SUPERGIRL
2026
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Written by Ana Nogueira and Jeremy Slater (based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely)
Of the many angles from which one could approach Supergirl, probably the most unavoidable is as a post mortem, this film, like many before it, having called into question the entire enterprise (DC superheroes, superheroes in general, studio blockbusters altogether), while also reminding us that there are still malign forces at work that have not been exhausted despite them seeming like the most exhausting thing (is actress Milly Alcock unattractive? sure! if your movement is the unacknowledged male equivalent of 70s-style separatist political lesbianism), which I mention with sincere dismay even if I probably won't mention it again, because Supergirl would be a pretty low hill to die on. The most positive angle would be "it's better than the first Supergirl film from 1984," though that's not anything like "a bar it had to clear," since pop cultural memory has been content to let that one sink so deep that you could've seen every other theatrically-released DC film and even be a decently-sized fan of the character, Kara Zor-El, and be unaware she had a first movie. The 2026 effort—the immediate follow-up to James Gunn's Superman last year, overseen albeit not directed by the man Warners named the architect of their "DCU" after their first attempt at a shared cinematic universe took a decade to not pan out—is not good even for a 2020s superhero movie, or for a James Gunn movie, or however you'd like to evaluate it. "Being better than Supergirl '84" only means that Supergirl '26 is more like "a real movie," where all its parts fit together to tell a coherent, thought-through story, without necessarily requiring it to be "a real movie" that accomplishes those things.
And that's strange. Because one angle that Supergirl could be approached from, and it's potentially a less-tired one, is that there are very few comic book films that have adapted a comic book storyline as closely as this one's adapted Tom King and Bilquis Evely's 2021 Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. (Compare even movies named after famous storylines, like Dark Phoenix, or the especially-egregious Avengers: Infinity War.) Now, Woman of Tomorrow is not too perfect. It's immediately off-putting, sufficiently so I'd been staring at it on my coffee table for about two years, since when you buy a comic called Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, you don't expect so much sword-and-sorcery vibe, and besides that, its deuteragonist (and extremely-present narrator), Ruthye, takes a while to get acclimated to, inasmuch as what she feels like is simultaneously a failure of translating "alienese" into English and King's ecstatic first experience with using a thesaurus. "You are unintelligently mistaken in presuming an invite to a negotiation when no such offer has been proffered" is not as atypical as you'd like. Then King has Supergirl pursuing a vital quest alongside her new friend with an astonishing lack of apparent urgency, which turns out to have a plot explanation, but becomes distracting long before that explanation shakes out. Later, he has Comet the Super-Horse show up out of what sure seems like fucking nowhere. And while I'd preface this by saying Evely's art is great, and fit-to-purpose for the sword-and-sorcery inflection that persists even once it's gone more sci-fi, she's also utterly convinced that Kara should look like Carole Lombard, and I don't know I agree. But it overcomes its initial hurdles; it's very good.
So if I said "this is a once-in-a-decade act of fidelity to a very good comic book," which is exactly what I'm saying, that should be finely complimentary. Somehow, it isn't. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Woman of Tomorrow is just not readily adaptable to film. That annoying narration? It's kind of an irremovable structural necessity, for better and worse; the entire comic is Ruthye's autobiographical recounting of her adventure with Supergirl from centuries later, and her narrative reliability turns out to be important.
But maybe we could streamline that. That's a big "maybe": Woman of Tomorrow squares circles that the film does not and probably could not, and I must therefore caveat its fidelity by mentioning it's also compelled to end literally the opposite way because of its streamlining; its ending, while not "wrong," is kind of stupid, reflecting how the themes it's tying up have been expressed kind of stupidly throughout. But that brings us to the second reason Woman of Tomorrow isn't readily adaptable to film, or at least was not readily adapted by this one: it's too lumpy a tale. This is the more interesting reason, because Supergirl makes for a valuable case study in how you can replicate a plot, and dutifully attempt the same emotional and thematic beats, and still wind up with nothing but a summary emptied of not only the aesthetic sensations, not only the content, but the feeling it ever had a soul. Supergirl is the adaptational equivalent of dumping a thin plastic bag filled with gifts into the trash, then proudly presenting the bag. Then, when you're disappointed, offering you a Lobo toy (Jason Momoa) to play with, but only for a few minutes.
