TLDR Super Watch: Supergirl (2026)

Watched:  06/25/2026

Format:  Regal

Viewing:  First

Director:  Craig Gillespie

It is probably worth noting that while a great IP to slap on thermoses and t-shirts, Supergirl is maybe the least consistently written mainstream character in comics.  So there is no "right way" to write Kara Zor-El.

I've read my fair share of comic books starring Supergirl over the past few decades.  I've read Silver-Age, Bronze and Copper-Era stories.  I read 90's-00's Not-Kara Supergirl by Peter David.  And was one of people who was flipping out when they brought Kara back in the mid-00's.  Aside from giving New 52 Supergirl a pass, I have pretty complete runs of pretty much everything since the 2005 reboot.  I heartily recommend the current series by Sophie Campbell as one of the best comics I've read in a while.  I own a copy of Action Comics 252.  

I've seen the 1980's Supergirl movie at least three times - including on VHS as a kid.  I watched the entire run of the CW TV show.  Am familiar with various incarnations in live action and animation.  (I have an affection for almost all of those takes.)

I am not a Supergirl PhD, but I feel pretty well oriented.  So, there's my bona fides.

Most importantly, I've read Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King on script and Bilquis Evely on art.  That comic ran as an 8-issue series during 2021-2022.   Considered one of the best comics put out by DC Comics in the past decade, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow pushes the modern take on Kara, really leaning into the notion that she is a young woman who has seen too much and done too much as a survivor of Krypton.  And, perhaps more importantly, of Argo City.  

The idea is that Superman is a refugee who arrived on Earth as an infant and was raised by the Kents,  but Kara Zor-El is a refugee who left her homeworld as a teenager, knowing she was leaving everyone behind to die.  She saw the face of her father as her capsule closed.  She remembers it.

Oddly, the graphic novel shamelessly is structured much like the novel of True Grit, narrated not by the gunslinger, but the girl who has employed him - a girl of mannerisms and propriety.   Both adapted versions of the book are good movies, but the Coen Bros. version rings truer to the book.  

When it was announced that Woman of Tomorrow was the basis for the coming film, I did raise my eyebrows.  It is structured as a multi-part, 8-issue episodic story, not a 90ish-minute film.  It relied on deep Supergirl lore (see: Comet the Superhorse) and is as far from the plucky teen bursting from a rocket in Action Comics 252 as you're likely to see.  

And it raised, in my mind, the question of "who will this movie be for?"  

There are many audiences for Supergirl (2026).  I suspect much of the audience for this movie, who do not read comics, who have not watched the CW show, who are not aware of the many, many, many version of Kara we've seen over the years - who understand Superman has a cousin who is a girl with blonde hair - will find this movie baffling.

It seems *unlikely* that many of those same people will not have already seen Superman from 2025.  And if they found that Kara off-putting, I have terrible news.  (I don't think people did dislike her, but it certainly starts as more-of-same.)

As a movie - without worrying too much about all those comics and shows and movies - Supergirl (2026) is a mess.  

It's about 90 minutes of slogging through sci-fi environs as we peel back the layers of Kara's trauma while dealing with deeply generic villains and which doesn't seem clear about who or what Supergirl's powers are and how they work - something that Superman spent no small amount of time highlighting in ways delightful and clear.  It boasts a power-pop-punk soundtrack that is there to grab young adults by the collar and scream "we made this for you!"  It has a lot of neat make-up and masks (ie: practical FX) to fill out the oddly bland sci-fi environs that it never lets us linger on or see.

I've heard some people say the movie is too dark or murky - and that literally may be a projection problem at your theater, because I didn't think that was an issue (and there are some well known issues movie theaters deal with when it comes to projection).  Even if I thought the imagery was oddly lifeless, the palette unnecessarily dull, and the art design lacked inspiration.  the art by Bilquis Evely of the comic is tossed aside for lifeless, generic sci-fi templates like someone hit "Sci-Fi dystopia" in the AI backgrounds machine.  Eat it, wonders of art.

It may also be one of the worst-edited movies I've seen in years.  Ie: I was *thinking* about the editing during the movie and how confusing it was, sometimes breaking basic editing rules - which is a weird, weird thing to pay attention to during a movie.  And it ruins things from really the first scene.

