Supergirl Review

A Tiny Sliver of Hope, Dashed Again

By: Marc Kozak

Supergirl

A Tiny Sliver of Hope, Dashed Again

By: Marc Kozak

One of the most frustrating things about the never-ending glut of superhero movies in recent years is the movie studios’ reluctance to stray even a little bit from the same formula. It’s as if they’re saying, “you liked it the first few times, so here’s a bunch more of the exact same thing,” as if even the most diehard fans wouldn’t notice and start to downgrade their enthusiasm and support (even if it’s taken them a bit longer than maybe it should have). Or, even worse, maybe they think that they are straying from the formula by making extremely minor changes and calling it a day, as if a heroic character that drinks and curses is enough of a deviation to justify doing everything else in the exact same way.

While I still believe it’s possible – even if it’s becoming increasingly unlikely – to make an interesting, high-quality, commercial movie featuring costumed super-powered beings, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is not at all one of them. Whatever joys there are to be found by watching star Milly Alcock sleepwalk through life in a drunken stupor, it doesn’t really matter when the script has no higher aim than to maneuver characters around in a CGI landscape so they can fight each other amidst slow motion explosions and increasingly ridiculous needledrops. This is the genre at (or near) its worst – unimaginative conceptually, thematically, and visually, with nothing to cheer for other than dutifully raising our eyebrows at the appearance of other characters who are recognizable from other movies or comic books. Why these creators continue to upstage their own lead characters with the irrelevant activities of other in-universe characters is beyond me; it’s like they don’t have any confidence that they can make the character with their name on the poster interesting enough to pay attention to for an entire movie.

In this case, maybe they were right. Alcock’s Supergirl isn’t exactly a delight to spend time with, even after we come to understand the reasons for her generally morose behavior. Glimpsed briefly in James Gunn’s Superman, Kara Zor-El is a survivor of the doomed planet Krypton just like her cousin Kal-El, similarly gifted with tremendous powers under the light of our yellow sun. Unlike Kal-El, Kara didn’t grow up on Earth and isn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of staying there. The movie opens during Kara’s “birthday week,” in which she heads out into space in order to drink with reckless abandon, still mourning the loss of her family and home world, reluctant to build a life on Earth on a planet that she feels no connection to. Her only friend is her dog Krypto, an untrained psychopath who also developed powers under the yellow sun, causing him to get into all kinds of adorable hijinks.

" Every choice feels devoid of any kind of creative spark or joy, from the story to the production design to the music to the visual effects. "

Gillespie and Co. are determined to highlight the differences between Kara and Kal, as if repeatedly stating that “Supergirl isn’t like Superman” is some kind of punk rock manifesto. David Corenswet reprises his role as Superman, showing up a few times via intergalactic Zoom calls to see how Kara is doing, goody two-shoesing to what feels like an exaggerated degree, giving off energy similar to a nervous parent reluctant to leave his embarrassed kid on her first day of college.

We don’t actually get to delve into the more revelatory difference between Kara and Kal until much later in the movie, as we flashback to the destruction of Krypton and the separation of Argo City, Kara’s hometown that survived in space for a short period before it, too, succumbed to the cruelty of space. Kal came to Earth as a baby and grew up in a supportive environment on a planet that he always knew as home. Kara had to actually live through the destruction of Krypton and grew up with family and friends who didn’t survive; she lives with the pain of her memories every day.

This is an effective bit of empathy creation for Kara, even if it comes a bit late. At this point, we are well into a John Wick-ian story where we have to track down the space pirates who poisoned poor Krypto, led by Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), an utterly forgettable villain who inexplicably wears a poison antidote necklace on his person. Sure, they are also child traffickers (a trend in movie antagonists in 2026), making them easy enough to hate and dispatch with maximum violence. We also run into Lobo (Jason Momoa), an alien bounty hunter that shows up to collect on a random space pirate and then pops up here and there throughout the story for seemingly no other reason than to spout his comic book catchphrases and run into people on his motorcycle. You could have cut Lobo out of this movie entirely and nothing would have been lost, but good for Jason Momoa on getting that paycheck, I guess.

Eventually we get to the inevitable CGI punch-out climax, with very little in the way of dramatic stakes. Bad guys are mowed down in slow motion as an utterly bizarre cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” plays, in what must be one of the strangest musical cues in some time. The battle wraps up with very little in the way of surprises – we know they aren’t going to kill the dog or let the human traffickers get away with a ship full of young girls, so things progress exactly as you’d expect, including the final moment in which Supergirl solidifies that she is not like Superman (again), a moment that has very little emotional weight.

Alcock is well suited to the surliness and sarcasm of the early scenes but struggles to sell the few moments of actual drama. There are two scenes during the flashback to her time on Argo City – one in which she walks in on her father dying of sickness and the other occurring mere seconds before she leaves the planet forever – where Alcock shows absolutely no emotion on her face, giving the equivalent of a Gen Z stare to the camera. It’s possible that these scenes were hacked to death in editing which resulted in some strange sequencing, but it’s also possible that Alcock simply couldn’t turn off the surliness. It’s a choice that really prevents us from getting attached to Kara, with any pathos the movie has coming more from our desire to see Krypto get better than anything Supergirl does.

It’s just one of many miscalculations made by the team that put Supergirl together. Visually, the movie is yet another example of the genre refusing to use bright colors, as if we can only imagine that every planet in space is a barren, sandy wasteland. We visit bars and bus stops full of the requisite aliens straight out of the Star Wars cantina scene, because that’s what we’re familiar with and this isn’t the kind of movie interested in doing anything different. Every choice feels devoid of any kind of creative spark or joy, from the story to the production design to the music to the visual effects.

It’s hard to feel too disappointed in a movie like Supergirl, because sadly, this is what we’ve come to expect from the genre. There will be billions of words spilled online about what this means for the superhero genre, for the DC Cinematic Universe, for James Gunn, for movies in general. It’s the same pattern and same conversation, ad nauseam, until a superhero movie that is mostly okay comes out and keeps things churning for a few more years. I still go into each one of these movies with a tiny sliver of hope that something finally breaks free of the pattern, but we’re way past fooling me twice.