Film Review: Supergirl 超女 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
There is a moment early in Supergirl when Kara Zor-El sits on a red-sun planet, powers gone, drinking herself into a temporary human state, and the camera simply watches her. She is not performing heroism. She is not even pretending. She is a young woman who has already seen the end of her world and is trying, with limited success, to stay one step ahead of the grief.
That is the film’s strongest suit, and Milly Alcock owns it completely.
Alcock’s Kara is not the sunny Girl of Steel of earlier versions. She is sharper, angrier, more exhausted. She parties because the alternative is remembering. She keeps Krypto close because the dog is the last living piece of a life that no longer exists. When a young orphan named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) forces her way into that carefully managed numbness, the story begins not with a call to adventure but with a reluctant, almost resentful agreement to help.
Gillespie and Nogueira understand that the most interesting version of Supergirl is not the one who always says yes. This Kara has every reason to say no. The film respects that. It lets her be difficult. It lets her be wrong. It lets her care more about her poisoned dog than about the grand moral questions the universe keeps shoving at her. That stubborn, personal scale is what makes the movie work when it works.
The interstellar journey that follows has the shape of a classic Western revenge tale dressed in science-fiction clothes. There are strange planets, dangerous characters, and a villain (Matthias Schoenaerts) who is more force of nature than personality. Jason Momoa’s Lobo appears like a chaotic weather system, funny and dangerous in equal measure, and then disappears again. The film never pretends these set pieces are the point. They exist to put pressure on the two central characters: a damaged young woman who does not want to be anyone’s hero, and a child who still believes revenge might put the world back together.
Alcock and Ridley have a genuine, prickly chemistry. Their relationship is not soft. It is earned through shared danger and mutual irritation. When the film trusts that relationship, it finds real emotional weight. When it drifts into familiar superhero rhythms—big fights, bigger speeches—it becomes less distinctive. Gillespie’s direction is clean and energetic, but it sometimes seems to be arguing with the more intimate story the script wants to tell.
The result is a movie that feels slightly at war with itself. It wants to be both a character study of trauma and a colorful cosmic adventure. It does not always succeed at being both at once. Yet the central performance is so specific and so alive that the film never collapses. Alcock carries the contradictions. She makes Kara’s reluctance feel like integrity rather than mere attitude.
Supergirl is not the seamless triumph some hoped for, nor the disaster its box-office numbers suggested. It is something more interesting: a messy, sometimes beautiful attempt to give a familiar icon a private inner life. In a franchise that often mistakes spectacle for substance, that ambition counts for a great deal. (Neo, 2026)