You may have also heard Milly Alcock is great as Kara, and she is.  Just as I thought Eve Ridley's Ruthye was well acted.  And Corenswet as Superman is really, really giving Reeve a run for his money between these two movies.  Momoa is predictably good as Lobo, because in real life, Jason Momoa seems very much like Lobo.  All they had to do was the make-up job.  

The problem is that the movie wants for Kara and Ruthye's traumas to be parallel, and they are not.  Ruthye saw her family cut down before her, and Kara saw the slow death of her bubble city as Kryptonite poisoning took hold.  Kara lost her family through happenstance, Ruthye lost hers to cruelty - lessons about revenge being bad are motivation-free.  If Kara wants revenge, as I said to Stuart - she needs to take it up with plate tectonics.

Our villain is a generic baddie, and why you're seeing comparisons to Mad Max.  He is a mustache twirling Immortan Joe-type who simply revels in cruelty because he's a motivation-free bad guy.  He and his buddies are so bad that for good measure they keep a character-free passel of female priosners around as breeding stock for their "culture".  (This is a baffling choice by the movie - is it actually hard to find people who are willing to join a roving army of thugs and bandits?  The movie tells you this is their *culture* as roving space pirates, keeping unwilling women who all stand around in a cage like county lock-up, and it makes absolutely zero sense even if you ignore the optics for what should be a family film).

The movie is defined more by what it does not want to be compared to than what it wishes it could be.  It is not Superman, first and foremost - this Kryptonian has an edge, people!  She's not all "gosh" and "gee" like Superman!  Which... just makes her like every other generic superhero of the 21st Century and why Superman in Superman felt like such a breath of fresh air - and continues to feel that way in this movie.

It does not want to be Guardians of the Galaxy with its interplanetary travel and cosmic candy-colored landscapes and space pirates, but...  y'all..  that's the fun of space movies.   And so we get a weirdly monochrome palette where the color that pops most is *beige*.  And it is a movie about chasing down space pirates - even if you try to say they are something else and borrow from a wildly popular Mad Max movie.  

It is terrified of being True Grit for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, and it guts the meaning of the overall story while also knocking all the interesting stuff off of Ruthye, her motivations and her drive, while also repositioning Kara in ways that wind up muddying the narrative.

It does not want to even be a superhero movie - it is telling an origin story of how Kara decides to be a helper - and so it tries to keep superhero-ing to a minimum in favor of bar brawls (two!) and refuses to let Kara use her powers for reasons that I started to think were budget driven.

SPOILERS

As someone who *did* see Superman last year, I have a level-set on what a Kryptonian's powers are and what Kara should be capable of.  And even with the handicap of "well, she isn't a practiced superhero" - the whole movie feels like it should have been over in like 20 minutes.  Things don't make sense.  You can't really poison Superman.  So how does Kara get poisoned?  Because the movie says so.  But also - how does Kara not hear the sneaky people scheming?  Does she not have super-hearing?  We know she does.  So why isn't she on alert?  It's not like those people know she has super hearing and would speak freely two rooms over.  When she's sneaking downstairs to listen in on them, why doesn't she float down the stairs?

How does anyone know she's Kryptonian?  How would they know about Kryptonite?  How would they get it and why would they have it if they knew it impacted Clark?  He's not running around in this part of the galaxy.  It's putting a hat-on-a-hat.  We already know how this fight is going to go.

Speaking of - why is there even a fight?  We watched Superman eye-laser 100 Iron Mans in the last movie in the space of 20 seconds.  Why isn't Kara doing that?  We know she has eye-lasers.  And the movie suggests each of these Brigands/ space-pirates can at least *try* to go hand-to-hand with a yellow-sun-infused Kryptonian, so why are they all living like pigs on a freighter when each of them could be sitting like a king of at least *part* of a planet?

And the final fight?  It's one of the worst choreographed I've seen since parts of The Flash (a movie it seems to have partially borrowed it's aesthetic from in the dust storm).  

