Disclaimer

I've not read Supergirl: The Woman of Tomorrow, which was apparently the inspiration for this film. So, I don't know which are the dumb ideas that came from it and which are the original dumb ideas for this dumb movie.

However, I've just discovered that it's "free" on Kindle Unlimited, so I will read it if I have any time after finishing this review, and if I feel it warrants it, I'll update the review as needed.

Live Your Trauma

Still reeling from the loss of everyone she knew and loved, Kara Zor-El spends her days sleeping off her nights as she pub crawls across the galaxy looking for solace in the bottom of a whiskey glass. That is, until a group of intergalactic sex traffickers murder a little girl's family and steals her father's especially hard swords (no, really), sending her on a quest for vengeance by proxy.

Searching for someone willing to help her hunt down and kill the dastardly villain, the girl, Ruthye, eventually crosses paths with a drunken Kara, who initially refuses to get involved. That quickly changes when the traffickers steal Kara's space RV and shoot her beloved dog, Krypto, with a conveniently slow-acting poison dart, one that precludes her from moving her pooch to a world with a yellow sun (which would presumably heal him), because it does, and gives her just enough time to retrieve the antidote from the braille-faced baddie and his Beyond Thunderdome cos-playing crew before it's too late.

What it Was Meant to Be

Channeling a less cohesive, less fun spiritual cousin universe to James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, Supergirl is meant to be a hero's journey that follows Kara on a therapeutic, planet-hopping adventure, encountering sometimes bizarre, sometimes zany creatures along the way, and forcing her to confront her demons so that she might move on and eventually reach the aspirational potential her cousin sees in her.

That's not necessarily the story that most fans wanted, but it's a solid, tried-and-true formula that could have worked despite its unoriginality, that is, had its first-time writer, Ana Nogueira, been up to it. Unfortunately, what the actress-turned-filmscribe produced is a lifeless 108-minute escort mission/fetch quest that wants to be an introspective, character-driven/action-mashup but instead delivers dull characters, inert arcs, meaningless action, and a plot driven solely by the need for the next scene, not to mention a whole lot of stupid.

Apparently, she's been put in charge of the next Wonder Woman script as well. That's not germane to this review, but I felt the need to warn you nonetheless.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

What is, in essence, a 1h48m chain of sterile CGI battles in which the protagonist is never in any real danger, linked together by an inexhaustible supply of exposition, convenience, and contrivance, Supergirl thinks that by pairing Kara with Eve Ridley's Ruthye, it can deliver the tension that battles between nigh-invincible god-like beings inherently don't possess.

For all intents and purposes, Ruthye has human-level strength and endurance, while bereft of any special martial skills, ostensibly making her the surrogate for the vulnerability that Kara's solar-drenched cells lack. Unfortunately, neither the script nor director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya - it's good, you should watch it) has it in them to do more than give a perfunctory nod to the conceit, and the threats to Rythye's safety ring hollow as she easily avoids any serious danger or injury. In one scene, she actually stands in the middle of a malestrom of death and destruction, looking in awe as Kara once again effortlessly lays waste to a group of armored, armed baddies. She stares, never blinking or ducking, or even twitching, as dust, shrapnel, laser fire, and even huge pieces of machinery fly toward her, often only narrowly missing her. How are we supposed to care if she doesn't?

More important than her physical surrogacy, after all, we all know that Batman isn't going to die in one of his films, and we're fine with that, Supergirl 2026 presents Ruthie as an emotional mirror for Kara, one that's meant to show The Woman of Tomorrow the failings of holding onto her own pain, and providing a sounding board and occasional pushback against her own floundering mental health journey. However, the duo's situations are too disparate for meaningful parity, certainly not at the level the film strives for.

Ruthye is a twelve-year-old (or thereabouts) whose parents and brother were murdered in front of her eyes fewer than 24 hours before the adventure begins. However, Kara was a young adult who has had years (1-5, it's unclear) to process her family's demise. More than that, she had time before their demise to come to grips with her fate, as what killed her world took an indeterminate amount of time, but certainly a minimum of several months. She was even able to say goodbye to her family.

It is true that in the real world, people process painful events differently, and what takes some three days to move past might take another a lifetime, but in a film with a narrative that depends on drawing parallels for character growth and to deliver catharsis in under two hours, these differences matter. We, the audience, need to emotionally bond with Kara through Ruthye quickly for maximum payoff, and the anemic script simply doesn't support that.

The lessons that the two are "teaching" one another are incongruous. Supergirl repeatedly tries to impress on Ruthye that vengeance not only won't help but will actually deepen her scars, but Kara isn't looking for vengeance, so how does that help her? One is left to guess that the intent is to say both she and Ruthye would benefit from letting go and moving on. This might very well be true, but films are supposed to be a journey that takes the audience along for the ride with their characters, so we can feel what they feel by the end.

When the emotional throughlines of its main characters clash, it is like two similar yet different pieces of music playing simultaneously. Alone, each one might be melodic, if not lyrical, but when played together, the differences in tempo and rhyme make for grating, discordant noise. In a film that struggles on every other level as well, such a fundamental flaw is devastating.

Convenient Conveniences are Convenient

Unfortunately, the script's flaws don't end there. The "adventure" is motivated by nuclear-powered contrivances that McGuffin (yes, I've chosen to use it as a verb) the main cast from scene to scene.