Reading Woman of Tomorrow confirmed these suspicions, but a zeroth reason not to adapt it had occurred to me already: unsurprisingly, a 2021 comic is not ideal material for introducing Supergirl. Maybe that's hard to get around: Woman of Tomorrow, a story where she's arguably not the protagonist, might actually be the closest thing Kara has to your prized "definitive arc," as thanks to the vagaries of her publication history, she doesn't have one. Her first decade is consumed by the zaniest interiority-free Silver Age yarns imaginable, her second found her a supporting character, her third and fourth left her so conceptually muddled by DC's post-Crisis On Infinite Earths editorial diktats that I would not attempt to pull you into a web of shapeshifting angelic madness that even I do not fully comprehend, yet I believe at some point, many reboots later, somebody finally sort of got the clue that Supergirl's distinction from Superman is that while her cousin understands, as an intellectual matter, that his world, Krypton, exploded, and that his parents are dead, and that his culture and species are dead, Kara experienced it, and naturally this has fucked her up. Woman of Tomorrow is "about" that, rather keenly at times, but it is not "about" it the way you would introduce Kara's great tragedy, or her relationship to Clark Kent (David Corenswet), or whatever.
But that's what Supergirl needs, so it's smooshed into Woman of Tomorrow regardless, and I'll throw this out there: do you need a self-contained Supergirl story that defines her character, but also weds her to a destiny on Superman's Earth? I mean, there's enough Legion of Super-Heroes to make the case that it wouldn't absolutely have to be; but let's not pretend the DCU's goals are ours. So let's see if we can cut that Gordian knot anyway. That story is "For the Man Who Has Everything": arguably a fundamental misunderstanding of Superman (it's Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons so it's "definitive" for Superman despite this), it would be a very natural story to tell with Supergirl. And, returning to the subject at hand, "how about Mongul?" seems like it would begin addressing the consensus opinion that this movie's villain sucks.
So, Supergirl: Kara (that's Alcock) has been resistant to her cousin's invitations to make a real home on Earth, and presently has lit out with her dog Krypto for the stars, especially the red ones, which thanks to one of the more boneheaded innovations of Super-lore circa 1970, instantly sap the power of Kryptonians,* and even if I appreciate that this respects the audience's ability to be shown something without being sat down and told twice, it's representative of Supergirl taking a page from Superman '25 in ways that aren't quite as useful here. So the all-important fact of Kara is her planet's destruction, her intermediary survival in the domed, doomed city of Argo, and her parents' (David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham's) ultimate decision to save her, and for all that we'd eagerly agree that Kal-El's backstory needn't have been belabored for a third time onscreen, maybe Kara's could've—a bit!—before a solid hour of her first theatrical film in forty-two years had elapsed, so that we're not ourselves in the position of "intellectually understanding" Kara's tragedy (at best), while that tragedy shapes the film's entire narrative and defines our entire engagement with her personality.
Well, Kara has sought out these red suns to copiously drink, and into the midst of one of Kara's featurelessly-smooth benders arrives young Ruthye (Eve Ridley), reduced in stature to "Kara's escort mission," which Kara accepts, in its essentials, by saving the naive loudmouth from the ruffians with sharp teeth. Their aligned interests are confirmed when the reason Ruthye has come around looking for an ally—this being Ruthye's father's murderer and the target of Ruthye's revenge, the outlaw Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts)—steals Kara's spaceship and poisons her dog. Needing Krem's poison to reverse-engineer an antidote, Kara permits Ruthye to accompany her on her manhunt while trying to teach Ruthye that vengeance is hollow and killing is wrong.
