Film Review: Supergirl (2026)

 

Sexuality/Nudity Acceptable

Violence Acceptable

Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

I think of the first three X-Men movies, the third one is the best.

I believe that Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is an underrated masterpiece.

I am letting you know this upfront because based on the response from critics and the box office, Supergirl is a bomb.

But I disagree.

I think Supergirl is a very good movie, one that I enjoyed despite its flaws.  So I acknowledge that I am in the vast minority when it comes to this film.  My first two statements were for you, dear reader, so that you have a barometer for my taste in super hero films.

I don't mean to be a contrarian.  I was prepared to dislike this movie, but I found it way more charming than most people.

Supergirl is a sequel spin off to last year's Superman.  Supergirl/Kara (Milly Alcock) is different than her cousin Superman (David Corenswet).  Unlike Superman who has no memory of life before Earth, Kara lived for several years after the destruction of Krypton in a floating city of Argo.  For reasons that are explained throughout the film, she is forced to flee with only her dog Krypto.  Because of this, she does not feel at home on Earth and engages in self-destructive behavior.  For her 23rd birthday, she travels to a planet with a red sun so that she can lose her powers and get drunk and party.  It is there that she meets Ruthye (Eve Ridley), whose parents were killed by the leader of a group called the Brigands named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts).  Ruthye is seeking revenge against Krem.  Kara does not want to get involved, but unfortunately crosses paths with Krem who poisons Krypto.  So Kara only has three days to find Krem and get the antidote.  Along the way they encounter dangers like Lobo (Jason Momoa), who is basically "Space Wolverine,"and other perils along the way.

Many people have criticized Ana Nogueira's script, but it has no more contrivances than most super-hero fare.  The story does go out of its way to seem rebellious in a very immature way.  The opening shot has Krypto urinating on a picture of Superman.  Speaking of urine, the movie also shows Kara sitting on a toilet and peeing.  Things like this seem like super-cheap ways of trying to give Kara some edge.  The set up to how Ruthye's family gets killed is also fairly stupid, but not a deal-breaker.  

The biggest deficit of this movie is that the villain is incredibly boring and bland.  He is basically a generic Russian mobster from a John Wick film but an alien.  He has no real personality to speak of or character.  He is really just there to facilitate Kara's character arc.  This isn't necessarily a knock on Schoenaerts' performance, since he is given very little to work with here.  If the screenwriter thinks that the villain isn't that interesting, why should we.  Contrast that with Lobo, who is really not on screen very much, but steals every scene.  DC has an incredibly stable of cosmic villains to choose from and they chose probably the most boring choice of them all.

Having said that, the movie is good in spite of these flaws.  The success or failure really comes down to whether or not you connect to Kara.  This is a challenge in the beginning, because the movie does not explain to you why she behaves like an irresponsible jerk. The movie has to let that story unfold.  When she first meets Ruthye, she continually talks herself out of helping.  But when Ruthye gets accosted and robbed by the patrons of the bar, Kara cannot help herself by assist.  This, rather than her conflict with Krem, is her main struggle: against herself.  She wants to lose herself in the oblivion of pleasure and self-pity, but her more noble nature nags at her conscience.  This is a movie about going from recklessness to responsibility.

My brother-in-law upon seeing the trailers called this movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4.  And there is some good insight here.  Director Craig Gillespie's approach to alien cultures is very similar to how James Gunn approached them in GOTG: every culture was an analog to human culture.  This is not an uncommon approach, but Gunn did it in a way where the exotic was looked at as mundane in context and Gillespie does the same.  This isn't bad, but it feels very familiar.

One of the strengths of the script is that it knows how to power-scale Kara.  A struggle that many writers have with Superman is that he is so powerful that they cannot find an adequate challenge.  The script for Supergirl is able to avoid this problem by placing Kara into situations (e.g. the planet with the red sun) that puts her and Ruthye in real peril.  While some have criticized these as easy contrivances, I thought that they made sense in context.

I have seen a little bit of Alcock in the series House of the Dragon, but I didn't see a lot that impressed me.  However, I really liked her performance as Kara.  While many viewers found her cockiness off-putting, I saw it as her armor.  She has created a wall of stone around her heart because she has been hurt too much in the past.  I thought that Alcock was able to play the part well of the reluctant anti-hero who slowly comes to true heroism.  You can see why she avoids the responsibility because if she makes the wrong call or isn't good enough, people die.  Alcock lets this weight slowly sink onto her shoulders and the pressure forms her into something more heroic.

Ridley is an excellent balance for Alcock.  She is overly serious and precocious to counteract the world-weary protagonist.  She plays the part of the scared, naive, but determined true-believer.  Her relationship with Kara was what I was hoping would be found between Kamala Kahn and Carol Danvers in The Marvels.  Ridley has to go through various stages of admiration and disappointment with Kara as the layers are slowly peeled back.  Momoa seems to be having a grand ole time chewing the scenery and throwing out snarky comments in every scene.  Corenswet has a small, but important role here acting as a foil to everything that Kara is and standing there for every Kara could be.  He brings that same earnest virtue he did in his own movie.

I thought that Gillespie did a good job of making the action sequences interesting and exciting.  As I mentioned earlier, they script makes sure to put Kara in real peril and because of this the stakes are higher.  I found the scenes where she and/or Lobo let loose on the bad guys to be incredibly enjoyable sequences.  

There is some controversy about the ending, which I will not spoil here.  Kara makes a choice that many could say contradicts the entire heroic theme of the movie.  And I think there is room for debate.  In fact, I think that was the point.  Kara is placed in a situation the choice is not so much whether the action is right or wrong or whether you can take on someone else's sin for them.  It obvious answer to this question from a Catholic perspective is "no."  But the movie does a good job of placing you in Kara's shoes and making you at least see the dilemma that she is in.  I think the movie is fairly ambivalent regarding the morality of that choice and leaves it open to interpretation for the audience.

Last year's Superman was about an ideal hero trying to survive in a fallen world.  

Supergirl is about a fallen hero trying to strive back to the ideal.

I think both films have a lot to offer.