Supergirl (2026)

A cape is easier to carry than a whole lost world.

Directed by Craig Gillespie · Written by Ana Nogueira · Approximately 108 minutes
Starring: Milly Alcock · Eve Ridley · Matthias Schoenaerts · Jason Momoa
Cinematography: Rob Hardy · Music: Claudia Sarne

Kara Zor-El would rather have a drink than give you a speech about hope. That is a promising place to start a superhero movie. She has extraordinary powers and very little interest in becoming a motivational poster for the universe. Unfortunately for her, the universe keeps putting people in her path who need something more useful than her company at the bar.

Craig Gillespie's Supergirl sends Kara across space with a grieving girl, an injured dog and a deadline. There is a good, prickly adventure in that arrangement. Milly Alcock gives it a centre worth following: somebody whose strength is much easier to summon than her patience. The movie gets less sure-footed when it tries to turn that difficult personality into a lesson about revenge.

Before you watch

Violence and bereavement: sustained fantasy combat, bladed weapons, crashes and explosions, with limited bloody detail. Family deaths, illness and grief are significant.
Animal peril: a dog is seriously injured and its life is threatened.
Implied sexual exploitation: girls are kidnapped with an implied intention of reproductive exploitation.
Alcohol: drinking and intoxication are part of Kara's behaviour.

The BBFC's guidance supports these distinctions. Comparatively restrained gore does not make the underlying material light.

Version note: the theatrical baseline is the BBFC's 107m56s cinema presentation, rounded to 108 minutes. Its separate 103m17s home submission does not, by itself, establish a different story edit.

Her cousin lost a world. She remembers it.

Kara's difference from Superman has a more interesting basis than a bad attitude. She remembers Krypton. Its language, culture and people are lived experience, which makes displacement something she carries rather than a noble origin story somebody can finish explaining in a minute.

Alcock lets that history sit beneath irritation and avoidance. Kara doesn't always announce the pain motivating her, and she isn't especially graceful about being asked to help. The performance is strongest when a flash of concern arrives before she has worked out how to disguise it.

That friction gives the familiar reluctant-hero arrangement some life. Kara can cross enormous distances and still struggle to be present with the person sitting beside her. Physical ability hasn't solved the part of adulthood that involves listening.

In DC's interview with Alcock and Nogueira, the actor and writer describe Ruthye as a reflection of Kara's losses. They also discuss starting the adventure beneath a red sun, where her physical vulnerability becomes unusually immediate. That is a useful dramatic choice: the film asks us to meet somebody before relying on what her costume promises she can do.

A travelling companion who won't take the hint

Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley, wants revenge on Krem of the Yellow Hills after the murder of her family. Kara has an urgent reason of her own to pursue him, involving Krypto. Their goals overlap without making them the same goal, and neither traveller is especially well equipped to negotiate the difference.

Ridley gives Ruthye a persistence that matters. She isn't simply a child installed beside the lead to generate protective feelings. She has a destination in mind and a frighteningly clear idea of what reaching it ought to mean. Kara has more experience, but experience has not made her a reliable guide to processing loss.

The relationship works when each exposes the other's blind spot. Ruthye can see how much Kara is ducking. Kara recognises the danger in a child making revenge the only available future. Their shared grief creates sympathy, but it can also tempt Kara to substitute her own history for Ruthye's needs.

Those are good reasons to spend time with the pair. The movie occasionally seems less confident that the company itself will hold us, so it hurries toward another encounter. The emotional work needs a little more room than the itinerary allows.

The galaxy is colourful. The stops need to count.

The interstellar setting is an attraction. Rob Hardy's images and the changing environments offer scale and variety, and the red-sun conditions make Kara's resources contingent. Strength that works everywhere in exactly the same way can make a pursuit dull. Having to negotiate the place you're in is more useful.

Gillespie is drawn to emphatic personalities and sharp changes in register. Jason Momoa's Lobo arrives with enough swagger to make subtlety look like a personal insult. He supplies a jolt of comic energy, though the film has to work to recover its smaller emotional register afterwards.

The issue is accumulation. An unusual place can be enjoyable without moving the relationship forward, but too many such stops make the journey feel assembled from attractions. A strange universe becomes dramatically valuable when it changes what the characters understand or what they can do. Some episodes manage that better than others.

Krypto supplies a different kind of pressure. An animal's vulnerability gives Kara an immediate reason to act, cutting through her cultivated reluctance. The danger is effective, but it also makes the surrounding tonal leaps harder to absorb: the movie wants a breezy adventure and a serious threat to somebody she loves, sometimes within the same breath.

