Supergirl review: DC's boldest new hero deserves a better film

Actor Milly Alcock leads DC's bold new chapter with a fresh take on Kara Zor-El, but does the film live up to its promise? Read on to find out whether this emotional superhero adventure soars or falls short.

In Short

• Supergirl explores survivor's grief, not just heroism
• Milly Alcock's Kara is flawed and emotionally inconsistent
• Ruthye's revenge quest challenges Kara's views

There is an expectation that comes with every Superman story. Someone will save the day. Supergirl isn’t nearly as interested in that.

Craig Gillespie’s adaptation of Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow begins not with triumph but with exhaustion. Kara Zor-El isn’t searching for purpose, nor is she particularly interested in becoming anyone’s symbol. She is drifting through space, carrying memories that nobody around her can fully understand. Unlike her famous cousin, Kara remembers Krypton. She remembers the people, the cities and the home she lost. The film’s most compelling idea is also its simplest: surviving a planet is very different from surviving the grief that follows it.

It is a surprisingly melancholic place to begin a superhero film. And, for a while, it works.

The story follows Kara (Milly Alcock), who reluctantly joins Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a determined young girl seeking revenge against Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the mercenary who murdered her father. Their journey unfolds like a cosmic western, moving from one unfamiliar world to another, where every stop forces both characters to question whether vengeance can ever truly deliver the closure they believe it will.

On paper, it sounds conventional. The film is at its strongest whenever it refuses to be.

Milly Alcock understands Kara better than the screenplay often does. She plays her with a restless energy that constantly pushes against the image audiences associate with the House of El. This Kara isn’t effortlessly inspiring. She drinks, she swears, she makes mistakes, and she frequently keeps people at arm’s length. Yet Alcock never mistakes cynicism for complexity. Beneath the bravado sits someone who has spent years learning that extraordinary strength offers very little protection against ordinary loneliness.

She gives Kara something superhero films often struggle to embrace; that is emotional inconsistency.

Eve Ridley complements that performance beautifully. Rather than existing simply to admire the hero, Ruthye repeatedly challenges Kara’s moral certainty. Their conversations about revenge, justice and mercy become far more interesting than the action surrounding them. The chemistry between the two actors quietly carries the film through stretches where the narrative begins to lose focus.

Visually, Supergirl has far more personality than many recent comic-book films.

Craig Gillespie embraces the stranger corners of DC’s universe instead of flattening them into interchangeable CGI landscapes. Alien taverns feel lived in, forgotten planets have texture and Krypto, despite threatening to become the film’s easiest crowd-pleaser, remains surprisingly organic to the story rather than a mascot inserted for applause.

The world is imaginative. The storytelling is less certain.

The film’s biggest limitation is that it never fully decides whose journey it wants to tell. While the emotional core belongs to Kara, much of the narrative momentum comes from Ruthye’s revenge quest. Kara spends large sections reacting to events rather than driving them, making the protagonist occasionally feel like a traveller inside somebody else’s story.

Ironically, the flashbacks reveal the richer film. The glimpses of Krypton and Kara’s childhood carry more emotional weight than much of the present-day adventure because they reveal the person hiding beneath the cape. The road trip across the galaxy introduces fascinating locations and colourful supporting characters, but many of those encounters feel episodic rather than cumulative. Just as the film begins exploring an interesting idea, it moves on to the next destination.

That impatience extends to its tone. Supergirl wants to be a revenge western, a coming-of-age drama, a space adventure and the foundation of James Gunn’s new DC Universe. Sometimes those ambitions complement one another. At other times, they compete. A heartfelt moment is followed by humour that arrives too quickly, while franchise obligations occasionally interrupt a story that works best when it stays intimate.

Matthias Schoenaerts lends Krem enough menace to justify the pursuit, but the screenplay rarely allows him to become more than the destination at the end of the journey. Jason Momoa’s Lobo injects welcome unpredictability into the film, although his appearance feels more like a promise of future adventures than a meaningful chapter in this one.

And perhaps that’s the contradiction sitting at the heart of Supergirl. The film repeatedly hints at something quieter, sadder and more character-driven than the blockbuster it ultimately becomes. Whenever it pauses to examine the survivor’s guilt, memory and identity, it finds an emotional honesty that feels refreshingly uncommon in contemporary superhero cinema. Whenever it remembers it also has to launch a franchise, that honesty begins to fade.

There is still plenty here to admire. Milly Alcock delivers a performance confident enough to separate Kara from decades of comparisons to Superman. Craig Gillespie gives the DC Universe a welcome sense of visual personality. And Supergirl proves that Kara Zor-El has always been far more interesting than the label of “Superman’s cousin” ever allowed.

The film simply never becomes as confident in its own story as it is in its heroine. And that, more than any intergalactic villain, is what ultimately holds it back.

- Ends