It’s summer, which means that it’s the time when studios are putting out their big releases, hoping to get those big bucks from people seeking shelter in a cold dark theater on a hot afternoon or entire families coming out to see the latest computer animated intellectual property product together, getting snacks and commemorative blankets and popcorn buckets that will be leaching microplastics into landfills long after the human race is dead. It’s been an odd year, wherein the two most talked about films of the current season are both horror—Obsession and Backrooms—and both are still playing at my local megaplex, as are more recent wide releases like Leviticus. It feels strange to have the films that would normally be reserved for a late fall/early winter release appearing at the same time as more standard blockbuster-courting fare like Masters of the Universe (which the ten screen theater near me has already dropped, despite it being released less than a month ago). And into that market comes Supergirl, the follow-up to last year’s Superman, starring Milly Alcock as the younger cousin of the Big Blue Boy Scout, out on her solo adventure. Will it manage to find an audience, or will the one-two punch of Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters be too big of a kryptonite chunk for the Woman of Tomorrow to overcome? 

When the film opens, our heroine is a depressed party girl on an interstellar pub crawl, flying around in her caravan-esque spaceship with her unruly dog Krypto and drinking herself into a stupor. While spending time on a planet with a red sun so that its nullifying effect on her superpowers can allow her to get properly wasted, she encounters recently orphaned Ruthye (Eve Ridley), the young daughter of a master swordsmith who is seeking revenge on her family’s murderer, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Krem is the leader of a group of space brigands who sex traffic “wives” from the planets they pillage to continue to propagate their “all male species.” When Supergirl’s defense of the naive Ruthye garners the attention of Krem, he shoots Krypto with a poison that starts the clock on the film; the last daughter of Krypton only has three days to track Krem down and get the antidote, while also trying to impart a lesson about the emptiness of vengeance to the determined Ruthye. Along the way, the two encounter immortal intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa), whose presence here is superfluous at best. 

There’s a lot to love and enjoy in Supergirl. Alcock is charming in the lead role, enough that some of the failures in character consistency are papered over by her performance. For the most part, the film also looks great. The title character’s barhopping showcases a myriad of excellent set designs and great alien creature effects, many if not all of which are practical in some way. When David Corenswet reappears as Superman in his video calls and in the flashbacks to his cousin’s arrival on Earth, he’s effectively corny in the way that made last summer’s outing so endearing. The film takes the opportunity that telling a story in a grungy, lived-in, space environment presents and offers the viewer a wide variety of environments to watch Supergirl kick ass in: an interstellar greyhound full of a dozen different alien species, a villainous bar full of unsavory space pirates, a gravity-defying aircraft carrier as it crashes into a mountain range. 

The drawbacks, however, are just as numerous. It’s not my habit to bully child actors, but to put it as politely as possible, fourteen-year-old Eve Ridley is not a very good actor. She has plenty of time to become one, but she fails to imbue the character with the kind of pathos that’s needed. Apparently, she was in the UK’s tour of Les Misérables when she was only ten years old, and you can see it in her performance; she’s a child of the stage, a student of a form of theatre that’s all about projecting enough to be heard in the back row. She has not yet learned the more nuanced acting that the close-up requires. When the effects are bad, they are quite bad, with the most frustrating example being the CGI effect used for Supergirl’s hair in space. Just get Milly Alcock in an actual pool of water and let her hair splay out naturally! It’s awful. Perhaps most glaring, however, is the overall presence of Lobo, who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s only present because Momoa was a “fan cast” for Lobo for a long time. Once upon a time, a fantasy casting was just something that you read in Wizard magazine and thought, “Huh, yeah, Josh Hartnett would make a good Nightwing,” and then move on. In the present, as the very existence of a released Snyder Cut shows, the outsized power of fandoms is enough to make or break a film. So sure, why not, let’s just let the extratextual reason of making the internet shut up justify sticking Lobo the bounty hunter in here, rather than the more traditional justifications like “narrative,” “character,” or “theme.” 

