Supergirl (2026)
Milly Alcock is extraordinary as a jaded Kara, but a grungy monotonous universe and a too-thin villain keep Supergirl from greatness.
The honest review embargo is one of the few pieces of advance information a studio still gives away for free, whether it means to or not. When a film lifts its embargo days ahead of release and quietly opens early-access screenings to build word of mouth, it is telling you something about its own confidence, and that signal usually points one direction. Supergirl arrives carrying exactly that whiff of nervousness, and the surprising thing is how little it deserves it. This is a flawed film with real structural problems, but it is also an enjoyable one, carried across the finish line by a lead performance strong enough to paper over a startling amount of what surrounds it. The embargo games may have suggested damage control, but the movie is better than that.
Supergirl follows Kara Zor-El, who survived long enough on dying Krypton to grow up watching her world end, and who has carried that bitterness across the galaxy as something harder and more jaded than her cousin ever became. When a young girl named Ruthye crosses her path on a revenge quest against Krem of the Yellow Hills, the ruthless leader who killed Ruthye's family, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance on a road trip through deep space. Milly Alcock plays Kara, Eve Ridley plays Ruthye, Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem, and Jason Momoa, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, and David Corenswet also star. Craig Gillespie directs from a screenplay by Ana Nogueira, adapting Tom King and Bilquis Evely's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.
Milly Alcock is extraordinary here and does much of the heavy-lifting (pun absolutely intended) toward making the movie an enjoyable experience. Coming off Sasha Calle's brief but well-liked turn in The Flash, the open question was whether anyone could carry a feature-length version of this jaded, prickly Kara, and Alcock does not just clear the bar, she obliterates it. This is not Superman in a skirt or the bright but complicated icon of the old CW series. This is the Woman of Tomorrow Kara who is emotionally scarred and mission-locked, and the dynamic she builds with Ridley's Ruthye is the beating heart of the film. It plays like one part Diana and Steve from Wonder Woman, the warrior who simply wants to be pointed at her target and let loose, and one part the reluctant babysitter dynamic of Tony Stark and the kid in Iron Man 3. Momoa's Lobo is fun in his limited screen time, and the smaller dose is the right call.
That said, the film has two real problems, and the first is that every single locale looks like a legally distinct version of Knowhere from Guardians of the Galaxy. The whole galaxy is rendered in the same dingy brown-and-gray grunge, every alien race some variation on a human, a lizard thing, or a squid thing, every costume cut from the identical muted palette, so that no location ever feels distinct from any other. This matters more than it sounds, because visual language is how a science fiction film tells you where you are and what you are dealing with. Think of how Star Wars makes Naboo, Coruscant, and Tatooine instantly legible at a glance, or how Marvel lets the technology of Wakanda feel profoundly different from Stark's, which feels different again from Kree design. Even the much-maligned Snyder era understood this, giving Themyscira and Atlantis and Apokolips each their own distinct grammar. Supergirl gives you one register, dirty and broody, and the effect is a universe that reads as a single endless backwater.
This bleeds directly into the second problem, which is that the action is hard to follow. Gillespie is a solid director, and I, Tonya and Cruella are proof of it, but he is not an action director, and it shows. The sequences lack the choreographic specificity that makes a fight legible, and because everything on screen shares the same murky color scheme, the eye has nothing to latch onto. When the film does briefly break its own monotony, a digital-flavored teleporting mercenary army turns up with a cool displacement effect, you can feel how much a little visual variety would have done for the whole picture. The third act compounds it with some shockingly weak green-screen work, the distracting kind that pulls you out of the movie and makes you wonder why a film at this budget level is shipping shots that obvious.
The deeper issue, the one that keeps this from the higher score, is that Kara's arc does not fully earn its turn. The film is built as a character redemption, the jaded Kara learning to care and become the protector her parents hoped for, with the suit going on at the end as the visual signature of an arc completed. The trouble is that the world the movie builds gives her almost no reason to make that turn. This is a Kara whose defining line is that Clark sees the good in people while she sees the truth, and the film then surrounds her with a truth that is nothing but cruelty: a villain in Krem who is cartoonishly, irredeemably evil, a child-trafficking sport-hunter with no shading whatsoever, hunting a girl who is barely thirteen. For a character that cynical to choose hope, she needs to witness a moment of goodness that cuts against her worldview, and the film never quite delivers one. The closest it comes is Ruthye's loyalty, which the jaded Kara the movie has drawn would more plausibly read as self-interest. A less purely monstrous antagonist, or a single clear beat where Kara helps someone and feels it land, would have given the arc the foundation it is missing.
There is a smarter version of this film visible in its own margins. Kara wears earbuds to drown out the cacophony of a universe in pain, music as a wall against everyone's suffering, and the All-Star Superman image of a hero who can hear everything and cannot save everyone is right there to be reached for. Played correctly, with Kara hearing the full weight of that suffering before she chooses to block it out, and then choosing to do what she can for whom she can as the affirmative end of her arc, that idea carries the whole movie. The film raises it, puts it on the poster, and then underuses it, the headphones appearing too intermittently to land the metaphor. And the Woman of Tomorrow comic offered an obvious fix the movie left on the table: that source is famous for its vibrancy, its color, and importing that palette would have solved the legibility problem and the thematic one at once, a bright universe worth protecting making Kara's turn toward protection actually mean something.
Fortunately, none of this sinks the film, because Alcock and Ridley are simply too good to let it. For all the talk that is already circling, the inevitable noise about whether a female-led DC film and a James Gunn production can ever escape the culture-war crossfire, and the louder talk about whether the DCU is dead on arrival, a single underperformer does not end a universe. Man of Tomorrow is already shooting, Clayface is coming, and it is worth remembering the MCU may have opened with Iron Man but immediately followed it up with The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor that nobody holds up as a golden age. Supergirl is better than all three. It is fun, it is anchored by a star turn that announces Alcock as the real thing, and its problems are the fixable kind. See it for her, and trust that the world around her will get sharper from here.
★ ★ ★ ★
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