aptitude for blockbuster genericism. She can’t pick a tone; her attempts at grit fall short against awkward humor and autopilot storytelling with no charm. The grumpy woman/determined child dynamic fails its charismatic actresses, evoking no real chemistry. Nogueira can’t juggle integrating Kara into the DCU while basing it on King’s story; the latter is sacrificed for frustrating characterizations that make the movie come undone. In the comic, Supergirl uses Krypto’s poisoning as a ruse to teach Ruthye a lesson. In the film, the dog being poisoned is her main drive (that’s 2:2 for DCU using Krypto as a plot device). The angsty, sharp heroine from the source is absent, replaced by a joyless, deadpan nihilist whose uncaring nature toward others is baffling.
The True Grit influence is faintly there, but altered to resemble Taken. The brigands are space Russian mobsters with the added convolution that they’re child traffickers. Their plot involves abducting little girls and selling them as sex slaves, which is wild to include in a superhero blockbuster, considering it’s not in the source material. Yet, the characters never acknowledge the elephant in the room. So every instance of Kara telling Ruthye not to kill someone who doesn’t deserve to live comes off as tone-deaf and unrootable. Krem is already a bland villain, with Schoenaerts using every ounce of charisma to make it watchable, but this unnecessary, unacknowledged severity makes it insulting, especially when Kara’s brain is only about that damn dog. Essentially, Supergirl is about a passive woman reluctantly helping a girl track down the child trafficker who murdered her family – not out of justice, but to secure an antidote for her dying dog.
Supergirl keeps asking us to care about the wrong thing.
Caption: Jason Momoa as LOBO in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERGIRL”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Whilst butchering Woman of Tomorrow in real time, Supergirl is at its best when taking cues from Man of Steel. Flashbacks to Kara's immigrant story, going from Argo City to Metropolis at a conscious age, set her apart from Clark. Nogueira proves she can handle the character via those tragic scenes, which gave way to a more interesting Metropolis-set “fish out of water” story. It’s frustrating because those flashbacks feature David Corenswet's Clark, and once he shows up, you can hear the shared serotonin (absent throughout the rest of the film) emit from the audience. It’s further infuriating how mismanaged Kara’s own movie is when her cousin’s five seconds of fame are more delightful than everything else. Then Lobo is mostly shoehorned in to prop up Jason Momoa's “new number, who dis?” rather than adding anything significant to the film. He’s fun applying a snarling, grunge energy to the biker antihero — his makeup is faboo too— but contributes little outside the movie’s steampunk identity (which reeks of GotG) or a deus ex machina to save the girls (again, WHAT?!).
For a character known to be scrappier than her cousin, you don’t feel that strength. The movie whisks her away from yellow suns, and all her CG punches through foes are unimpressively repetitive. It doesn’t help that she spends most of the runtime weakened, getting her butt handed to her. The same goes for Ruthye, who at many junctures warrants her own action sequences but doesn’t get them.
I get that the reluctant hero archetype is triumphant; it’s why Gunn is co-controlling the DC aux. But framing an entire film about a person forced to save the day because of her dying dog, notwithstanding him being her last remnant of home, without truly growing to care for others or the severity of the situation, makes it infuriating if not insulting to the character and the audience wanting a triumphant screen turn for her. Also, not to sound like that too-woke friend, but it’s too early post-Juneteenth to see a blockbuster where the only Black space characters, including a child, get murdered to enforce the conflict of non-Black leads.
It doesn’t fare well that Nogueira is handling DCU’s Teen Titans and Wonder Woman because if you can’t outright acknowledge that traffickers deserve to die, then you don’t deserve the baddies of Themyscira.
Kara deserved better than Craig Gillespie’s lifeless direction.
Caption: (L to r) Milly Alcock as SUPERGIRL and Matthias Schoenaerts as KREM in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERGIRL”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Alright, let’s cut to the chase. Gillespie should’ve been the last filmmaker to steer Supergirl’s ship. His low- to mid-budget drama roots (I, Tonya, Dumb Money) make him a misfit hire. Whatever fine ideas exist in the action set pieces are dully realized in the murkiest of visuals with no style. If you had a problem with how Superman looked, Supergirl makes that look like James Cameron’s Avatar. When Kara leaps into action, the camerawork highlights her fighting style in tracking shots, dusts its hands, and calls it a day. The action makes sacrifices in the service of flat comedy, muddied by poor lighting and an ugly, backlight-heavy palette. The movie opens with Krypto urinating on a newspaper, and honestly it merely foreshadows its entire presentation.
At best, Gillespie’s direction is lazy. At worst, it’s delusional.
It insists Kara’s heroic moments are epic despite looking unpolished. Its crème de la crème set piece meant to awaken Kara’s heroism – a slow-mo 360 of Kara kicking ass to a horrendous soft-girl cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” like a rejected Sucker Punch track – is so full of itself, hoping it’ll make audiences stand up in cheer. Reader, it made me laugh uncontrollably. Unintentionally, it’s the best laugh I had all movie. In the same release month as Travis Knight’s imaginative Masters of the Universe or Kenji Tanigaki’s exhilarating The Furious, it’s a total embarrassment that made me wish I were watching either of those other films instead.
LAST STATEMENT
Milly Alcock proves she has everything needed to be a great Supergirl, but this drab, misguided adaptation strips away the heart, grit, and heroism that make Kara Zor-El soar. Despite a handful of strong performances and flashes of a better movie, Supergirl arrives as a disappointingly dated blockbuster that grounds its heroine before she ever gets the chance to fly.
