Supergirl (2026)

PG-13 for a lot or cussing, a lot of drinking, and a lot of dying.  It's going to be a hard sell for my five-year-old, who really wants to see it.  But I'm going to go with a hard "No" on this one.  It really feels like the adult cousin of Superman.  And it's not like it would really work without the stuff that is questionable.  It's fundamental to this version of the character.  So as much as I want to say that this is the fun superhero movie of the summer, it's one of those liminal movies.  As it is a PG-13 movie, 13 is about the right age to consider this movie.

DIRECTOR:  Craig Gillespie

What kind of landmine am I stepping in?  The internet is bringing out all of the trolls with this one.  The manosphere wants this movie to fail so badly.  I, on the other hand, was more excited about this movie than I've been for a long time.  Like, I wanted this movie to be great.  So here I am, having to explain that Supergirl isn't the movie I wanted it to be, but I also think that the trolls are way off on the movie as well.

I don't want to speed through this part for the first time.  There has been this revisionist history saying that this movie is crapping on a legacy of great Supergirls.  I'm not saying that the other Supergirls out there aren't great.  The Helen Slater Supergirl film was played on repeat in my house.  (Even though I had seen the movie dozens of times, I kept waiting for Christopher Reeve to appear.  I dont know why I didn't understand that he wouldn't, outside of a poster, even though I had the movie memorized.)  I am one of the few advocates for The Flash with Sasha Calle as Supergirl.  She was solid and I enjoyed that movie well-enough.  And even though the series never got great, I watched every episode of Supergirl with Melissa Benoist.  I think that every Supergirl has added to the history of this character.

What I won't stand for is the idea that the internet loved these other Supergirls and didn't root for their respective downfalls.  So when I start praising Milly Alcock for a near perfect performance, part of it comes from the fact that she honestly was that good, but also because I refuse to hear "This movie would have been better if Sydney Sweeney had the role."  No it wouldn't have.  Stop being the worst.  Had Sydney Sweeney gotten the part, we'd have an equally toxic reaction with a different bent to it.  Milly Alcock absolutely crushed the part that she was given and none of my frustrations of the movie come from Milly Alcock.

A lot of my frustration with this movie had to do with the fact that I needed it to be great.  I was too excited.  I wanted it too much.  I honestly thought the trailers were some of the best trailers ever.  (Although my peeping online told me that people thought that the trailer looked terrible.)  I don't deny that my overenthusiasm has wrecked many a good movie for me.  I love the entire Superman story.  I like that we've gotten to a point in storytelling that we get a Supergirl centric story.  But to say that I was getting an adaptationo of Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow?  That's just adding to the expectation that I was going to get something truly special.  

But I have to think, Woman of Tomorrow was a risk.  (Note:  I know that Craig Gillespie directed this.  Some of the criticisms are Gillespie's issues.  But in some cases, it's a James Gunn issue.  Also, I adore James Gunn, especially when it comes to comic book storytelling.) From a comic book perspective, Woman of Tomorrow gave us insight into an underdeveloped character.  As a lifelong Supergirl fan, I have to acknowledge that the character has always had issues living in her cousin's shadow.  Please note:  We're all aware that is one of the central themes of the movie.  But she was created as a marketing push to sell comic books to girls.  She was a feminine Superman for a long time.  It's why I don't write off the Melissa Benoist version of the character because she often fills that role on the show.  But a lot of Supergirl's story didn't do new readers any favors.  She died in Crisis on Inifinite Earths.  She was replaced by Power Girl, a Supergirl from another planet.  She was replaced by Matrix who simply took a Supergirl design.  She was brainwashed by Darkseid.  She was a Red Lantern.  That's all interesting stuff over the course of decades and decades of reading the character.  But it wasn't until Woman of Tomorrow that we had a definitive exploration of what made Supergirl fundamentally different from her cousin.

