‘Supergirl’ Review

Hitchhiker’s slog through the universe.

Milly Alcock in Supergirl. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

SUPERGIRL IS A TREMENDOUS SLOG of a film, a real step backwards for the James Gunn-overseen DC Universe of movies and TV shows. It’s neither fun nor exciting, and while it feints toward meaningfulness it ultimately feels empty. This wouldn’t be a problem if the movie looked any good. If it at least had something in the way of an original action beat, if it were shot in a way that rendered the action visible rather than a muddy mess, we might be able to give it a pass.

Alas. There are no passes to be given here.

Part of the problem is that no film has really solved the problem of Kryptonian power. Kara, aka Supergirl (Milly Alcock), is, of course, the cousin of Superman (David Corenswet, who has a few brief scenes here), meaning that she is powered by the yellow sun of Earth. This allows her to fly, makes her invincible, gives her laser eyes: You get the drill. But this also makes her (and him) a somewhat boring action figure. To get around that, we are following Kara on a galaxy-wide pub crawl celebrating her 23rd birthday: She heads to planets with red suns to get her drink on, the intoxicants doing their work better when she’s not juiced up by a yellow sun’s specific brand of UV light.

She’s drinking because she’s depressed, and she’s depressed because she watched her bottled-up city die from kryptonite poisoning. And if you’re wondering how you make a depressive alcoholic superhero whose powers come and go based on the needs of the plot fun, well, luckily director Craig Gillespie and writer Ana Nogueira have a nice little trump card: Krypto, the super dog! What a fun dog! He’s such a good boy. I sure hope no evil villains poison him ten minutes into the . . . film. Oh no.

Okay, so, to recap: We’ve got a depressed hero and a dying dog, who team up with the orphaned girl Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who is seeking revenge against the brigands who killed her parents and brother. These brigands, it should be noted, spend most of the film traversing the galaxy kidnapping underage girls in order to rape them to propagate their species, which, for some reason, is male-only.¹

Supergirl: It’s the feel-good film of the summer!

Jason Momoa in Supergirl. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

The film does have one bright spot: Lobo, who is played by Jason Momoa as something like Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice by way of Jason Momoa’s Aquaman. He’s blustery and cantankerous and saucy and just a little menacing; it’s a perfect piece of casting and a really nice performance. Unfortunately, it’s the only spark of life in what is otherwise a deeply dour, deeply boring piece of filmmaking.

And the action sequences, my goodness. They’re terribly lit, incoherently staged, and just generally weightless and ugly. I didn’t love how the action in Gunn’s Superman was staged, precisely—I dislike the faux-oner, stitched-together-from-multiple-angles aesthetic of many of those sequences—but you couldn’t deny that they were composed in such a way that rendered everything visible, legible, and easy to follow. I have no idea what went wrong with Supergirl—the cinematographer, Rob Hardy, also shot Alex Garland’s Civil War, a film with a series of riveting action beats—but it’s reminiscent of the disaster that was The Flash: It’s just very obvious during certain sequences that everyone was in a big green-screen warehouse and the camera was whipping around with the knowledge that everything would be painted in later, so who really gives a crap how anything looks on the day of.

There are hints of noble, worthwhile ideas within the film, particularly revolving around Kara’s parents, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and Alura (Emily Beecham), who implore her to be good. Not necessarily nice, or tough, but good. And the closest we get to a stirring moment is when Kara shows up in her Supergirl costume, a visual representation of that choice to be good, do good, to enact goodness. Symbols matter, and, as older cousin Kal tells her in a flashback, that big bright S is a potent symbol. (It helps that this is also one of the few moments lit properly.)

Supergirl is just a misfire on nearly every level, one that lacks the sincerity and fun of last year’s reboot of this universe or the comic pathos present in Gunn’s Peacemaker series on HBO Max.

1. I have so many questions about the biological and evolutionary forces at work here.