SUPERGIRL
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Writer – Ana Nogueira
Reviewed by Jeremy Elwood
Supergirl is the second movie in the rebooted DC Universe, after her brief, uncredited introduction in 2025’s Superman. Following a well-worn template for fantasy series,this second instalment goes out of its way to be darker than its predecessor, with more obviously flawed characters risking more dramatic consequences. Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and The Real Girl, I,Tonya) makes deft use of the immense toolbox an enormous budget can buy, and as a result it looks gorgeous, with sweeping other-world landscapes, minutely detailed costume and production design, and immaculate lighting in every shot.
And if that’s all you’re looking for in a superhero movie, then stop reading this now.
Because there isn’t a hero in any multi-verse that can save Supergirl from the steaming pile of Kryptonite it calls a script.
There are a lot of words you can legitimately use when describing the writing in a superhero movie that would be insults to any other genre. Silly. Camp. Cheesy. Overblown. James Gunn’s Superman was all of those things and more, but it was also fun, had a story that fit within its illogical context, and characters that had a reason to be there.
Supergirl is just badly written. The blame for this lies with Ana Nogueira, who until now had one play and one short film to her name. (She’s co-credited here alongside Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman and related characters, but considering they’ve both been dead since the 1990’s, I think it’s safe to let them rest in peace.)
Somehow, DC were so impressed with her Supergirl script that she’s already working on the next Wonder Woman instalment, so if this seems harsh consider it a plea to the Gods to intervene before Nogueira ruins another iconic character.
The dialogue is cliched, derivative, and goes around in circles so often that it’s hard to work out exactly who started it. The plot borrows so heavily from earlier, better movies that you’d be forgiven for drifting off and recounting those instead of watching this. And the characters are so flimsily drawn that they might as well have been performed as voiceovers.
The definitive case in point is Ruthye, the young girl with the tragic backstory who drags Supergirl out of her barroom wallowing and towards being the, say it with me, “hero she was always destined to be”. Ruthye would be bad enough if she was just a clumsy plot device, but she ends up taking over large swathes of the film, without ever actually contributing anything. There’s a scene where we get told, literally told, that she has hidden depths, but then…nothing. Her character arc is a flat line. She goes from watching, wide-eyed, as Supergirl kicks some ass early in the movie to watching, wide-eyed, as Supergirl kicks some ass at the end. And that’s it. It feels unfair to blame Eve Ridley’s performance for this, but she’s inadvertently donned the cape of “most pointless teenage sidekick in a major motion picture” previously worn by Dakota Fanning in War of The Worlds or any young actor in any Jurassic Park flick.
Jason Momoa, chewing the CGI scenery in full Rob Zombie cosplay as the bounty hunter Lobo, doesn’t fare much better, but at least he’s entertaining. He acts as a human Deus ex Machina on at least three different occasions, turning up with the barest of justifications to save the girls from a grisly fate – which is deeply problematic for reasons beyond the inherent laziness of the writing. Some mildly interesting minor characters come, go and (literally) get killed off before they can make any real impression.
The three almost-exemptions are Supergirl and her extended family. Her Krypton backstory (that can probably be rightfully attributed to Siegal and Shuster, rather than Nogueira) features some nice scenes with her father Zor El, played by David Krumholtz. And although David Corenswet will never topple Christoper Reeve as the definitive Superman, he at least brings a pleasant naiveite and much needed comic timing to his fleeting cameos.
It’s Milly Alcock you should be feeling for. By rights, this should be a massive break for the Australian actress (Upright, House of the Dragon), and she earns it, growing from a (deliberately, this time) annoying Gen-Z wastrel to confident, but refreshingly imperfect, super-being as the film plods along. She absolutely does her best with what she’s given, but she’s given so little that she should sit down with Halle Berry, Michelle Pfeiffer and Henry Cavill to bemoan DC roles they should have turned down.
Like Supergirl herself, she deserved so much more than a piece of writing the Daily Planet would be too embarrassed to publish.