This is precisely the plot of Woman of Tomorrow, but few films have ever more amply demonstrated the vulnerability of the picaresque, and, in Supergirl, Kara and Ruthye journey from Ruthye's planet's Star Wars cantina where Kara has a fight to this other planet's Star Wars cantina where Kara has a fight, while Kara's power levels whipsaw all over the place depending on what demands the next Star Wars cantina scene shall place upon her as a superhero whose movie needs to run about two hours.** There is much that is fundamentally awry with Supergirl, and we're not done with those fundamentals, but the biggest thing is very simply this: its action is ugly and its adventure is boring.
Rob Hardy is not someone I think of as a hack cinematographer, but he's hacking here, lost in dreams of probably Blade Runner with the kind of lighting and coloring ideas that do result, on occasion, in a great pre-vized shot, nonetheless swallowed up by the fifty shots on either side that are nothing but a cloudy, "colorfully" desaturated murk punctuated otherwise only by the rampant, meaningless lens flares, everything looking like it's composited on a greenscreen even in the unlikely case it isn't; this is in service to conveying Neil Lamont's production design of one grubby, unimaginatively "used future" space after another, which was only part of Woman of Tomorrow. (The alien designs are sometimes cute, though without the world-building bona fides of the comic or their more proximate inspiration, that aforementioned Mos Eisley bar; later, we behold the most uncreative "Krypton" in that concept's whole visual history.) The "empty bag" analogy might not be better illustrated than by the "green sun" planet that Kara falls victim to in each medium: this was, for one thing, previously explicable (it's a preexisting deathtrap built for Superman, explicitly salted with kryptonite), and bafflingly stupid now (it's... simply green, and would you like to guess what "color" Earth's sun technically is?), but that planet was a deathtrap, also, because it swarmed with monsters for Ruthye to fight during Kara's incapacity, while in the movie it just sort of drags the runtime forward another ten minutes (at a maximum, it only gives Movie-Ruthye more opportunity to be useless) in a rock quarry treated with what Hardy has apparently determined is "green light." But take, also, Krem and his brigands (this script uses the generic noun "brigands" oftener than pronouns or articles), who are at least truly apocalyptic in the comic. In the movie, the closest they get to definition is Krem stealing a pie in an intimidating manner, and trafficking spacegirls (though not Ruthye, as that would interfere with the premise), for it be the law of female-led superhero films that instead of fighting cool villains they fight patriarchy, which it would be irresponsible to make cool villains out of, so there you are.
None of this is really "the problem," which is the editing, with one cut evidently turned in by Tatiana S. Riegel, and another by Gunn's guy Fred Raskin to effect the studio's rejiggering, and I think you can tell, though it's made especially easy by tracking Lobo through a story he wasn't originally in. He'd seem to be a perfectly organic addition to a cast of greasy space gangsters, if you were starting from scratch, but, obviously, they weren't "starting from scratch": his entry into the film is the sort of popsicle-sticks-glued-together incompetence you don't usually see even with reshoots, when he enters the narrative turning out to have been in the back of a bar during an entire superpowered action scene, yet not appearing to have any knowledge of this scene. At least he has a couple of cute lines (Momoa's a pretty inevitable Lobo, and the makeup looks swell), which is out-of-the-ordinary in a movie that, I'm told, though I did not notice it myself, is often attempting breezy comedy; but there's a noticeable disconnect between a character who could provide parallels and conflict (the last daughter of Krypton against the last Czarnian, who obliterated his lame species on purpose in x-treme 90s parody of Superman) and this Lobo, who kind of just shows up sometimes. And for all that, it doesn't quite feel like the blatant interference is to blame for the more thoroughgoing issues with timing and clarity here (people seem to hate Gunn's imposition of a pop song finale, and I'm no outsized fan of its "neverending combo in a fighting video game" stylings, but I certainly don't know why this was the needledrop too far). Anyway, it doesn't look like any cut of Supergirl ever had good editing, rather than shots slamming into each other with something close to anti-analysis, failing to answer basic questions such as "so Ruthye just fell to her death?" until, in this instance, offering about a minute later a "no, I guess not."
