Movie Review: ‘Supergirl’ (Second Opinion)

Plot: Based loosely on the Tom King graphic novel “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” several years after escaping the doomed planet Krypton’s Argo City, Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Milly Allcock) still struggles with the trauma of losing her entire race. Deciding to go on a red sun pub crawl for her 23^rd birthday to get drunk, Kara encounters Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl whose parents were slain by the villainous Brigand leader Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). After Kara’s dog Krypto is poisoned by Krem, Ruthye persuades Kara to help her on her quest for revenge. Subsequently, Kara begins a galaxy-spanning quest to save Krypto, stop Krem, find purpose, and preserve the last vestige of Ruthye’s innocence.

Review: In December of last year, I began taking the prescription medication Zepbound. For those of you unaware, Zepbound is a GLP-1 designed to help people struggling with obesity and sleep apnea. It helps slow down fat absorption and also works as an appetite suppressant. However, one of the things you need to ensure is to not eat overly fatty and fried foods, especially later at night, otherwise there can be…well, let’s say consequences and leave it at that. Early on, fool that I was, I ignored that warning and consumed some delicious Dave’s Hot Chicken late one night. And boy, were there consequences, like Keanu Reeves in John Wick saying the word “Consequences.”

Why the Hell am I bringing up this sanitized version of a personal medical story at the beginning of a movie review? The reason is that watching Supergirl was a lot like that experience, delicious upon first watch, but upon further analysis, ultimately full of empty calories that left me with profound stomach issues.

*Just a heads up before I go much further. I typically try to keep my reviews as spoiler-free as possible, and I will endeavor to do the same here. However, there is one moment in particular that will be impossible for me to critique without spoiling it. Having said that, I will drop a spoiler warning for those of you who want to skip past that part.

Lest I give the impression that Supergirl was some irredeemable bowel movement, I do want to address some of the aspects I liked about director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl. First and foremost, Milly Allcock is phenomenal as Kara/Supergirl. Although her character is somewhat flimsily written (a separate issue I’ll address), she was absolutely the correct person to cast, and I am eagerly looking forward to her appearance in further DCU films. The same goes for Jason Momoa’s Lobo, who was born to play the wise-cracking, cigar-chomping, immortal Czarnian bounty hunter. Additionally, the segments on Krypton and later Argo City were amazing and easily the best parts of the movie. Cinematographer Rob Hardy (Annihilation, Mission: Impossible-Fallout, Civil War) also did yeoman’s work behind the camera. And of course, Krypto was cute as ever.

Sadly, everything else is an epic disaster.

I was a massive fan of James Gunn’s Superman. It was my second-favorite film of 2025. It gave me the kind of Superman I never knew I always wanted. The world was classic Silver Age comics with a gorgeous color palette, super science, kaiju, pocket universes, and everything my geeky nerd heart was pining for. I loved David Corenswet as Clark/Superman. Moreover, Superman foreshadowed a glimpse into a wider fantastical DC galaxy full of awe and wonder. It was a giant step forward into—as Obi-Wan Kenobi famously said—a larger world.

Supergirl, unfortunately, is three colossal steps backward.

Supergirl somehow manages to make the galaxy feel small and perplexingly dull. It’s a derivative of other, far better science fiction films. Whether it’s Schoenaerts’ Krem looking like an extra from a Mad Max film, aliens in bars and space buses that feel like knock-offs from the Star Wars cantina, a skirmish with Sklarian Raiders that feels reminiscent of the Quicksilver scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past, or unearned Guardians of the Galaxy-esque needle drops, nothing feels original or captivating. It’s a half-cooked knock-off brand of Digiorno Pizza that’s lukewarm and adequately edible.

Take Schoenaerts’s Krem of the Yellow Hills and Momoa’s Lobo for examples. Here you have a phenomenal award-nominated actor (The Danish Girl, A Hidden Life, The Mustang) in Schoenaerts, and you completely waste him. Director Craig Gillespie gives him nothing better to do than make weird faces, saunter like Negan from The Walking Dead, and talk like a Russian bad guy from a third-rate 80s action film. Meanwhile, Jason Momoa’s Lobo, as great as he is, deserved more. This is a badass immortal bounty hunter…and they introduce him by having him talk to bartenders. Also, we as the audience are expected to know who he is, which is ridiculous. The typical moviegoer isn’t going to have a clue.

The same could be said of Eve Ridley’s Ruthye. While she’s endearing in the role, there’s not a lot of depth there. Additionally, every time she introduces herself to someone, she constantly gives her most recent backstory and announces it in a manner not unlike Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. Once again a choice that’s a cheap facsimile of a better film.