The director of this film, Craig Gillespie, is the man who helmed I, Tonya and Cruella, and those films’ use of tonally jarring humor and juxtaposition are present here. After all, this is a film in which a super dog delivers a groin attack and Supergirl pretends to be a Valley Girl to divert the anger of the aforementioned Lobo, but also one in which the villains are sex traffickers who treat the film’s young sidekick as merchandise to be haggled over. There’s also little point in denying that the fingerprints of Warner Bros.’s DC visionary James Gunn are all over it, especially when it comes to the more CGI-heavy fight scenes. It’s very reminiscent of Guardians of the Galaxy, which isn’t necessarily negative, but certainly bears mentioning. Where it also seems to draw inspiration from is in the glut of 80s Star Wars knockoffs like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, but the eighties-ness of it all doesn’t end there, with villains taken straight from the Mad Max sequels. Nostalgia for that era has become radioactive over the past decade of Stranger Things and imitators thereof, but it feels somehow more sincere and real than most mainstream attempts at invoking the media of the decade. To put it succinctly, Supergirl is doing in earnest what Turbo Kid did ironically, and it mostly succeeds. 

You may have noticed that the character’s actual name, Kara, hasn’t come up yet in this review. The film also saves the first use of “Kara” on screen for quite some time, drawing attention to this fact by pointing out in act two that Ruthye doesn’t even know what Kara’s name is. This is done with intentionality, as the first time that anyone utters “Kara” is when her father, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) uses it in her expository flashback. As we learn, Zor-El (brother of Superman’s father Jor-El, whom we saw last summer telling his son to become a god on earth) and his wife Alura (Emily Beecham) escaped the destruction of Krypton via a force field that encircles an entire city, allowing it to live on after the planet exploded. Unfortunately, since said explosion resulted in kryptonite poisoning the soil of their little city in a bubble, Kara’s father sends their daughter, born 8 years after the Kryptonian apocalypse, out in an escape pod, along with the puppy she found rooting through the trash on the day of her mother’s funeral. “Kara” is a ghost of a world that no longer exists, and when someone finally verbalizes it out loud, it’s supposed to be emotionally effective in a way that the film struggles to fully convey. 

Most recent versions of Supergirl take their backstory from the 2005 relaunch of the character, in which she is technically Kal/Clark’s older cousin but whose pod was knocked off course, causing her to arrive as a teenager after he has already grown into an adult. This hews closer to the original concept, including the Argo City forcefield and her being born some years after Krypton’s destruction, but it also includes concepts from the aughts version, which makes the film a bit of a mish-mash in a way that plot hole pedants will likely latch onto and care too much about. Frankly, it does not make a lot of sense to try and have it both ways. For instance, at one point Kara saves Ruthye from an alien whom she has unintentionally insulted because of differing cultural norms. At this point in the narrative, we don’t know that Kara was born post-Krypton, so one assumes that she has knowledge about interstellar customs because she was from a world that was at least somewhat involved in interstellar communication. When we later learn that she lived her entire pre-Earth life in a literal bubble, it makes much less sense. Why would she know that setting your bag at the feet of this particular species is an insult if she’s never had contact with other aliens, especially in comparison to a child who lives on the planet that the space bus ferrying said alien arrives at? One must assume that Argo City never had contact with other non-Kryptonians. Otherwise, there would have been some option to save its citizens rather than letting them all die of Kryptonite cancer. It’s a plot element that’s not entirely thought-through, and although I’m not usually one to get hung up on something like this, it demonstrates that this was a narrative that was, perhaps, not given enough drafts to work out all the kinks (or, more likely, had so many drafts that the kinks became inevitable). 

This is a fun movie, and a cute one. It fails to recapture the effectiveness of last summer’s DC superhero outing, which was in some ways more narratively messy but nonetheless more thematically coherent. At the same time, it’s a cutesy little space adventure with lots of cool set designs, a braver approach to color and lighting than most post-Avengers comic book adaptations, and interesting aliens. A little more time spent rendering (or considering the necessity of) certain special effects would have been appreciated, but it’s decent overall. Perhaps not worth running out to the theater to see, but if you don’t do that, we may never see this version of Supergirl again. It’s up to you whether that’s something you want to vote for with your box office dollars. Between this and Minions & Monsters, it’s almost certainly the lesser of two evils.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond