I love last year’s Superman movie. I love James Gunn films. I love Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. So I was very excited to see the new Supergirl film. I’m excited to see a lot of superhero movies. But I have full faith in James Gunn and company to pull of a new, expanding DC Universe of movies. Superman was a great start! Let’s keep it going! Let’s have more fun!

Movie Rating: 4/10 – Pretty Bad

I wanted to like Supergirl. The online discourse is very negative around this film for the usual reasons. And if it needs to be said, I’ll say it right now: that’s all idiot nonsense. Anyone that uses the word ‘woke’ unironically — especially to bash a movie for having a female lead — is not a good person. So if it needed to be said: I am not that kind of person or pop culture afficionado. I got no problem with Milly Alcock. I got no problem with Supergirl as a character. I’m not about that life. I just didn’t care for this movie.

Join me after the jump for my full thoughts and review of Supergirl. Expect FULL SPOILERS for both the movie and the comic, Woman of Tomorrow. And feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments below!

6. It’s a dark movie with few redeeming qualities

Supergirl is a visually dark, misdirected movie that I don’t feel has an entertaining bone in its body. It’s supposed to be an adaptation of the great Woman of Tomorrow comic, but it throws out everything that made that comic so appealing and just uses its bare bones to tell a far less compelling story. The movie is visually bland. I don’t know if it was my theater or the movie itself, but it was so damn dark. Distractingly so. You could barely see anybody or even some of the action in some scenes. It didn’t need to be that dark! I have no problem with the movie being thematically dark — such is some of the source material — but the emotional and thematic darkness didn’t make up for the lack of superhero entertainment. The darkness of Kara’s emotional journey never made the movie enjoyable to watch.

That being said, I think the movie does a fine job exploring this version of Supergirl. I can’t necessarily say that the movie earns her character growth at the end, but the presentation of her character is fine. She just doesn’t get a very good movie around that. It’s all about visiting dim, grimy planets and getting her powers taken away. It’s all about failing to defeat an unbalanced villain. It’s all about never going far enough in mentoring her new sidekick. It’s never about expanding the Superman legacy.

It’s just not very good.

5. Every change from the source material made it worse

I knew going into Supergirl that I needed to try to distance myself from Woman of Tomorrow, and I really tried. If you don’t know, writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely put out an eight-issue Supergirl comic in 2021/2022 that is so damn good that DC decided to adapt the comic for its Supergirl movie. Of all the Supergirl stories the movie could have told, including coming up with an original story, like the Superman movie last year, they decided to adapt Woman of Tomorrow because it is that damn good.

But then the movie makes a lot of unnecessary changes to Woman of Tomorrow, and every change is for the worse. The movie even fails to follow the emotional messaging of the book, and the character arcs. Why adapt that story if you’re not just going to do the story on the big screen? I think the director has come out and said he didn’t even read Woman of Tomorrow. I normally don’t poo-poo that kind of thing. I’m fine with a Star Wars showrunner isn’t a big fan of Star Wars. But this time it feels really really bad.

Honestly, I’m just gonna list the stuff that annoyed me, that didn’t need to be changed. Like how Ruthye’s father is now some famous sword-maker, and the sword she has belongs to him instead of Krem. I don’t like how Krem of the Yellow Hills is some super brigand instead of just some jankass dude who committed murder. I don’t like how Ruthye still speaks all hoity toity even though it doesn’t work as well without her actually narrating the story. I don’t like how Krypto is actually dying instead of it being a trick Supergirl is playing on Ruthye. I don’t like how every planet they visit is some grimy dive bar world instead of being unique and pretty and colorful, and then also evil in some different sort of way. I don’t like the new trafficking subplot.

I don’t like the ending and Krem’s fate. Defeats the entire point.

4. Supergirl and Lobo are great

All the actors/characters are fine to great in this film, especially the two major DC characters, Supergirl and Lobo. As mentioned above, fuck any and all CHUDs waging the usual internet war against woman on Milly Alcock. She’s great. She embodies Supergirl perfectly, and does a fine job establishing her depression and state of mind in this universe. She’s great with Ruthye, she’s great with Superman, she’s great with Krypto; in a better movie, Supergirl would really shine. She’s just not in a good movie. She’s always being either poisoned or Kryptonited so that she can’t really show off or do anything awesome. Superman got to fight a kaiju.

Jason Momoa is great as Lobo. Really embodies the character. Really nails the look. Born for this role, obviously. The problem is that he has no real place in this movie. He’s too big for this movie. He’s such a larger-than-life character, with a larger-than-life portrayal, and he just outshines this grim, henchmen-level affair. And the script doesn’t do enough to play up the angel/devil on the shoulder thing. The movie should have leaned far more heavily into the idea that Supergirl is the angel on Ruthye’s shoulder and Lobo is the devil. That would give him a role to play! Instead of just being there for the sake of having Jason Momoa play Lobo.

3. I didn’t like the world building

So we’re building a new DCU, and while we had one movie on Earth, now we’ve got another movie set in space. And maybe ‘world-building’ isn’t the right term for this…but I didn’t like a lot of the little choices the movie made in showing off the universe. Like…why is an alien lounge singer singing Earth songs? She sings the 1935 jazz hit “Cheek to Cheek.” Why? And why does she sing “The Girl from Ipanema”? Why are they singing Earth songs?! Is it really that hard to invent an alien song?

Also, why does Krem know so much about the weaknesses of Kryptonians? The Brigands hide from Supergirl on a planet with a green sun, which has an effect like Kryptonite. There is a planet like that in the comics, and it’s a great chapter not tied to the Brigands. But why do the Brigands know to hide from Supergirl under a green sun? And why does Krem know to create Kryptonite-laced darts? There are only two Kryptonians left in the universe, and Superman spends all his time on Earth. How does a punk like Krem know so much about them and how to defeat them?

I dunno. There were just a bunch of little things like that about the world that bugged me.

2. They could have done so much bigger

In Woman of Tomorrow, while taking the intergalactic bus with Ruthye, Supergirl has to go out and fight a space dragon. In the movie, she has to fight some tech pirates who think robbing a bus is a good idea? It’s a bus! But still, they traded a grand, colorful spectacle for something far more drab and mundane. And I think that happened a lot in this movie. When it could have gone really big, they instead chose to go really small.

I especially didn’t like how small the scenes in Argo City felt. The book has this whole thing where the inhabitants have to fight against their little chunk of rock suffering all sorts of realistic troubles that come with being a hunk of rock floating through the cosmos. But the movie just has everybody get Kryptonite poisoning. Also, I thought it was weird that Supergirl was born after Krypton was destroyed. I don’t remember if that’s from the book. But I felt like they could have done so much more to show what Kara went through when her planet was destroyed, but they settled for just having her mom die of radiation poisoning, and a bunch of other people around her get sick and die. I just feel like…that whole element could have been bigger.

1. They’re in the universe now, so use them

Supergirl exists in the universe now, so I hope she has an appearance in the Man of Tomorrow sequel that’s currently being filmed. Lobo exists in the universe now, so I hope he also gets a cameo. I doubt either one is going to appear in Lanterns or Clayface. We’re clearly not going to get a Supergirl sequel. So just use them for cameos. Cameos can still be really effective; just look at Superman showing up in this Supergirl movie. It worked perfectly! So just use these characters again in future projects. Don’t abandon them to a movie bomb.

The MCU survived The Incredible Hulk (which I liked).

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