But it took a long time to get to that breakdown.  Now, put me in James Gunn's shoes.  Supergirl, especially in an incredibly depressing and toxically masculine era, is a harder sell.  We can't really afford to do this whole soft launch of Supergirl.  Instead, I get why Gunn and Gillespie started with "Woman of Tomorrow" with the story.  This is the character that differentiates her from Kal-El.  We don't need two Supermen.  We have a tangential character that is at least introduced in Superman.  From a marketing perspective, it all scans.   It has less pressure compared to a new section of the DCU opening.  (It's why Iron Man 2  came so close to the first Iron Man.) 

And the thing that I really appreciate about Supergirl is that it breaks up the formula, which is one thing that people can't seem to wrap their heads around.  One of the myriad of complaints that people seem to have is that people don't care about Krem.  Krem isn't a supervillain.   He's a bad guy, to be sure.  He's definitely the antagonist of the piece.  And I'll say that, he might be one of the more evil characters we've encountered in superhero media.  He's not complex.  He's a human trafficker.  He is selfish and hurts people to get ahead in life.  But the scope of his villainy isn't some grandiose, universe-ending problem.  You'd think a powerhouse like Supergirl would be trying to save the universe.  No.  This is a very small story where Supergirl gets overwhelmed by her own limitations rather than any kind of cosmic level event.  The modern run of Hawkeye did something very similar of having the hero overwhelmed by local thugs.  But the point isn't the bad guys.  If the bad guys won, the universe would keep ticking.  This is a story that only affects two people (okay, the people that Kara saves along the way are also important).  

Instead, this is aggressively a character study of what makes a broken person tick.  I love the Krypton stuff / the Argo City stuff.  Like, honestly, that is some of the best origin story stuff I've seen in a movie.  I adore that it was all in Kryptonian / Kryptonese.  It gives us more context for the Superman movie while fundamentally being an understanding to what Krypto means to Kara.  It's so good.  We understand why Kara has to stand up for Ruthye.  All that stuff comes so organically and it gels with what the movie presents us.

So why didn't I love it?  I mean, here I am defending the movie from the manosphere and I didn't love it. It's all stupid. It's got editing and music issues.  And I'm not talking about "The Middle."  That needle-drop was perfect and I'm going to die on that hill.  The only criticism that I have of that moment is that we're starting to get a trope happening in each James Gunn superhero movie with the use of needle drops. But I smiled wide at "The Middle."  It felt like a fun movie at that point. 

But this is a less fun movie.  I wanted it to be more fun and I think a lot of that came from sitting in a half-filled theater with some real pacing issues.  The music never really grabbed me.  Like, I loved Superman's take on the John Williams theme.  I don't think Kara's theme exactly has the legs that Clark's does.  And that's in the shadow of using Blondie's music in the trailer.  Like, that trailer music was so perfect that I was surprised that we didn't get the bangers that we normally would have out of a James Gunn joint.  (Again, I cannot stress enough that this is Craig Gillespie's film.)  

The one thing that I want to sleep on is the fact that Kara kills Krem.  I really had a problem when Superman killed Zod in Man of Steel.  Like, I really didn't like it.  I actually like when superheroes have their "no killing rule."  But somehow, that death made sense to me.  I don't want to defend it because I feel like Clark would get incredibly mad if he found out that Kara did that.  But I also feel like the Kara that we learned about in this movie isn't the Kara that already has a firm sense of right or wrong.  Instead, we have an angry girl who sees Krem as a monster that destroyed a little girl's life.  And she's both mature and immature enough to understand that she has do anything to stop Ruthye from throwing her life away.  Now, in "Woman of Tomorrow", there's a death fakeout when it comes to this moment.  In reality, Kara sends Krem to the Phantom Zone.  I like that as a book ending. The reason why I don't think it works in the movie is because it's a third option that the movie never presented.  We don't live in a world with Phantom Zones yet.  To introduce the Phantom Zone seems disingenuous to the story we're presented with.  So I don't like that Kara kills in this movie, but I also am processing it.

I am 1000% going to buy this movie and probably watch it a dozen more times.  But right now, I acknowledge that it's a flawed movie that I enjoyed the concept of.   Also, I hate entitled white dudes.