An adaptation has to argue for its choices

The film draws on Tom King and Bilquis Evely's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Nogueira describes her approach in the DC interview as adapting the emotional experience rather than reproducing every situation. That is a sensible principle. A moving comic panel doesn't automatically become a moving scene when somebody stands in front of a camera and says its words.

It also places responsibility on the new version. The comic's reputation can't perform the film's emotional labour for it. Kara and Ruthye have to earn their growing trust through the encounters we actually see, and the final action has to follow from this telling of their relationship.

The movie earns some of that trust. Alcock and Ridley make the uneven partnership engaging, and Kara's abrasiveness has a purpose beyond proving this entry is edgier than the previous one. The weakness is that the larger gestures can rush past the consequences the quieter material has taught us to care about.

Anger is a beginning, not an answer

Kara does not need to become a perfectly adjusted person before she is allowed to help. One of the film's better instincts is to let care emerge while she is still angry, avoidant and occasionally exhausting. Emotional recovery would be a miserable entry requirement for heroism.

But the film has a harder job once it starts distinguishing vengeance from justice. A pursuit encourages us to anticipate the satisfaction of catching its villain. Challenging that appetite takes more than having a character explain why revenge is damaging.

The ending makes the problem concrete; the details belong below. What matters for the recommendation is that the film's moral advice and its appetite for a decisive action payoff do not sit comfortably together. That could be the beginning of a rich contradiction. Here, it is given less room than it needs.

The reservation isn't that Kara behaves imperfectly. Imperfection is already the premise. It's that a movie interested in the cost of violence needs to stay with the cost after it has collected the thrill.

Corny DNA

A super-powered dog, cosmic scenery and Lobo's extravagant presence leave plenty of room for comic excess. Alcock and Ridley give the adventure a more earnest emotional register. The clash sometimes produces enjoyable friction and sometimes makes a scene feel tonally stranded.

The strange environments offer weirdness; the broadest gestures can shade into cheesiness when the emotional connection hasn't caught up. Neither a corporate franchise nor an argument about its reception establishes cult appeal or so-bad-it-is-good pleasure. All six numerical axes remain unscored.

Verdict

Watch with caveats — proposed. Alcock's difficult, wounded Kara and her uneasy partnership with Ruthye give this space adventure a worthwhile centre. The changing environments provide variety, though the itinerary sometimes crowds out the relationship it is meant to develop.

The larger qualification concerns revenge and responsibility: the ending complicates its own advice without giving the contradiction enough dramatic weight. Bereavement, animal peril and implied exploitation are substantial viewing considerations. There is enough character interest for a qualified recommendation, with no need to turn a film review into a referendum on the future of a franchise.

Spoilers from here

Reveal Krypto's rescue, Krem's fate and the moral problem at the ending

Krem poisons Krypto, making the antidote an urgent reason for Kara's pursuit. The journey also brings Kara and Ruthye into conflict with the Brigands, whose captives are freed. Krypto ultimately survives.

At the climax, Kara persuades Ruthye to lower her father's sword and give up killing Krem. Ruthye walks away. Kara then kills him herself. Those actions, corroborated by DC's ending editorial, create the film's most difficult question.

Who carries the damage?

There is an intelligible distinction between protecting a child from a killing and claiming that nobody should kill under any circumstances. Kara could believe the former without believing the latter. Her choice can be understood as taking responsibility for an act she refuses to let Ruthye carry.

But understanding a possible rationale doesn't settle whether the film has earned it. Krem is beaten. The immediate situation matters: this isn't simply an unavoidable blow delivered in the middle of combat. Kara removes Ruthye from the act, then supplies the punishment the revenge narrative has been building toward.

That makes the ending less a rejection of vengeance than a reassignment of it. Kara can preserve something for Ruthye while also acting on an appetite she has been warning the girl against. The film would be stronger if it allowed those two facts to remain uncomfortable for longer.

Tim Beedle's DC column offers a sympathetic account of the choice and notes the departure from the comic. It is an editorial interpretation, not a filmmaker statement certifying one meaning. The review's reservation is about the released film's dramatic follow-through, rather than a claim that any change from the source is automatically wrong.

The subsequent return toward a home on Earth gives Kara a hopeful direction. It doesn't erase the action that immediately precedes it. Becoming more available to other people is a meaningful development; the question of what she has just modelled for Ruthye remains open.

Sources

This is a researched editorial draft. Its verdict and advisories remain proposed; no owner reaction, fresh viewing or numerical ratings are claimed.