Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
When Guardians of the Galaxy writer-director James Gunn kicked off his co-chairmanship of the newly rebooted DC Universe by writing and directing last year’s refreshingly sincere Superman, it felt as though the comic book–to–movie pipeline, clogged with sludge after a nearly two-decade flood of sequels, crossovers, and spinoff TV series, had been flushed clean with a burst of cool water. Might it be possible to imagine a new superhero franchise that didn’t seem like a grasping attempt to recapture the box-office might—and, for a long time, the broad cultural influence—of Marvel’s ever-extending cinematic universe?
The release of Supergirl, directed not by Gunn but by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella), from a screenplay by Ana Nogueira, takes that dream and exposes it to a deadly hunk of Kryptonite. Despite an appealingly rough-edged title character played with scrappy aplomb by Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon), this second installment in what DC is positioning as an unfolding multicharacter franchise defaults to too many of the clichés of superhero cinema at its worst. There is a precocious kid—the 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley)—whose innocent belief in the possibility of justice eventually wins the heart of the at first cynical protagonist. There’s an uninspired and dimensionless villain, the punk-inflected space pirate Krem (a tragically overqualified Matthias Schoenaerts). There are action sequences shot against muddy CGI backgrounds that make every planet Supergirl visits look the same: orangish-brown dystopias littered with rusted hunks of metal. And there is a supporting character, Jason Momoa’s leather-clad bounty hunter Lobo, who appears to have been plonked into the story for the sole purpose of setting up a future sequel.
Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, as established in the 2025 Superman (and in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the acclaimed 2021 comic series on which the story is based), is the Man of Steel’s party-girl cousin. Like him, she is a survivor of the now-destroyed planet Krypton. Unlike him, she still remembers her home world’s language and culture, since her parents (Emily Beecham and David Krumholtz) brought her up in the floating off-world city of Argo until that Kryptonian outpost was also obliterated. Clark Kent’s idyllic childhood on Earth, where he was found and adopted as a baby by a loving couple on a farm, has virtually nothing in common with Kara’s trauma-ridden backstory. Still, the two share a bond like that of a big brother and kid sister, with straitlaced Kal-El (played in too few scenes by the irresistible David Corenswet) checking in on his wayward cuz via video call.
Also established in Superman was the fact that, due to a quirk of Kryptonian biology, the former residents of that doomed world can feel the effects of alcohol only on planets without a yellow sun like Earth’s. So as we first meet Kara, she is celebrating her 23rd birthday with some solitary drinking on a distant red-sunned planet. Well, not quite solitary: Kara is accompanied, as she has been since leaving her home world, by her faithful and occasionally airborne dog Krypto. (I too like to name my pets after their doomed planet of origin. Earthy, leave that pizza crust on the sidewalk. Leave it!) Unlike her cousin, Kara has not yet found a place in the universe that feels like home; she’s an isolated, unsettled young woman who trawls the galaxy in her rusty old beater of a spaceship, stopping to seek solace in grimy bars on low-rent party planets.
Dana Stevens
The New Superman Is a Corrective to the Modern Superhero Movie
Read More
In one such dive, Kara meets up with the fierce, sword-wielding Ruthye, whose whole family has just been slaughtered by the loathsome Krem. This idealistic teen seeks the catharsis of revenge; the disaffected Kara, older and wiser, tries to make her understand that continuing the cycle of violence by finding and killing Krem will only leave Ruthye with further psychic damage. But Kara’s belief in peacekeeping falters when Krem, the head of an interstellar crime gang called the Brigands, doses her beloved pup with a toxin that will kill him in the space of three days. Knowing that Krem carries an antidote around in a locket (as dog-poisoners everywhere will do), Kara, with Ruthye in tow, goes on a John Wick–style rampage in search of the scumbag who poisoned her pet.
Supergirl’s strongest asset—indeed, its only consistently strong element—is the spiky charisma that Alcock brings to the role of the outwardly combative, inwardly fragile Kara. The Australian actor’s expressive face, complete with a set of wonderfully un-Hollywoodian crooked teeth, tells us more than the often inert dialogue does about the character’s classic avoidant personality. Though she’s all but invincible in battle, as evidenced by several interminable scenes of Supergirl dispatching with indistinguishable Mad Max–esque baddies, Kara is neither righteous nor especially honorable. Her cousin is famous for going out of his way never to kill; last year’s Superman had him dashing away mid–alien invasion to rescue an imperiled squirrel. She, on the other hand, has an ever-mounting and blithely ignored body count.
The murkiness of Supergirl’s moral universe is exemplified by the debate Kara and Ruthye carry on throughout the movie about the value of eye-for-an-eye revenge: Even as Kara is holding forth on the corrupting power of retributive violence, she’s hurling every Brigand they encounter into the nearest abyss, a contradiction that the ostensibly sharp Ruthye for some reason never points out. In case avenging one’s family and saving one’s furry companion weren’t motivation enough, the script throws in another reason to hate the Brigands. Hailing from a planet with no female inhabitants (why? How does this work?), Krem and his minions go around the universe, kidnapping young women—teenage girls, from the looks of them—to serve as breeding stock. This plot point, lifted more or less directly from Mad Max: Fury Road, brings in an element of real-life darkness—child sex trafficking? In a summer movie marketed to families?—that’s hard to square with the script’s sometimes flippant and jokey tone.
-
Supergirl Is a Super-Bummer
Less distasteful, but also regrettable, is the waste of an actor as reliably fun to watch as Jason Momoa. His presence has upgraded many an otherwise middling blockbuster, and when he appeared midway through as the cigar-chomping mercenary Lobo, I was excited that Supergirl might be about to transform into a hangout movie à la Guardians of the Galaxy. But alas, Momoa’s antihero, whose chalky makeup and biker getup make him look like an extraterrestrial Gene Simmons, never gets a chance to sit down and recount his backstory to the heroine and her young sidekick. From the moment the character is introduced, he does little but show up for action scenes to help the women escape captivity or whale on their enemies. He looks great pulling up to a battle on his intergalactic motorcycle, sharpened teeth exposed in a grin, but Lobo’s potential as an affable lug with a secretly tender heart—the kind of role Momoa shines in—is left untapped.
Supergirl’s closing credits provide no final stinger, suggesting that the filmmakers may have wanted to leave open the possibility of what the next chapter, if any, will be like. If this freshly reinvented comic-book cosmos wants to hang on to the goodwill it earned with Superman, DC needs to bring in the big guns, or Gunns, as it’s doing next summer with Man of Tomorrow, another Superman-centered adventure written and directed by James Gunn, with Corenswet and Alcock returning as the cape-clad supercousins. “Are you dead or are you sleeping?” sings Modest Mouse in one of Supergirl’s many vintage pop needle drops, “Satin in a Coffin.” Unlike that song’s narrator, who goes on to add, “God, I sure hope you are dead,” I hold out hope that the DCU’s apparent moribundity is only temporary.