Marvel has a lot of flaws, but one thing they've done wonderfully since the first few movies is make sure we have minimal room to consider these sorts of questions as a movie unfolds.  They clearly run their script and pre-production past a panel of nerds to make sure those questions get answered before anything goes in front of a camera.  

Supergirl does no such thing.   It's a massive step backward for this sort of movie as it seems to do the 1990's thing of shrugging and saying "it's a superhero movie.  You're thinking about it too much, nerd."  And, yes, I absolutely am thinking about it, and you've left plot holes in your film that make you look like a lazy filmmaker if I'm not caught up in your story.  And once I've ticked the third or fourth thing, I am now just looking for those plot holes.  

You are not making a stand-alone movie with Supergirl, you are making an adjunct to the movie Superman, and I have seen that movie.

Oddly, the only writer listed is a person with no prior writing experience - an Ana Noguiera.  Do I think Warner Bros. and DC let some random person write their would-be summer blockbuster?  I absolutely do not.  These screenplays pass through a dozen writers and it's impossible to know who actually had their hands on the movie.  But someone has to take the fall, so why not Noguiera?

The movie has taken the male gaze and chucked it out the window.  This will drive much of the YouTube Incel-verse insane.  Supergirl of the comics arrived as a 1950's good-girl, and has gone through a variety of iterations, including the controversial 2005-ish relaunch edited by famed sex pest Eddie Berganza. 

But it is also a movie that thinks they're singing "Girl from Ipanema" in a bar on an alien world (do aliens not have Spotify and speakers?) and Kryptonians wear librarian glasses.

Adaptation

As an adaptation of the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, this is one of the worst adaptations of a book I've seen in quite some time.  

I never expected that Supergirl would stick to the comic's format of episodes, but I did think it would understand the point of the book and why that was a story worth telling.  Like Snyder's Watchmen, the movie seems to grok some aesthetics and bad-assery, but makes changes along the way and in the finale that undercut what came before.  In this case, it's to meet expectations of what bad-assery means while failing to understand what makes the El family truly super.

The Kara of the comic is a world-weary hero who has all that trauma behind her and has already long-ago chosen to fight on the side of the angels, just doing her way - and her way is different from Superman's decision to become a symbol.  The Kara of this comic is a person who takes action and knows she's making the barest dent in the universe.  But she can help what's right in front of her.

This leads to Ruthye learning about grace through the stoic heroism of a flawed hero like Kara Zor-El.  And it... doesn't seem to understand that's the point of the comic.  Which is weird, because Ruthye basically states the theme of the work in the final chapter, very specifically.  

What the comic understands is the grace of mercy.  Ruthye decides not to kill our baddie because she's seen what killing is and does as she's crossed the galaxy.  She has no taste for it and sees how it helps nothing.  And just spawns more killing.

Does the movie need to do this?  Absolutely not.

The movie tosses that notion aside and instead states that Kara will take a life, which is an option!, but it does nothing to build to that decision while also denying Ruthye of that which she's happy to do.

Our movie Ruthye is told "revenge is wrong" - but not why - just that it's something she'll have to live with forever.  Which is, frankly a wobbly argument at best when the killer has killed so many and will kill again and again given the chance - that seems like something that will stick with you and you will feel you did nothing to stop them.

And then - for reasons that will no doubt be a plot point in some other movie - Kara kills our baddie, both undercutting everything she said.  Keep in mind - this guy did not kill her family, he killed Ruthye's family - and if revenge is okay, all she did was take away Ruthye's blood debt.  All Kara did was show us John Wick is right.  If she's willing to absorb someone else's sin, killing an incapacitated man is a sharp right turn and feels driven by external forces for future stories and audiences craving blood from baddies.

In the comic, by the way, Kara puts Krem in the Phantom Zone for 200 years and then releases him after he's had time to really think about what he did and how he ended up there.  The comic is aware that this may be worse than actual swift death.

I'd also point out - in the comic, Krem is just a guy.  He's not even a Brigand at the start.  He's just a shitty guy in the mode of a Sergio Leone villain who picks on farmers because he can.  He kills Ruthye's father just because Krem is a shitheel and he felt like killing.  He joins the Brigands when he finds out Supergirl is on to him.  He is not winning any physical fight with Kara, and his final fight is with Ruthye, which works better on about ten different levels.

