Quality Matters, At Least it Should
I think it’s time to have the hard discussions about the current state of superhero cinema. These hard truths could extend to Star Wars as well, but for now we can target the underlying issues of comic book universes currently plaguing the genre as a whole. Superhero fatigue is very real, but Supergirl confronts us with another reality: people are no longer ok with just ok.
The diminishing returns of oversaturation and hollowed out creativity in lieu of franchise dollars has made each new attempt feel further and further from the things we use to love. Audiences seem to be coming around to the fact that just having their favorite characters on screen isn’t enough. Quality matters, and Supergirl lacks every ounce of quality filmmaking.
Supergirl is a barely serviceable comic book adaption, resting on the idea that we should just be grateful that they exist and not concern ourselves with whether or not it’s good. It’s the mediocracy on full display in Supergirl that makes it worse than if it were just outright bad; it’s as disappointing as it is forgettable. A circa 2002 superhero movie released it 2026 is simply uncalled for; we should be moving forward instead of backwards.
Wrong Director for a Deeply Flawed Movie
The stalwarts of what was once the peak entertainment have fallen victim to their own creations, and Supergirl reeks of iterative tropes and cliches buried under the shadow of James Gunn’s signature style. Director Craig Gillespie is a lot of things as filmmaker, but a Gunn protege is not one of them. Supergirl makes it is abundantly clear that he doesn’t understand the character nor the genre itself, let alone the imbalanced tonal style he’s desperately trying to copy cat. Gillespie is unequivocally the wrong directorial choice for Supergirl, constantly struggling to wrap his arms around the material and create adaption with any sense of emotional resonance or tension.
Directed by Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, Supergirl follows Kara (Milly Alcock), off world going from red sun planet to red sun planet to celebrate her birthday, but really it’s to drink her regrets and pain away, steering clear of any form of heroism like her do-gooder cousin. When a brutal space pirate and human trafficker (yes, really) Krem murders a family for their weapons, the surviving daughter Ruthye (Eve Ridley) searches for a warrior to help her kill Krem for revenge. Kara has no interest in helping the young girl, but when Krem poisons Krypto and keeps the only antidote on his persons, the two must reluctantly team up put an end to his reign of terror. Oh, and um, Lobo shows up for uh…reasons?
Alcock’s Performance is The Best Part
Milly Alcock gives everything she has to Supergirl, but sadly the film around her just doesn’t deserve her. It’s a great performance in a pretty run of the mill, boring movie and it’s a major disservice to a rising star. And because the internet is dark and full of terrors (and chuds), she’s going to unfairly get the brunt of the backlash. Studios have proven to be cowards and will have no problem throwing the only good thing about the movie under the bus to save face.
I want to hammer this home one more time: Alcock is an excellent Supergirl, and Supergirl is watchable because of – not in spite of her performance. She’s charming, brash, messy, and wholly committed to the character. I have a laundry lists of problem with the film, but let me be crystal clear: she is not one of them.
Everything else though is a chore to get through. Not because it’s outright bad, but because it’s not really anything at all. Supergirl is hastily strung together by nothing but things we’ve seen before, and executed much, much better in most of its borrowed compositions. It’s adapted screenplay opts to spend a majority of the time nerfing our hero, constantly creating ways to restrict her powers or remove them entirely.
A Film That Doesn’t Even Like Its Hero
There are times where it feels like Supergirl doesn’t even like Supergirl, and doesn’t even trust itself to let her lead her own movie. She’s constantly sidelined andr/or restricted, stripped of her powers at almost every chance the film gets, as if everyone thought no one actually wants to see Kara be a badass. Supergirl seems to think that the best way to experience the character is to watch her mope around and play babysitter while everyone else does cool stuff.
There’s a back to back sequence in the third act where Kara gets her powers back, loses them instantly, gets them back in a heroic return to save the day only to lose them AGAIN some 30 seconds later. Supergirl is consistently trying to take its hero down a peg and it’s incredibly backwards because again – Alcock is the only one giving any kind of performance that could shoulder a middling movie.
One Plot Contrivance After Another
It’s a baffling struggle that stifles any intrigue or growth in the character. It keeps alluding to it being a darker kind of hero’s journey but refuses to engage with any of the darkness it proposes and robs its only interesting component of agency and purpose. There’s no character growth if the film itself doesn’t care about its hero, and that makes Supergirl increasingly frustrating.
Supergirl is just one plot contrivance after another followed by a tired, predictable cliche and lacking any kind of inspired creativity. The tonal whiplash becomes far more exhausting that exciting, possessing everything that makes these kinds of films a humorless chore. Seth Rogen as Babu Frick (not his actual character but he might as well be) has some of the only funny moments in the film, and I’m convinced it was not written and Rogen just came into the studio and heat checked with his own improve and actual comedic timing. Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a villain from somewhere else, delivering an over the top performance from a completely different movie.
A Lazy Villain and Annoying Child
He’s so underdeveloped without any motivation whatsoever, and not even Supergirl seems to be all that bothered by his galactic trafficking antics. The amount of times she forgets or ignores the fact that he has trafficked girls caged up everywhere he goes is confounding, as if the script forgot about it too and has to find ways to bring it up for no other reason than Krem needs SOMETHING other than sticking his tongue out and creepily getting up in everyone’s face with his bedazzled rhinestone cheeks. He’s like Tazerface, but not funny and not in on the joke.
It’s like they forgot that he actually has to do bad things to make him a bad guy, so they just kind of give him all of them and hope that one of them sticks. It’s not really a fault of Ridley herself, but Supergirl commits a cinematic sin that drives me up the wall: forcing a child into the story as a catalyst for events. I am aware that this directly pulled from its comic counterpart, but that doesn’t make the trope any less irritating to me. I don’t hate children, but I do hate when movies insist that the only way for a hero to actually become one is to babysit an insufferable child. It’s personal beef with Supergirl, but its equal parts lazy and egregious and I simply could not let it go.
The Positives are Few and Far Between
Admittedly, it’s a struggle to find some positives here, and aside from Alcock’s performance there aren’t many to chose from. Supergirl does have some really great creature designs, displaying some care and craft in constructing diverse alien races. And though he’s not in for very long, Jason Mamoa’s Lobo is a scene stealer. And ya, David Corenswet’s brief appearances as Superman is very welcomed. I’m sorry, but that’s about where the positives stop. You can see that Supergirl seems to be doing everything it can to not actually make a Supergirl movie.
Final Thoughts
All in all, Supergirl disappoints across the board. The script feels like a first draft, completely unrefined and messy on all fronts. The visuals are horrendous, the lighting are just…why does everything have to always look so washed and ugly all the time? The editing is manic and jarring with no sense of tone or consistent sense of geography or time. The action feels straight out of a PS2 game with no eye for compelling framing or tension. There’s not one single fight sequence that welcomes the audience into it because the camera just spins around the hero, obscuring any view of the action taking place.
Supergirl is like a checklist of early 2000s tropes, which simply should not be the case in 2026. We’ve had ample time to learn from our mistakes, and refusing to do so in a new era for the DC universe amplifies the let down.
The superhero genre needs a reckoning, and we deserve better.
