Supergirl
Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home. -IMDB.com
Excerpt
"If we’re going to connect to Kara as an audience, we need to know who she is. Kara may not fully know who she is, but the audience should – especially as our hero."
Stepping Out of Superman’s Shadow
Sure, it’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s Superman (2025), but what of Kara? She’s probably watching her cousin’s hero shenanigans from the comfort of her local bar on whatever planet she happens to be in at that moment. She’s likely got snacks, cold beer, a hyperactive dog and a healthy dose of trauma. Kara Zor-El is a hero in her own right though without that pesky “people pleasing” gene Kal-El seems to have. When a threat hits too close to home, Supergirl decides to jump in and goes on a journey to self-discovery and finding a place called home. Craig Gillespie directs the second James Gunn DCU film, and the first film for DC, Supergirl (2026) and it’s thrilling, hilarious and inspires the heroes – willing and reluctant – in all of us.
When we last saw Supergirl (Milly Alcock) aka Kara Zor-El (shh… it’s a secret identity!), she was relieving Kal-El of his pet sitting for her mischievous pup Krypto. Now it seems Krypto is in trouble. During a wild night out, Kara’s dance party is interrupted by the entry of a young girl looking for someone to help avenge her father. Ruthye Marrye Knoll (Eve Ridley) is a very Lyanna Mormont (Bella Ramsey in Game of Thrones (2011)) coded character. She’s got a lot of heart, but is missing any skill that would be helpful to completing her goal. Kara – who is a mess – sees a reflection of herself, but decides not to get involved. A scuffle forces her hand, but when she thinks she’s out, they just keep pulling her back in!
This time Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his band of lackey’s pay a visit to Kara’s home, steal it and use Krypto for target practice. While Krypto fights off a paralytic, Kara says she’ll help, but she’s not going to let a revenge mission get in the way of finding her dog. The two embark on an intergalactic adventure to find justice and the antidote. Through the film we see Superman (David Corenswet), Kara’s parents Alura Zor-El (Emily Beecham) and Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and new anti-hero Lobo (Jason Momoa). There are some notable side characters (including Seth Rogan and Paul Hunter as Wormhole bus drivers), but our core group is pretty tight.
Making Supergirl Fit in the DCU
Supergirl clocks in at 107 minutes which makes it one of the shorter entries. James Gunn has said that this next DCU canon era will include films that feel like their own graphic novels. And each entry will have a different writer and artist attached. The first film, Superman (2025) was written and directed by James Gunn. This next entry was directed by the aforementioned Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira. Gillespie isn’t a name you’d necessarily associate with superhero action films. He’s gained notoriety with quieter dramatic fare like Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Dumb Money (2023). As an aside, he also directed the Beyonce x Verizon Super Bowl commercial! While he hasn’t dealt with superhero action, he’s definitely shown himself competent in tension building fast paced dialogue.
Nogueira is known primarily as an actress in TV series and sitcoms like The Blacklist (2017) and Hightown (2020) which could have lent a snappiness to some of the lines. I bring this up because even though Supergirl was enjoyable, there were a couple of items that reeked of studio oversight. It’s shown in the trailer, but a constant theme is Kara begging Ruthiye to take killing off of her list. Killing for revenge will never leave her satisfied and she will carry that death with her for the rest of her life. Kara says this several times, each time growing with intensity. It makes the audience believe that we’ll see or be told about a time that Kara went to carry out a revenge kill and it went terribly wrong, but that time never comes. Are they saving it for a sequel? What possible reason could there be for not including something that’s fundamental not only to the plotline, but to Kara as a character.
Throughout the film, I found it hard to fully connect to Kara and I think it hinges on the key difference between Kara and Clark. Our connection to Superman is informed by his connection, protection and love of humanity. It’s something we can understand about the mostly infallible alien that makes him feel like a man of the people. He literally is. Kara on the other hand, has a traumatic past that involves radiation and death and getting sent to Earth in her own capsule. She notably doesn’t really have a connection to Earth, but it would have been great to see her struggle to find a home in the film.
We learn at the end of Superman that Kara prefers the red sub planet because her powers don’t fully work there and she can get drunk. Clearly a coping mechanism, but definitely not somewhere she should call home. Very little of the film is dedicated to this and I think that’s what spurs my frustration with her character in the film. It feels as though we’ve met and know the lore for Kara so now showing her reactions to external forces. When we do get in her head, her flashbacks that honestly just seem to cause more confusion and aren’t really about her at all. One entire scene was dedicated to a time 8 years before Kara was even born.
Connecting With Kara
If we’re going to connect to Kara as an audience, we need to know who she is. Kara may not fully know who she is, but the audience should – especially as our hero. And I need to stress, none of this falls on Alcock. She’s shown herself to be an extremely valuable and versatile actress in projects like Sirens (2025) and of course, House of the Dragon (2022). She has the ability to deliver comedic lines in one scene while squeezing out tears in the next. It’s just her talent that seems to be boxed in by her surface level characterization. This shallow interpretation affects her and everyone she interacts with. Lobo was one of the best characters, but often played to an empty room. He was funny and snappy but also dedicated to his work . We were able to connect to him with extremely limited backstory. The times they interact are almost immediately forgettable and there doesn’t seem to be any permanency to their acquaintanceship. In fact, Lobo sort of deus ex machina’s his way into scenes only to flit out again. And that’s not a complaint.
What is a complaint is the woeful miscasting of Even Ridley as Ruthye. I give a lot of grace to child actors, but if you’re going to make a character who is frustratingly self-destructive, then the actress has to be wildly charming. I don’t understand the overly formal British accent, the Game of Thrones-like search for vengeance and justice. I don’t understand why she didn’t feel the need to train and why she felt that she could find and kill Krem based on vibes? I get that putting your protagonist with a kid can help them be sympathetic, but this almost would have been better as a joint Kara/Lobo project than adding in someone who is so inconsequential. It could have worked, but again, without the knowledge of Kara’s revenge kill, there’s nothing but a dead parents trauma bond to connect the young women and that is flimsy since the circumstances were so different.
It also leads me to another complaint that involves the Epstein Planet side plot where “brides” are being kidnapped to become wives for an “All male race” (we’re never told if it’s all male by choice). At one point Ruthiye refers to the girls as “brides” and no, those are children. They are girls. I couldn’t understand why that was so glossed over? Which, is a choice that again could point to studio oversight. If you’re going to present such a controversial plot point, it needs to be treated with the same level of outrage on the screen. Instead it played as a side note that barely garnered more than a quippy line at the end of the film.
While there are moments that really work, Supergirl is ultimately a film with varying degrees of successful digital effects, flimsy world building, frustrating characters and possibly too many cooks. In a film under 2 hours these things can make the film feel like it was rushed, but that’s not the case with Supergirl. It’s more like, they didn’t care? Which is extreme, but I don’t think it’s too far off the mark. At the end of the film no one clapped, we just all kind of watched the credits asking questions and trying to understand what didn’t hit. It’s not that the film was disappointing, it’s that it was fine. And that may be worse.
Supergirl will soar into theaters on June 26, 2026