All of this makes me wonder: When next we meet Kara, who will she be?  I have no idea, which is a very weird way to end a movie.

Stolen Punk Valor

Punk is a curious thing.  

It's far more inextricably linked to fashion than anyone really wants to talk about, with bands like Sex Pistols and the Go-Go's basically forming from people shopping in certain shops and hanging out or working there.  But these were not big chain stores in your local mall.

But punk was also a reaction to social standards and propriety - maybe sometimes boneheaded in its approach, but a rejection of both the square life and whatever the hippies had been up to.  It pointed out flaws and reveled in them.  It was, in theory, looking into the void and deciding to choose to live a certain way.

In the 21st Century, I now see toddlers in Ramones shirts, elementary school kids given hair dye and hair cuts that were reserved for a certain subset in the 90's, and "punk" essentially treated as a fashion object, kind of bringing it all back full circle while gutting the ethos for suburban cool-parent fashion.  

Meanwhile, Debbie Harry of NY-based punk group Blondie has been a global fashion icon for going on fifty years.

By the way - I don't care if you dress your kids like Iggy Pop.  It's just an observation.  I never claimed any punk roots of my own.  I was more into Buddy Holly than Johnny Rotten.

But Superman had some interesting statements on what *punk* is in the context of Gunn's DCU.  It's pushing back against norms and expectations and narrative and going one's own way.  In Clark's case, it meant choosing every day to see the best in everyone and operate from that standpoint.

So it was curious that Supergirl decided to market itself with the admittedly cringey "Truth. Justice. Whatever." tag line, which reads more pouty 15 year old than anti-authority.  It was a sign of where the movie's heart would be - a sort of weak-ass middle-finger to... your mom when she asks you to take out the garbage (that is not punk, that's just being shitty).

Kara of this movie has rejected Superman's optimism.  She is, reasonably, dealing with depression and survivor's guilt through self-medication and running away from the only family she has, and someone who wants to love her.  Compelling!

The movie really sold itself with 80's new wave/ punk which I found interesting, especially as they used the theme song from American Gigolo, "Call Me" in the trailers.  And Blondie was a break out of the scene at CBGB's, starting as a punk band before becoming more mainstream and new wave ("Call Me" was not written by them, by the way.  It's a Giorgio Moroder song if you want to know why it slaps as hard as it does.  And I love Blondie.).  By using Blondie, you're signaling a cool, sexy, punk aesthetic.  By using "Call Me" you're telling me you can't use Google.  The right choice here was "Atomic".  

What Supergirl's marketing team was trying to position the movie as was anti-authority punkiness - but that never really happens in the movie.  Getting drunk all the time and avoiding your upbeat cousin who just wants to go ride jet skis with you is not punk.  And to set up Clark, who we just spent a whole-ass movie explaining why HE is in fact very punk, as the social norm?  It feels very off.

So it's a weird thing.  While I don't expect for Kara to rock through the cosmos blasting The Descendants, what the movie did instead is provide, like, covers of middling 00's-era pop punk acts.  It is wiiiiiild.  And distracting.  

I don't blame Alcock or even Gillespie, but I think there's just not a lot there to grab hold onto for the marketing, for why a 17 year old would want to see this movie.  So, they went with "she's edgy!"  After all, she wears a Debbie Harry shirt through 85% of the movie, only donning the Super-togs at the end.

Why Debbie?  We're never told.  But she must love Blondie?  Right?  Well, no Blondie music ever made it into the movie.   Which... what the fuck, guys...?

Anyway, it comes off as poseurish.  Real Hot Topic stuff.  

In conclusion...

I dunno.  I can't even say it was fine or that I liked it.  It felt like a movie rushed into production that grabbed the wrong source material and then didn't quite understand it.

I remain enthused about Alcock who is a genuine talent.  Momoa is fine if Lobo is your thing (he's not and has never been mine, but this is far less stupid than Momoa as Aquaman).  But I am concerned about what else is brewing in the DC Studios Universe is this is the bar for non-Gunn managed productions.  It's a step up from Snyder's basement-boy take on superheroes, but it's hard to get excited if this is the bar.