Detective Comics' newest film arrived with a deliberate statement etched into its first promotional poster — the iconic Superman logo spray painted to read “Look Out” instead of the known “Look Up.” Director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” — the second installment in the rebooted DC Universe — has the titular character, also known as Kara Zor-El, playing by a different set of rules. Lead actress Milly Alcock, for the most part, delivers — bringing Kara to life with an edge and emotional depth that justifies every bit of the hype. However, the film around her, with its often uninspiring visuals and weightless action sequences, fails to keep up with her performance.
“Supergirl” opens not with a hero, but with a wreck. The opening scene pans on an apartment in ruins, depicting Zor-El with a drink in hand, mentally somewhere far from the reality she sits in. To escape her grief, Zor-El seeks out planets orbiting red suns, where the atmosphere strips her of her Kryptonian powers and lets alcohol take the wheel. Alcock inhabits this wreck of a person with startling specificity, as her slurred words and deflective jokes land as the behavior of someone who has stopped trying to hold it together.
Kara and her cousin Kal-El, better known as Superman and played by David Corenswet, are among the last known Kryptonians alive. While Superman escaped the planet’s destruction entirely, Kara survived aboard Argo City, a domed remnant of Krypton slowly poisoned by kryptonite radiation. Flashbacks to Argo illuminate the full devastation of that loss, tethering Kara’s self-destruction to something specific and earned rather than vague superhero brooding. Her mother’s dying wish — for Zor-El to “be good” — turns out to be the tallest order in the galaxy for a character drowning in grief and booze.
Into Kara’s blur of a 23rd birthday stumbles in Ruthye Marye Knoll, played by rising British actor Eve Ridley — a gusty, energetic and newly orphaned alien teenager on a mission to kill the man who slaughtered her beloved family. Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, leads the Brigands, an all-male planet-jumping gang who abduct young women to sustain their species. Schoenaerts’ performance is watchable, but Krem never quite coheres into a villain worth fearing. Given so little beyond function — showing up, doing damage and fleeing — he serves more as a plot mechanism rather than a genuine menace, and the film’s stakes suffer for it.
The villain may most ire audiences with a soft spot for animals, as Krypto, Zor-El’s dog and a rare piece of home, is shot by Krem with a bullet laced with slow-acting poison. This gut punch fuels Zor-El’s narrative throughout the film, as her indifference begins to crack and her push toward action begins. Alcock plays this shift with remarkable restraint, hardening her eyes and quietly speaking volumes.
Jason Momoa’s performance as Lobo positions him as a standout side character, as the cantankerous, cigar-chomping galactic bounty hunter raises the temperature of every scene he steps into. Momoa barely contains Lobo’s chaos, with his scenes specifically crackling with an unpredictable energy that the rest of the film rarely matches. Many scenes without him become noticeably quieter, though do not come up with the depth to replace any excitement.
The film follows this cast of turbulent characters, pulling pages from the “Mad Max” playbook. It trades Earth’s familiarity in “Superman” for bombed-out alien cityscapes, barren wastelands lit by the sickly green glow of foreign suns and Brigand goons in studded leather aboard tricked-out spacecraft. Gillespie builds a universe nobody has bothered to clean up, and the atmosphere is one of the film’s genuine strengths. Zor-El and Knoll move through it without ceremony, their method far messier than any conventional notion of heroism.
The landscape’s mood is precisely mirrored by its soundtrack, with Wet Leg, Wolf Alice, Rilo Kiley and Sleigh Bells — scoring the journey with an indie-punk sensibility. The tunes feel less like curated needle drops and more like a window into Kara’s interior — the music of someone who feels everything while appearing detached.
Where “Supergirl” consistently loses altitude is in its technical filmmaking. Action sequences rely heavily on Zor-El’s speed and laser red eyes as their primary visual language, but the camerawork frames them in tight, murky compositions that obscure rather than amplify the impact. Sequences that should feel visceral instead become flat and difficult to follow. The color grading offers little relief, draining scenes of the visual dynamism and vibrance of comic-book source material. For a $170 million production, the gap between ambition and execution is difficult to ignore.
The ending earns a degree of emotional satisfaction, less because the screenplay fully sets it up and more because Alcock and Ridley build something real together across every grimy corner of the universe they have crawled through. “Supergirl” is a film easier to respect than to love. It keeps its scale intimate, forgoing catastrophic stakes in favor of something rawer and more human — though the execution falters. Kara Zor-El — drunk, heartbroken and ferociously alive under a yellow sun — deserved sharper cinematography, a villain with real teeth and a pace that trusted its own story. Luckily, she had Milly Alcock, who was almost enough to create a great film.
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