Supergirl

dir: Craig Gillespie

2026

When one Aussie succeeds overseas, we all triumph. When two succeed, well, we all become national treasures.

When what they do doesn’t succeed that well, we’re the first to bring out the knives.

Craig Gillespie: Aussie director. Milly Alcock: Aussie actor, well known for roles in tv series like Upright with Nick Minchin and a piano, and House of the Dragon, where she played a young Rhaenyra Targaryen. Australian success stories all around.

American superhero character, though. The blame, like with most things that go wrong around the world these days, must rest solely with the Americans. They took a lively character and a strong concept and buried it under clouds of grey and brown miasma and generic action.

Supergirl is perhaps not as well-known as her cousin Superman, but she’s distinctive enough both in print and in these movies that she’s not just a female analogue of the big blue boy scout. As a great little detail / difference, she’s a superhero who’s also a drunk! Finally us drunks who think we have superpowers when we drink enough have someone to look up to!

In all the versions of the story, Kara’s main difference from Clark / Kal-El is that she didn’t grow up on Earth with loving farmer parents in Smallville: she either got here beforehand or well after, often having lived through the destruction of their home planet. In this version Krypton has a brief reprieve in that Argo City is preserved in a shielded bubble, and yet the few survivors slowly die due to, you guessed it, kryptonite poisoning. It takes oh so many years, though.

For whatever reason, much of the film is given over to people talking in a made up Kryptonian language, yet everyone else in space is basically talking English. Space English. So, that seems like an unnecessary complication.

As we start watching this flick, with a hungover Kara going through all our usual earthly versions of dealing with a hangover, like eating high sugar / high carb foods, rehydrating, scrolling through IG, a point is made early on and hammered home repeatedly that Kara does not feel any affinity for Earth or its stupid people. It does not feel like home, to her. And as she feels disconnected from everyone, and miserable about her aloneness in the universe and the fate of her parents / people, she routinely flies (in a spaceship remarkably similar to the Milano from the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks, except it looks slightly more like an RV internally), to planets in systems with red suns.

When the suns are red, she doesn’t have superpowers, which means she can get shit-faced drunk. Nothing celebrates your pain like drinking until the pain is replaced with the horrors of the demon drink.

This is not a winning strategy. Clark keeps calling (somehow) and leaving messages expressing his concerns about her wellbeing. Superman would never fly across the universe in order to get fucked up. What would Ma Kent think? She wouldn’t be angry, but she would be disappointed.

But Kara’s a fuck up. She ends up on some planet where bad guys kill people and kidnap women without consequence in a galactic milieu where decency doesn’t seem to apply, and she’s like “Stop that. That’s bad.” But she doesn’t have her powers, so no-one will listen to her, at least on this particular planet.

The baddies are bad. They’re so bad they’re called Brigands. Brigands who are brigands. That’s so lazy. They might as well call themselves the bad guys. Bad guys coming through.

We watch as one family, I guess they’re humans? have three members butchered for no good reason, and the one survivor, Ruthye (Even Ridley) vows revenge on the leader of the brigands, who is called Krem and has piercings in his face, so you know he’s a really bad guy.

My favourite bit of this sequence, and yes I am being sarcastic, is that when the family is attacked, when the brigands converge on their homestead, the mother says confidently “We will give them what they want, and they will leave us alone” and I’m not sure how smart or how dumb the character is meant to be, but is that like the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard?

What do they want? To kill everyone. When do they want it? Now!

You can’t negotiate with murderous sex traffickers. All you can do is jail them if you can’t kill them, and kill them if you can’t jail them, just like the Tate brothers.

In that, this flick 100% has my endorsement with how to respond to that sub-class of criminals that caters to the needs and desires of the Epstein class of the wealthy; kill them in great numbers such that all fear to follow in their footsteps.

Right from the start, Ruthye is meant to be the naïve but determined child seeking bloody vengeance on those who have wronged her, and to do so she enlists the aid of a drunken hero who perhaps possesses True Grit, who at every stage rebuffs the child, saying revenge is less than great.

I have to say throughout the flick I was confused. This man called Krem, with a German accent, is a murderous rabid dog who kidnaps women for fun and profit. If he doesn’t need to die I don’t know who does. If he shouldn’t be murderised, who should?

It leads to these circular, very repetitive arguments between Ruthye and Kara where they say multiple variations on “but I want to kill him” “ but you can’t kill him because it will haunt your dreams”, and “yeah, but it would be so worth it” and “nuh-uh, it will change you and poison your heart and oh wait he just killed another family while we were talking still hasn’t changed my mind, don’t do it, you don’t want this, you want something different from this”. And on it goes.

And on and on. There are joys to be had in this flick, but there’s a lot of filler / dross as well, and it doesn’t help that they really don’t do a good job of situating / grounding this flick in a believable / comprehensible ‘world’. DC’s current take on a science fiction setting, out there amongst the stars, looks a lot like DC’s previous setting under Zack Snyder, even worse including some of the generic space setting and look from Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies, which were lazy and drab even by his standards. The digital effects in a lot of scenes are less than great, and there’s a pervasive brown / murky look to a fair few action scenes that make it all look less than meh.

