When Superman came out last year in 2025, kicking off James Gunn’s new DC Universe, I walked away genuinely satisfied with the film. We already knew Supergirl was slated to follow the next year, starring Milly Alcock, whom I fondly remember as young Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen on HBO’s House of the Dragon. I’d actually considered catching Supergirl in theaters, but with its reception being fairly mixed and my finances not exactly thriving this year, extra trips to the theater weren’t the wisest use of my money. So we ended up catching it recently on HBO Max instead.

The film leans directly into what we glimpsed with Kara Zor-El at the end of Superman, establishing this version of Supergirl as something of a party girl, one who travels to planets orbiting red suns specifically so she can actually feel the effects of alcohol, and presumably some alien substances too. Of course, that comes with a tradeoff, since without a yellow sun powering her Kryptonian biology, she’s essentially reduced to an ordinary humanoid.

We also get some backstory that comic fans had largely pieced together already. Her family escapes Krypton’s destruction and settles on a new world, only for that planet to eventually meet a similarly doomed fate. Much like her cousin Kal-El, she ends up the sole survivor, launched toward Earth to find him. I genuinely appreciated that they showed her landing with zero knowledge of English, which honestly makes perfect logical sense given the circumstances. And yet, plenty of aliens speak English in this movie.

The actual story was unfamiliar territory for me, since it’s adapted from a fairly recent comic arc called Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. The primary antagonist is a character I’d genuinely never heard of before, Krem of the Yellow Hills, essentially a raider-type villain with superhuman strength, virtually no moral compass, and a strong preference for melee weapons like axes and swords. He ends up slaughtering the family of a renowned weaponsmith, inadvertently leaving behind a sole survivor, Ruthye Knoll.

Ruthye turns out to be a reasonably compelling character within Supergirl’s story, though without any real superpowers of her own, she’s essentially just a bitter teenage girl armed with a sword and a revenge mission. There was clearly potential there, but the film never fully capitalizes on it during her screen time.

This also marks Jason Momoa’s return to DC, though this time the DCU cast him in a role that genuinely feels tailor-made for him: Lobo. Lobo is a Superman-adjacent villain/antihero that most casual viewers probably have zero familiarity with, and Momoa absolutely looks and embodies the part convincingly, even if he occasionally feels slightly out of place within the broader film. Still, casting him as Lobo makes far more sense than recycling him as Aquaman again, since while I did enjoy his earlier Aquaman portrayal, it was always a much more exaggerated, radical take on that character. Ideally, characters should feel true to their source material.

I genuinely wanted to love Supergirl, since the character rarely gets the spotlight she deserves outside her more famous cousin’s shadow, but much like the 1984 Supergirl film starring Helen Slater, this adaptation stumbles in several places. Supergirl essentially shares the same power set as Clark Kent, yet whenever she gets her own standalone narrative, the storytelling tends to lean noticeably more chaotic and uneven. I particularly didn’t enjoy watching her powers get stripped away, randomly injured, then restored again in this constant back-and-forth rubber-band effect throughout the film. The villain didn’t land well for me either, Krem came across as an odd hybrid of alien, crackhead, and pirate, and the action sequences involving him didn’t do enough to compensate. Milly Alcock also made social media comments that drew significant backlash from right-wing audiences, which likely contributed to the film’s disappointing box office performance. As someone who leans liberal and honestly didn’t care about her comments either way, I’ll still say that despite having some genuinely redeeming qualities and not being a total disaster, Supergirl ultimately falls flat to the kryptonite of mediocre writing.