Supergirl Crashes and Burns Where Superman Soared

When James Gunn’s Superman landed last year, it felt like a breath of fresh air—proof that the superhero machine could still produce something genuine and heartfelt instead of another focus-grouped assembly line product. The DC Universe seemed poised for something different. Then came Supergirl.

Director Craig Gillespie’s follow-up, written by Ana Nogueira, squanders that goodwill almost immediately. Despite Milly Alcock’s genuinely compelling performance as Kara Zor-El—the party-girl Kryptonian cousin who remembers her home world in ways Superman never will—the film defaults to every tired superhero cliché in the playbook. There’s the scrappy kid sidekick with the dead family (13-year-old Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley), the one-dimensional villain (Matthias Schoenaerts as the leather-clad space pirate Krem), and the action sequences that all blur together against muddy CGI planets that look indistinguishable from one another.

What makes the failure sting more is how close Supergirl gets to working. Alcock’s expressive face and crooked teeth—refreshingly un-Hollywood—convey a character far more damaged and morally ambiguous than her boy-scout cousin. While Superman famously runs off mid-alien invasion to save a squirrel, Kara has a mounting body count she barely acknowledges. That contradiction could have been fascinating, but the script never lets it breathe. Instead, it piles on extra motivation after extra motivation: saving her poisoned dog, stopping a crime gang that kidnaps young women for breeding stock (a plot lifted straight from Mad Max: Fury Road). The result feels bloated and tonally confused—family summer movie meets real-world darkness about child trafficking, with a flippant script that doesn’t know which register it’s actually in.

Then there’s the waste of Jason Momoa, whose mid-film appearance as the cigar-chomping bounty hunter Lobo briefly promised the film might transform into something fun and hangout-y. Instead, Lobo just shows up for action beats, his potential as the kind of affable antihero Momoa excels at playing left completely untapped. It’s emblematic of the whole problem: Supergirl has the pieces for something interesting but assembles them into something that feels obligatory—a stepping stone to next summer’s Man of Tomorrow, another James Gunn Superman project that apparently can’t come fast enough. If the DC Universe wants to maintain the momentum Superman built, it needs to remember why that film worked in the first place. This wasn’t it.