Like so many stories about the all-powerful, Supergirl runs headfirst into the Superman problem. Namely: how do you tell an interesting story about a character to whom everything comes easily?
And like so many of those stories, the most appetizing, self-evident solutions Supergirl finds are, unfortunately, also the hardest for the audience to stomach.
You’ve seen it before: the almighty being oddly burdened with artificial problems that somehow make godlike abilities a curse. The über-strong hero becoming inexplicably too weak to defeat street-level opponents so the stakes feel real.
Or that near-omnipotent paragon of strength choosing to isolate herself from humanity to manufacture pathos. Or simply wishing away her powers because life can apparently be enjoyed only by the weak and mortal.
In fact, it’s such a pervasive problem that it may have been best addressed in — of all places — the early-2000s webcomic, minus. While following the adventures of a similarly all-powerful being, minus doesn’t dwell on how supposedly arduous it would be to be faster than a speeding bullet. Instead, it mocks the way writers default to that idea to make their stories work.
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“When it comes down to it, a normal human life is the way to go!” exclaims a very human kid in one strip, mocking that pervasive trope while trying to convince herself it would be terrible to fly.
Then Minus rides a cloud over their heads and into the distance. The other children run around holding hand-drawn clouds of their own. Because, of course, being super would be incredible. Any moral suggesting otherwise is a contrived answer to the Superman problem.
As you may have guessed, Supergirl isn’t exactly innovative in answering the question that has plagued Superman writers since the iconic superhero’s earliest days. The problems start from the movie’s opening minute, as we follow Supergirl (Milly Alcock) doing her best Hancock impression. Waking with a hangover and sunglasses playfully askew, Superman’s simultaneously younger and older cousin is on a self-destructive pub crawl across the galaxy.
It’s an adventure born of a deep disconnection from humanity. In her mind, the only way to cope is to isolate herself physically from anyone who cares about her — and from Earth’s yellow sun, which grants her those abilities.
Soon after, this wounded woman reluctantly takes on a wounded girl to protect: Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a mortal but fierce warrior given the film’s only semi-effective backstory.
Armed with an irresistibly valuable sword forged by her father — and no, we are not asking why swords are so desirable in a story of laser beams, hyperdrives and superpowers — Ruthye is bent on avenging her family’s murder by interstellar brigand Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts).
Meanwhile, the infinitely generic bad-for-the-sake-of-being-bad villain is busy being exactly that. Beyond an oddly repetitive, Brad Pitt-esque habit of eating other people’s food, his only memorable traits are the ball bearings embedded in his face and his willingness to poison Supergirl’s superdog, Krypto.
Luckily for her — and the plot — the antidote happens to hang around Krem’s neck. With all the ingredients of the long Logan, Uptown Girls and Terminator 2 tradition in place, Supergirl reluctantly takes guardianship of Ruthye on an interstellar road trip. Through the power of childcare, she learns that true happiness comes from abandoning her self-imposed loneliness. Cue the credits, and weep.
First, the good. The world-building and set design is generally effective, even if Supergirl often resembles a decidedly browner Guardians of the Galaxy reskin.
The performances are also admirable— notably Alcock’s fantastically acerbic Supergirl and Ridley’s charmingly bullheaded Ruthye. Even Schoenaerts somehow turns the offensively drab Krem into something slightly more compelling than the walking boulder he was written as.
And at least Jason Momoa seems to be having fun as the demonic biker god Lobo — though he stumbles in and out of the larger plot with all the consequence of a Stan Lee MCU cameo.
Unfortunately, that is both the end of Supergirl’s strengths and an example of its central problem: amateurish writing and direction leave the film equal parts inane and inert.
Disappointing direction
Written by first-time screenwriter Ana Nogueira and directed by action newcomer Craig Gillespie, it is honesty shocking how directionless this followup to DCU’s eclectically energetic 2025 Superman is.
Even those who disliked that film’s morally simplistic, Boy Scout tenor could see that it accomplished what it set out to do: balance the cartoonish joy of classic Superman stories with direct engagement with his (now controversial) ideals of universal acceptance and opposition to xenophobia.
Supergirl does the opposite. More than that, it fails to establish its protagonist on the most basic storytelling level. Nogueira’s script feels like a bucket of action tropes assembled without understanding why they work, while Gillespie’s sluggish, anti-action direction bogs it down even more.
For example, there’s Supergirl’s self-imposed exile, motivated by a dissatisfaction the film barely explores. A mid-film backstory only slightly reinforces it while doing more to shoehorn a version of Superman’s origin into the franchise. Lobo checks the box of adding a fan-favourite name, but his character is so inconsequential that he could be removed without altering the story at all.
We also get the standard superhero motivation — Supergirl vehemently instructing Ruthye not to murder, lest it scar her for life — without offering any in-universe context for what trauma or experience shaped that belief.
And that’s not to mention how one of the universe’s most powerful beings also becomes chronically unable to win bar fights against street-level thugs whom Batman‘s Damian Wayne could handle without breaking a sweat.
Nor does the film do anything to engage with, or subvert, the reality of women being devalued or underestimated. Beyond one unanswered question about why the 23-year-old is Super “girl” while her cousin gets to be Super “man,” it discards what could have been an engaging theme.
They’re all bog-standard storytelling crutches — common enough that they don’t make Supergirl terrible. But they do make it something worse: boring.
