Supergirl Is Less Riot Grrl and More Spice Girl: Review

When Supergirl begins, 23-year-old Kara Zor-El ( Milly Alcock ) is celebrating her birthday. Well, that’s not entirely accurate: She’s using her birthday as an excuse to get very drunk on planets with red suns and avoid her unprocessed grief. What matters is that she’s not looking for any kind of adventure, which by the sacred laws of summer blockbusters means that with relative efficiency, she gets tangled up in a 13-year-old girl’s revenge quest.

Stories about characters who need a reminder of their innate morality often feature the trope of a plucky young person who needs mentoring. In Supergirl ‘s case, that plucky young person is Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who watched her family get murdered by a ruthless Brigand named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) and is determined to get vengeance. When Krem poisons Kara’s beloved Krypto and takes off, Kara and Ruthye’s goals become aligned, even though Kara’s not used to leaning on anyone for help.

Supergirl is fully committed to playing out as a cosmic adventure, with a bare minimum of scenes set on Earth and all the interesting stuff happening out in space. This means a wide range of extremely alien-looking aliens, and elements like an intergalactic rest stop that sells intergalactic slushies and snacks, all really fun in the execution. There’s even some attention to detail paid to alien languages, including a mix of dialects rooted in strange sounds and full scenes of spoken Kryptonian.

It’s only the flashbacks that really establish Supergirl as the character’s major introduction to viewers, following Kara’s quick cameo in Superman . It’s certainly a credit to Milly Alcock’s performance that the character feels as well-realized as she is right from the jump, delivering more than enough spark to power this movie on her own, and enough emotion in a single facial expression to sell a scene’s worth of dialogue. (There is meanwhile not nearly enough of Krypto, a necessity of the plot, but disappointing nonetheless.)

The cast is overall quite compact, with Eve Ridley bringing necessary sidekick pluck and Matthias Schoenaerts not bothering to dive deep into his bad guy’s motivations, sometimes, a villain just really loves his work. Plus, there’s the long-awaited debut of Jason Momoa as intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo, a performance that reveals how much playing a “good” guy like Aquaman was really holding him back. He’s not in as much of Supergirl as the marketing implies, but between his ever-present cigar and gleeful taste for violence, it’s a reminder that the best use of Momoa is letting him be totally unhinged. (See also: Fast X .)

Although Gillespie and Gunn are both fiends for needle drops, Supergirl does demonstrate some restraint in that regard. That said, it can’t resist pairing a few action sequences with incongruous old jazz standards or a dreamy cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” by Kelty Greye and KidMotel. Other featured artists on the soundtrack include Sleigh Bells, Wet Leg, Rilo Kiley, Modest Mouse, Wolf Alice, Halsey, and Eagles of Death Metal. No Blondie, though, despite the fact that Kara spends most of the movie wearing a Debbie Harry T-shirt.

As big as Gunn’s plans for DC Studios maybe seem, Supergirl is steadfast in its standalone, character-focused approach. It even makes an effort to explain even the most basic elements of comic book lore, specifically the basic rules for Kryptonians bopping around the solar system: A yellow sun means they have incredible powers, while a red sun means no powers, and a green sun means bad news.

Unfortunately, that character-focused approach keeps things a little too small, especially for a movie that hops between planets at the rate this one does, there’s an itch to understand this galaxy beyond the limits of one young woman’s quest to save her dog and maybe stop some sex slavers along the way. (Oh yeah, it turns out that the Brigands traffic largely in young girls, a depressingly down-to-Earth issue.) When Supergirl takes big risks, they tend to pay off. There aren’t enough of those moments, though.

One defining aspect of 21st-century feminism is a woman’s right to be a hot mess, should the occasion call for it. Supergirl doesn’t go quite far enough with that concept, something illustrated by the fact that by the end of the movie, Kara ends up wearing the character’s signature old-school uniform, a choice that feels less rooted in her journey through grief and more dictated by the need to sell action figures. It’s just one way this movie’s depiction of girl power leans more towards the Spice Girls side of the spectrum. Kindness may be punk rock, but that skirt is not .

Supergirl soars into theaters on Friday, June 26th. Check out the trailer below.