Steel Yourself For a DC Disappointment

Superman and Supergirl share a home planet but not an origin. Superman’s parents shipped him off to Earth as a baby. Supergirl wasn’t even born until after Krypton was destroyed. She remembers it (or at least the ruins of it where she grew up), and remains haunted by its loss. Far more of a stranger in a strange land than Superman, she can’t quite figure out where she belongs. Is she Kara Zor-El of Krypton or Supergirl of Earth?

The character’s new film suffers from a similar split personality. At times, Supergirl assumes the form of a quirky space adventure filled with colorful aliens and broad comedy. At others, it’s a grim character study about orphans and trauma set in a world of misery, radiation poisoning, and alien sex trafficking. These two halves do not remotely mesh together, and as a result, neither does Supergirl.

This is particularly disappointing because the new DC Universe got off to such a promising start with last year’s Superman. Milly Alcock’s Supergirl cameoed in that film, and was so instantly likable in her brief screen time that it set high expectations that her spinoff doesn’t come close to matching. That’s despite the presence of Superman’s biggest scene-stealer — the rambunctious super-dog Krypto — and even the Man of Steel himself, played by David Corenswet in a small but important supporting role.

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READ MORE: Every DC Comics Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

Sadly, Corenswet’s appearances only serve as an unwelcome reminder of what a firm handle Superman writer/director James Gunn has on that character and his timeless appeal. Supergirl comes up frustratingly short in capturing the essence of his cousin. Adapted from an outstanding miniseries from 2021 called Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely, the film version takes place almost entirely in outer space, where a depressed and lonely Kara goes on an extended 23rd birthday bender to drown her sorrows over her lost family and planet.

That’s when she meets Ruthye (Eve Ridley), an alien girl whose family was murdered by a sadistic “brigand” named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye vows to avenge her parents’ deaths, but as she is wholly unqualified to fight a savage alien mercenary, she recruits a reluctant Supergirl to her cause. Kara only agrees to help Ruthye after Krem hurts her beloved pooch Krypto.

Warner Bros.

Refusing to help someone until she has a personal stake in the matter doesn’t sound like very heroic behavior out of DC’s new Supergirl. And the original Woman of Tomorrow comic series was very much about the meaning of heroism, and the psychological toll that revenge takes on people. While Supergirl’s script, written by Ana Nogueira, follows the beats of King and Evely’s story, it mangles (and sometimes borderline betrays) a lot of its thematic underpinnings.

Instead of King’s interpretation of the character as a righteous beacon of justice worn down by the darkness that surrounds her during her quest with Ruthye, Alcock’s Supergirl is a sullen, moody loner. (The funny spark plug that showed up for that Superman cameo is largely absent here.) And Supergirl director Craig Gillespie never manages to figure out what’s beneath Kara’s diamond-hard exterior — despite numerous flashbacks to her tragic backstory in Argo City. (These scenes do at least feature a very committed performance, the best in the film, from David Krumholtz as Supergirl’s doomed scientist dad, Zor-El.)

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Supergirl does an even poorer job translating the Ruthye character to the screen. It turns her from a distinctive frontier heroine — True Grit’s Mattie Ross by way of Deja Thoris from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels — into a generic YA heroine; sheepish and polite in a cool leather jacket and a posh English accent.

Gillespie was under no obligation to make a more faithful adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, but every change he made to the source material lessens its impact. That includes swapping the point-of-view characters so that the film primarily follows Supergirl instead of Ruthye, adding the macho alien mercenary Lobo (former Aquaman Jason Momoa) for some exhaustingly over-the-top comic relief, and revising the book’s ending in a way that I found slightly disastrous — not only in terms of providing an emotionally satisfying conclusion to this story, but also as the summation on the film’s message about the nature of vengeance and learning to live with loss.

Warner Bros.

James Gunn, writer/director of Superman and one of the key architects of the new DC Universe, did not write or direct Supergirl, but the movie still feels like it was shaped by his tastes. It’s got exotic aliens, grungy interstellar dive bars, cool extra-terrestrial technology, and a soundtrack jammed with anachronistic needle drops. Supergirl herself plays here like a fuzzy Xerox copy of Star-Lord from Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy: An ultra-snarky outsider lost among the stars with nothing but emotional baggage and an antique pair of Walkmen headphones to keep her company.

Guardians (and Gunn’s Superman, for that matter) found the right combination of action, humor, and heart, a formula that felt like an authentic expression of its director’s idiosyncratic worldview. In its forced and calculated attempt to recreate that aesthetic, Supergirl lands somewhere closer to Guardians’ inferior copycats, like 2016’s abysmal Suicide Squad. Given the splash Alcock made in Superman, and the fact that Supergirl is based on one of the best books DC Comics has published in the last decade, this has to be one of the biggest disappointments in recent superhero movie history.

Additional Thoughts:

-Don’t bother waiting for a post-credits scene.

-On the subject of retro needle drops: The one deployed in the film’s slo-mo action climax really might be the most eye-rolling song choice in any Hollywood movie of 2026.

-My two daughters, ages 10 and 8, love adventure films with female protagonists, so they were very excited when I told them Supergirl was getting her own movie. Unfortunately, I can’t take them to see it. Not because I didn’t enjoy it myself, but because the film is far too adult for younger viewers. Supergirl is surprisingly violent, and Supergirl herself spends the first chunk of the movie drunk, peppering her dialogue with way more S-bombs than I would have thought allowed in a PG-13 movie. A Supergirl that parents could bring their kids to sounds like an easy win at the box office to me. Warner Bros. did not decide to go that route.

RATING: 4/10