Supergirl

After loving Superman last year, I went into Supergirl hoping DC had found its footing. I wanted more of the same: colorful, optimistic superhero storytelling with strong characters and a sense of fun. Instead, I mostly found myself bored. That’s actually the biggest criticism I can make. Not angry. Not offended. Just… bored. About an hour into the movie, I actually caught myself nodding off and had to get up for more soda. The frustrating part is that there are good ideas here. This version of Kara Zor El is intentionally contrasted with Clark Kent. Clark arrived on Earth as a baby and never really experienced the loss of Krypton. Kara remembers everything. She watched her civilization die. She remembers her family, her culture, and the life she lost. That’s fertile ground for a character. The movie introduces her as someone coping with severe trauma by drinking, picking fights, neglecting herself, and generally drifting through life without purpose. It’s an interesting premise. Unfortunately, I don’t think the movie knows what to do with it. Milly Alcock spends much of the runtime playing Kara as perpetually half drunk and emotionally detached. I don’t blame Alcock. I’ve seen enough of her work to know she’s an excellent actress. This feels more like a problem with the direction than with the performance. The script mistakes trauma for personality, and after a while the character just stops being interesting. The central plot doesn’t help much either. Kara ends up accompanying a young girl seeking revenge against the men who murdered her family and kidnapped other girls into slavery. It’s obviously intended to give Kara a chance to rediscover her heroism, but the emotional arc never landed for me. The turning point isn’t really that Kara decides innocent people are worth saving. It’s that her dog gets threatened. That’s an odd choice because it makes her eventual heroism feel reactive rather than transformative. The young girl herself never develops into much more than a plot device. I understand why she wants revenge, but I never became invested in her as a character. Since she’s powerless and Kara is essentially a god whenever she has access to a yellow sun, we already know the outcome depends entirely on Supergirl’s choices. That leads into what has always been one of the biggest challenges of writing Kryptonians. They’re overpowered. Every Superman story eventually arrives at the same place. Introduce Kryptonite. Introduce a red sun. Or invent some reason why the Kryptonian can’t simply end the conflict in five seconds. Supergirl is no exception. Half the movie finds ways to depower Kara. The other half asks us to believe she has to slug it out with enemies who shouldn’t remotely be on her level. From a comic book standpoint, that just doesn’t work for me. When she’s depowered, she’s still taking apart trained opponents. When she’s fully powered, she’s suddenly trading punches with ordinary soldiers like she’s in a boxing match. That’s backwards. A fully powered Kryptonian shouldn’t be a brawler. She should be a force of nature. The movie never establishes consistent rules for what Kara can and can’t do, and that inconsistency constantly pulled me out of the story. Krypto, who was one of the highlights of Superman, barely has anything to do here beyond serving as a plot device. That’s a missed opportunity because audiences already liked the character. Instead of letting him continue being fun, the movie sidelines him almost immediately. Visually, I also found the movie surprisingly drab. One of the things I loved about Superman was how bright and colorful it was. Supergirl feels like it swings back toward the muted, gray CGI aesthetic that superhero movies have spent years trying to escape. One of the film’s biggest shortcomings is its world building. We’re supposed to be traveling across an interstellar civilization, but every planet feels dingy and tiny. Most of them have only a handful of people wandering around, which makes the galaxy feel oddly empty. I suspect a lot of that comes down to the CGI budget. Instead of spending that money making these worlds feel populated and alive, the movie appears to spend a significant amount of it on unnecessary Mos Eisley style cantina scenes filled with random CGI aliens. It feels like they’re trying to convince us we’re watching Star Wars instead of building out the DC Universe. Ironically, all of that expensive CGI makes the universe feel smaller, not bigger. I also found myself wishing the movie trusted its audience a little more. At times it felt like the story was trying very hard to make broad thematic statements instead of simply telling the best Supergirl story it could. I don’t think female superheroes need stories built around proving why female superheroes matter. Wonder Woman never needed that. It simply gave Diana a compelling story and let her character carry the film. Black Widow worked for similar reasons because its themes grew naturally from Natasha’s own history. Here, some of the thematic choices felt imposed on the character rather than emerging from who Kara is. I wanted to spend more time exploring her trauma and her relationship to Krypton than watching the movie make broader statements that didn’t feel unique to her story. All of that said, I don’t hate this movie. There are flashes of the DC Universe I want to spend more time in. Milly Alcock has the potential to become an excellent Supergirl, and the cast is generally solid. I still want this new DC Universe to succeed, which is probably why I walked away disappointed more than anything else. Superman made me excited about where DC was headed. Supergirl made me wonder whether they’ve already started slipping back into some of the habits that caused superhero fatigue in the first place. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just… mid. And that’s probably more disappointing than if it had simply been terrible.