Speaking of better, director Craig Gillespie deserved better. This is a man who’s delivered some of the most underrated films of the last 20 years, whether that’s Lars and the Real Girl, Fright Night, or The Finest Hours. Furthermore, I, Tonya is a gem and Dumb Money is a flick I constantly suggest to people. With that pedigree, it’s kind of amazing how woefully inept Gillespie is at directing this movie. That’s not to say he’s necessarily bad; he’s just way out of his depth and was clearly not the right choice to helm Supergirl. Perhaps the powers that be thought he could champion strong women characters like he did with I, Tonya and Cruella, but the characters are too surface-level to have any real impact. The tone of Supergirl also feels discordant, which may explain why three different composers—Ramin Djawadi of Game of Thrones fame, Tom Holkenborg of Junkie XL, and the eventual composer Claudio Sarne—each took cracks at the score. Also, why Gillespie chose to utilize a somewhat washed-out color palette after the bright and dynamic color palette we got in Superman is beyond me.

Yet the lion’s share of the blame falls not on Gillespie’s direction but on the story itself. Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (which this film is loosely based on) is one of the best DC graphic novels of the last twenty years. Yet what we got was a shadow of a shadow of that story. Furthermore, you have other fantastic examples like Superman/Batman: Supergirl from Krypton, Supergirl: Being Super, and Sterling Gates and Jamal Igle’s Supergirl run from 2008-2010, to mine from, and the people behind Supergirl chose not to use them! I can’t imagine how infuriating this must be for Supergirl comic fans, especially female Supergirl comic fans.

Ultimately, I blame most of Supergirl’s failures on Ana Nogueira’s derivative, vapid, and uninteresting script. Kara Zor-El is a Kryptonian who watched her entire race of people (aside from Clark), including her parents, get sick and die horribly. Yet her way of dealing with that trauma once she gets to Earth is to become a sloppy, drunken, party girl. Bullshit. I don’t buy it. It lacks verisimilitude. Her actions are how a human would cope with race trauma. I want to know how a Kryptonian would deal with race trauma. Additionally, Kara just randomly owns a spaceship. How? Why? Also, why are aliens in dive bars playing Earth songs like “The Girl from Ipanema”?

There’s also the fact that the Brigands are running an alien child sex trafficking ring and capturing young girls to be their brides. It only partially works, not because it is “politically woke” (please miss me with that shit) but because it feels like it was tacked on just to make Krem and his Brigands more evil. It’s just another tired cliché couched in fraudulent feminism that lacks the emotional wallop it should have.

***SPOILER ALERT*** However, the most egregious element of Nogueira’s script comes at the end when Ruthye and Kara confront Krem. Kara spends the entire movie convincing Ruthye that revenge won’t give her peace and that it will change her for the worse. It works when Ruthye ultimately chooses not to kill Krem. But does Kara walk away? NOPE. Instead, she undermines her entire message to Ruthye by immediately killing Krem for revenge. Now listen, you can make the argument that Kara was already broken and she took on the killing act to protect Ruthye, but—again—I don’t buy it. It completely negates any character development Kara was supposed to have, so by the end, she still seems like she’s in the same place she was when the film began. ***SPOILER ENDS***

I am at a complete loss as to how Nogueira, who, aside from a few plays, only had one short film for a writing credit, was allowed to write the script for a major feature film like Supergirl. What exactly qualified her to pen this script? It’s baffling, and I refuse to believe that there weren’t far more qualified veteran female writers who could have done an exponentially better job. Nogueira clearly didn’t do the work, and the lack of originality and poaching ideas from better films shows through in every frame. What’s even more infuriating is that there aren’t a lot of quality female superhero films for girls and women to latch on to. It took the MCU an inexcusable 20 films to have a female-led superhero film. Girls and women FUCKING DESERVE BETTER. They deserve better than a movie that barely rises above mediocrity. Hell, we all deserve better.

Despite my dislike of Supergirl, I still believe in the future of the DCU. Lanterns looks solid, I think Clayface is going to surprise people, and I have no doubt James Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow will be just as good, if not better than Superman. I hope and pray that Supergirl will ultimately prove to be a minor stumble on an otherwise golden and smoothly paved DCU road.

My rating system:

1 God Awful Blind Yourself With Acid Bad

2 Straight Garbage

3 Bad

4 Sub Par

5 Average

6 Ok

7 Good

8 Great

9 Excellent

10 A Must See

Masterpiece

Supergirl: 4/10