The villain just so happens to be in the same town, on the same continent, on the same world, in the same solar system as Supergirl, and he just so happens to have a slow-acting poison dart that he so happens to shoot Krypto with when he conveniently stumbles upon Kara's spaceship. It just so happens that, after moving the sick K9 to a mystical space vet who just so happens to be in a nearby sherpa tent and just so happens to know everything there is to know about this particular poison, it just so happens that Krypto can no longer be moved, because it just so happens that that will kill him more quickly. But it just so happens that the main villain keeps a vial of the convenient antedote around his neck, and so on and so on and so on.

Not enough? Now that Kara is without a mode of convenience, there's a convenient intergalactic bus stop conveniently near the sherpa tent that conveniently takes Kara and Ruthyie to a bar on another planet that the mystic vet conveniently knew the villains frequent. Along the way, an obligatory action sequence occurs in which Kara, who is conveniently an accomplished pickpocket, snatches a teleportation device that gives her a fighting edge, prolonging the encounter long enough for the conveniently nearby yellow sun to conveniently dawn just in time to conveniently save the day.

Do you get it yet? No. What about a planet with two suns, one yellow, and one green, on which the green one, not kryptonite, mind you, just green (apparently the Guardians made Kara) hurts Kara (don't know why), but only stays out long enough for Ruthye to get herself into trouble before the time released McGuffin sets, and Kara gets powered up to save the day.

There is one major plot hole, spurred by Nogueira's proclivity for the provocative proliferation of proto-thought, which would be criminal to neglect. Krem is the leader of sex trafficking space pirates with a taste for young girls, yet in the film's opening sequence, after murdering her family in plain view of her, rather than kidnapping Ruthye, he looks at her, shrugs, and walks away.

It's actually kind of impressive.

Character Flaws

Engaging characters can make up a lot of ground for otherwise lackluster scripts, but Supergirl fails on this front as well. Milly Alcock is a fine actress, and she is clearly not the problem here, though I'd argue that Supergirl should be played by someone far more statuesque. What is the problem, aside from the film's terrible dialogue, is that the script doesn't support the character that it so clearly wanted to create.

Kara is meant to start out as a surly, off-putting mess who slowly finds her way as she is forced to protect and guide Ruthye in her time of need. And, yes, she's unpleasant but not overly so or dynamically so. Being hungover isn't a character trait that can sustain an entire film, but Nogueira and Gillespie sure do try.

At the end of last year's Superman, Alcock's cameo gave us a clearly defined character, an unpleasant one who no one wanted anything to do with, but clearly defined, and a solid place to start for one meant to find redemption in heroic works. In her own film, Kara comes across as a nice girl who is merely deeply sad and withdrawn, and Alcock spins her wheels on a poorly written character who's not unlikable enough to hate, nor likable enough to like, nor sad enough to empathize with, nor amusing enough to forgive her flaws. She's just there, tired and frumpy, waiting for her next dose of yellow sun.

Meanwhile, Ruthye, arguably meant to be the film's emotional keystone, is an empty suit. Eve Ridley seems like a decent enough performer, but there's no there there. Ruthye isn't cute enough to give you a case of the feels, nor tough enough to root for, and Ridley, at 14 years of age, simply doesn't have the charisma to make up for it.

He's a Bad Guy

You watch Batman 89 for the Joker. Gene Hackman steals every scene in Superman: The Movie. Dolores Umbridge makes Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

A thought-provoking, or over-the-top scenery-chewing baddie can make all the difference, elevating mundane to iconic with only a few lines.

Matthias Schoenaerts, who you might recognize if you frequent Netflix (why are you frequenting Netflix? They hate you.), from The Old Guard films starring Charlize Theron and their Django series, plays Krem, the leader of the space-viking, sex-trafficking group known as The Brigands. Given so little screentime as to be forgotten about between scenes, Krem is a bloodless stand-in, a sawdust-filled punching bag with an evil sneer. And that's no fault of Matthias, who is clearly invested in the character and doing everything he can to show the world he's worth giving future roles.

Dressed Up with No Place to Go

Ok, James, but what about the visuals? All I want is a bunch of explosions and cool fight scenes.

You'd best stream Die Hard, then, because, from the knock-off Guardians of the Galaxy aesthetic to Kara's poorly fitted Supergirl suit, Supergirl is a visual mess.

Fight scenes are incomprehensible, hard to follow, and rather pedestrian, with a not insignificant amount of their action happening just off camera.

The fight choreography is weak and uninspired, and Alcock simply lacks the physicality to pull any of it off. Supergirl looks fine in a fight when the character's back is to us, and a stuntwoman or digital double takes the actress's place, but Alcock punches like a girl who's punched like a girl her whole life, except for the handful of weeks of fight training she received for this film. It's as unnatural-looking as the mediocre CGI that takes over for most of the bigger action set pieces.

Even something as mundane and seemingly simple as the lady tech-pirates looks laughably bad, like low-rent cos-players in ill-fitted costumes with cheap cake makeup on their faces.

Supergirl isn't offensively bad so much as it is relentlessly bad. Every element that should have carried the film, its emotional core, its characters, its action, its villain, even its visual identity, falls just short of being engaging, leaving behind an adventure that feels strangely weightless despite its constant insistence that it's saying something profound.

Milly Alcock is a talented actress and acquits herself as well as anyone reasonably could under the circumstances, but she also feels fundamentally miscast. Supergirl has traditionally been portrayed as a larger-than-life, almost mythically striking figure, and Alcock simply doesn't project that kind of screen presence. That's less an indictment of her abilities than of the filmmakers' vision. Rather than launching DC's newest heroine with confidence, Supergirl stumbles into theaters burdened by contrivance, weighed down by lifeless spectacle, and convinced that trauma alone is a substitute for personality. It's a joyless, forgettable detour through the cosmos that never justifies the trip.

Oh, and Lobo's in it.