Not that I would've cared much if she had, so we're back to fundamentals. Comics-Ruthye is sort of abrading, but she has a cool hat and her arrogant precocity grows on you. In the movie, she's somebody for Kara to talk at (and when Ridley talks back, she's a drag to listen to, because one of the littler reasons Woman of Tomorrow isn't adaptable is that even in a reduced-to-instrumentality role, Ruthye remains a literally-unplayable character). Hypothetically, Kara teaches her a moral lesson. Very hypothetically: even before the ending, we have a heroine who continually states, essentially, "killing is bad, except for all these people I've indifferently killed," and does so with unsupportably more insistence upon her charge's tragedy mirroring her own in all details. Of course, they don't (the comic, pretty pointedly, acknowledges that all they have in common is loss), so you're constantly wondering what authority Kara might have to declare vengeance unnourishing when I don't suppose she's spent the last six years trying to get revenge on a geological catastrophe. It's phony, but abominable phoniness is the movie's abiding tone: remember that all-important fact about Kara Zor-El? An aspect of that, you'd think, is that she is truly a Kryptonian, an alien. (Though Supergirl already has Gunn walking back his Superman concept of Kryptonians as vile rapist-conquerors as a peculiarity of Jor-El and Lara alone, and yeah, probably for the best.) Supergirl, anyway, doesn't even stretch for the barest superficialities of "being alien," and the moment I saw that poster—the coat, the spraypainted "S," it's so punk rock!—I was never going to love this film's conceptualization of this Kara Zor-El as an out-of-date archetype of a turn-of-the-millennium boozy sadgirl, and it's somehow even less committed than it sounds.
I have not so far mentioned Supergirl's director, Craig Gillespie, whose career is partially synonymous with chronicles of messy young women, and partially synonymous with flogging IP, with significant overlap between the two—this and Cruella, whereas there's an argument that his biopic I, Tonya is "IP" spiritually-speaking—and so you'd think he'd have a bead on this, though even in the Disney movie about keeping the dog-skinner from skinning dogs, the messy young woman was messier. (Its editing, also by Riegel, was still pretty choppy, though.) As for adapting that approach to a very specific character who is, sort of, not "a young woman" at all (the comic starts out with the same red sun bender, incidentally, but characterizes Kara through Ruthye from an emotional distance, as an ever-generous, but lonely and somewhat-inscrutable demigod), Supergirl doesn't even bother, taking its cues from Gunn and his movies, so a character whose main trait is homesickness for an unimaginably-alien world is now so thoughtlessly human she references Spongebob Squarepants in between her primary pastime of listening to American pop music in space. Most good faith commentators have taken pains to praise Alcock, which I'm pretty sure in this context can be more meaningfully translated "no, I promise I don't actually hate women," and I am not preoccupied with blaming her, because the narrow channels she was going to be compelled to take were in place long before she showed up to act; but she's taking to those narrow channels as thoughtlessly as the screenplay's laid them down. She always calls Superman "Clark," not "Kal-El," for instance; the screenplay and the director do not notice there's an inherent meaning to whether Kara calls her cousin by his human name or his Kryptonian one, and if it's not in the screenplay or direction, Alcock will remain equally oblivious to it. It's not a good performance, then, or even an engaged one, in service to a spongy non-conception of the character that isn't any more psychologically robust or science-fictionally fascinating than the "Linda Danvers, happy to be shipped off by her cousin to an actual fucking orphanage" conception of the Silver Age Supergirl, which at least was always pleasurably whimsical—and this is plopped into a movie that was already not fun or enjoyable in just about in any way.
Score: 4/10
*This path eventually leads to "Batgirl beats up Supergirl because Batgirl turned the mood lighting on."
**You know, I've been reminded that the DCU's Clark had to breathe, back in Superman.
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