Every flick has to have a ticking clock in order to, I dunno, keep us convinced that linear time exists and is important and that punctuality is the most important virtue of all, and this flick’s ticking clock is that Krypto, Kara’s beloved dog, has been poisoned by the main bad guy, and Kara has three days to save him. What a ‘day’ means out there is left to anyone’s guess, but Kara has three of them to save her dog.

She is a superbeing though, and as is often the case in cinematic versions of Superman, because their set of powers is so extensive, because they’re generally invulnerable, you need ways to depower them or make them vulnerable in order to make everything seem more dangerous. I don’t really know that it makes them more relatable, because, sure, after 14 espresso martinis I think I have superpowers, too, but the sad reality is I am completely vulnerable, especially in the face of harsh criticism, so I don’t even need a steady diet of poisons and kryptonite and the rays of a green sun to make me feel weak.

Good thing no-one needs me to make things right in the universe or get revenge on someone who really deserves it. There is a really odd gag in the flick that made me scratch my head: at some place, somewhere in the cosmos, Kara waits next to a machine that has some creature inside. This creature eats or drinks something, and poops something out that looks like popcorn, sort of. Kara fills a tub with this stuff, and eventually eats some of it, recoils in disgust, and says something like “this tastes like shit.”

Well, none of us needed superpowers to figure that one out: what was stopping you, Daughter of Krypton, with your X-ray vision and galactic brain intellect? And she’s not even drunk when she does it?

For the life of me I can’t figure out how that was meant to be funny. Unfortunately I could say that about much of this flick, whose script comes across as less than AI assisted and more so auto-generated. The bit with Kara’s mum imploring her to “be good” and to do good, without necessarily having to be nice or gentle, whilst great lines, don’t even work in their initial context, so when they’re repeated by a different character many years hence towards the end of the film, it feels like repetition for the sake of repetition, from a character that never heard that initial conversation, and couldn’t know what it would mean to Kara.

As for Jason Momoa playing a character called Lobo, well, that was kinda terrible. He adds almost nothing to the film and if you excised him from the flick you’d barely notice. As director, if you asked him to repeat a line because the take wasn’t great, he’d probably just repeat the line much louder. Momoa plays the role like he plays everything: completely unconvincing as a character but with gusto, so… Inserting him so painfully into a script and a story that didn’t need him shows the producers were worried tiny-dicked basement dwelling chuds were going to be so alienated by the anti-sex trafficker storyline that they needed someone to delight in and relate to, because putting themselves in the shoes of women who’ve suffered great loss and struggle with their pain is too much to ask of these delicate snowflakes.

When the film gets to the very end, and Kara asserts that she now loves Earth and all its people, and wants to stick around, and won’t get fucked up all the time (she’s asserting this to Superman (David Corenswet)), I wondered aloud “Why?” Nothing from the film I watched indicated why she should have a connection to Earth since she spends none of the film on it. Her experiences with Ruthye maybe let her process her pain in a helpful way, but I then wondered why she didn’t hang around with her only non-dog friend and find some other planet with a yellow sun upon which she could look after her, guide her towards adulthood, doing for Ruthye what no-one got to do for Kara.

But nah. All Earth all of the time, except when it’s not. At least, at least the soundtrack wasn’t saturated with 70s 80s ‘hits’ and deep cuts. James Gunn’s influence seems to be pretty light on this outing, but it’s not invisible. It’s not as clear a vision as what he generally got to do, because though many of the alien designs are pretty strong (and don’t directly rip off too many other familiar designs from other franchises), the sets and worlds look so generic and bland that it’s hard to recall many details.

The original story this script was based on was a great comics run in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Bilquis Evely and Tom King, and that was a great story arc for Kara. This flick? Eh. It gets her where they probably need her for the next Superman movie, but it does something of a disservice to the character.

Milly is great as this character, though. She gives a committed and game performance in a flick whose surrounds and production don’t quite match what she’s giving, but she gives heaps. The grim fate of the flick at the box office has fuck all to do with her performance, and plenty to do with the murky cheap & nasty digital effects work in some sections, and the marketers, and the fact that a lot of the flick looks like generic fantasy / sci fi programming. They even threw in a Mad Max bit that had me scratching my head.

You could make up anything, come up with anything, and this is what you came up with?

One part that was a little bit inspired was when, having lost her ship, Kara waits at a stop for a space bus(?) It’s good that out in the galaxy there’s still some notion of public transport in the future, but of course someone has to come along and fuck things up for the other passengers.

Usually, the people who fuck up the experience of public transport are the other passengers, but in this instance it’s blue Sklarian raiders, who want to steal all the tech on the spaceship bus and from people individually. These raiders aren’t particularly bloodthirsty, but they ain’t gentle either. The sequence that transpires here, both with Kara needing to get access to some yellow sunlight, and a spasmodic teleporter led fight with the raiders that sees her popping into and out of all sorts of spaces, is funnier and more fun that most of the other set pieces in the flick, and it looks really great.

And that isn’t necessarily true of many scenes later on.

I’ll put this down to a missed opportunity, which is a damn shame.

6 times this warrants a chant maybe of only “Aussie, Aussie” and “Oi Oi” only and nothing more out of 10

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“You know, we haven't been formally introduced. Hi. I'm the bitch whose dog you shot.” – anyone who hurts dogs or cats should die painfully - Supergirl

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi242535193/