Supergirl

The adaptation draws from Tom King and Bilquis Evely's celebrated 2021 comic, and the bones of a space western are here: a grieving alien girl, a revenge quest, a companion, a long ride toward a reckoning. Gillespie shot the central action sequence himself over roughly six weeks with no second unit, insisting Kara's emotional state should govern whether a beat felt kinetic or fluid. The results of that principle are most visible in the mid-film battle aboard a space transport, where Kara fights Sklarian raiders inside the ship and then chases them out toward a horizon line of yellow sunlight. It is the film's most sustained piece of action, and the effort put into it registers.

The strongest material, oddly for a superhero picture, is the quietest. The Krypton and Argo City flashbacks — Kara's childhood, her mother's death from radiation, her father Zor-El's farewell — carry the clearest dramatic weight and do the most to explain who this Kara is and why she is not her cousin. David Krumholtz performs Zor-El entirely in an invented Kryptonian tongue and still lands the emotion. These scenes establish the survivor's guilt, the language barrier, the disconnection from Earth that the film wants at its core.

Whether the film holds that core through 108 minutes is where opinion splits, and honestly splits. The washed-out palette is a deliberate choice, and a divisive one; against the source comic's color it can read as a retreat. The editing of some set pieces has been called out for undercutting choreography that deserved better. And Krypto the superdog, however his movements were sourced, looks conspicuously synthetic. What is not in dispute is Alcock. Across a reception that runs from tepid to hostile, her performance is the fixed point almost everyone agrees on. If you go, go for her.

Let me start where nearly everyone lands: Milly Alcock is the real thing here, and the argument is not whether she's good but whether the movie around her deserves her. Manohla Dargis put it well, that Alcock rises above the fray with a performance that never feels like borrowed goods. Joe Friar read the same work as a profoundly human portrayal of someone messy, grieving, and cynical, keyed specifically to a trauma that separates Kara from Superman: the survivor's guilt, the inability to feel pain, the inability to be understood. I think both are right, and I think that's why the film's failures sting rather than bore.

The central fight is over the script, and it's a real fight. Laura Sirikul argues the film earns a genuine A-to-B journey for Kara, with the Argo City and Earth flashbacks doing the heavy lifting. Dan Murrell counters that the arc is muddy — that the film can't decide if Kara is an anti-hero, a symbol of hope, or both — and, more damningly, that it plays like a sequel to an origin story nobody told, banking on investment it never earned outside of flashback. I lean toward Murrell's diagnosis of a structural problem while agreeing with Sirikul that the flashbacks themselves are the best-built scenes in the picture. Both things can be true: the raw material for the arc exists, and the film doesn't assemble it into a shape that pays off.

Then there's the tone question, which is really a Gunn question. Mark Redfern reads the irreverent, needle-drop punk sensibility as a legitimate extension of Gillespie's strengths and calls the thing a rip-roaring self-contained space western. Owen Gleiberman reads the exact same attitude as corporate pretension cosplaying as rebellion, the cinematic equivalent of Superman calling his own virtue punk rock, and he was far from kind about the rest. Sean Burns splits the difference in the cruelest way: he grants the irreverent early scenes their charm, then argues Gillespie's sensibility evaporates in the second half, leaving a personality vacuum filled with weightless set pieces, including a gargantuan crashing hovercraft lifted from early Marvel. That collapse-after-the-first-act shape is the movie's real problem for me. The front end has a voice. The back end has a runtime.

The supporting corners are uneven. Gleiberman's read that Krem of the Yellow Hills is an overly derivative Mad Max reject who never becomes loathsome enough to anchor a revenge plot is a genuine structural wound; a vengeance story needs a villain you can hate, and if he's right, the engine's undersized. Jason Momoa's Lobo turns up and feels bolted on. Tomris Laffly's objection cuts deepest culturally: she calls the film a shallow blockbuster whose 101-level feminism is actively offensive, you-go-girl crumbs served while the industry's actual commitment to parity keeps sliding. That's a harder charge than "the CGI dog looks fake," and it deserves to sit next to the praise rather than under it.

Which brings us to the noise around the release. The pre-release discourse was polluted by misogynistic attacks on Alcock's appearance, memes spread even by a former Superman TV actor, and the film opened soft — below The Marvels domestically, with reports it could cost Warner Bros. up to $100 million. Mark Redfern is right that this makes it hard to separate legitimate criticism from culture-war sludge. But I don't think the answer is to pretend the film is better than it is out of solidarity. Matt Singer's line lands because it comes from disappointment, not contempt: given Alcock's splash in Superman and the quality of the King and Evely book, this is one of the bigger letdowns the genre has produced lately. The tragedy of Supergirl is that the pieces of a good movie are all visibly present. The flashbacks work. Alcock works. The premise is a gift. Gillespie just doesn't hold the shape once the first act's charm runs out, and a self-consciously punk attitude can't paper over a second half that forgets what it was for.