Supergirl (2026) - Review: What Was DC Thinking?

 dc has no idea what to do with supergirl. she was created as a superman side character to boost comic sales amongst young girls, and that is the only trait of hers that sticks in her most recent movie. kara has been a kiddy character for most of her history, and this movie wants to do its best to convince you that she’s actually cool and badass, with her constant alcoholism and her repeatedly stating that she thinks superman is dumb and gay while she is actually very cool. her main conflict in this movie is feeling without a home, and she gets a surrogate child to take care of. the movie spends a lot of time telling us that supergirl doesn’t wanna be defined by a man, but she ends up just being defined by her newfound motherhood instead. not only is this a much worse and watered down version of a story everyone has heard a thousand times before, it feels like an insult to any feminist message this movie is trying to have. supergirl being cool and independent is only ever seen as a coping mechanism to deal with her grief, its something she has to shed by realizing that the dominant man in her life is actually very cool and she should follow in his footsteps. the movie spells this out for us, we get flashbacks of superman giving her the suit right before she puts it on as if she is realizing that he is right, and her surrogate daughter is the one that gives it to her in the first place. by listening to her dominant patriarchal figure and surrogate daughter, she realizes that she needs to do exactly what superman does.

this movie wants to have its cake and eat it too by trying to have the grief-stricken drunkard kara turn into the happy-go-lucky girl kara loves earth as much as she misses krypton and looks up to her cousin, and these 2 versions of the character are just irreconcilable if you want to treat supergirl as the badass no nonsense version of superman like the movie wants you to think she is. it also neglects the fact that kara being a grief-stricken drunkard is not a thing at all in the comics. from the beginning, she has always been a ray of sunshine in human form, with the old comics had a very innocent and kiddy tone. they were also extremely tied to superman, and she was very much living in his shadow at first, but eventually she got her own comics that were more separate from superman and that built her own mythology, side characters, and giving kara her own life while still retaining her happiness as she grew her independence. instead of letting kara be separate from superman by doing anything close to this, we get a movie full of bland space aliens and the most forgettable characters who feel like they don’t really do anything, where the lesson she learns at the end is that superman is actually very awesome and she should be like him too, a lesson she could only learn by becoming a mother. it’s such a weird dichotomy and if you try to make sense of what the story is actually trying to say about womanhood, it falls apart, because it is based on a garbage comic written by a man and brought to life by a male director whose understanding of women begins and ends at “they’re edgy, but deep down they’re sad” in a story that still ends up revolving around the most dominant patriarchal figure in the history of american literature.

this movie has no audience. does it want to appeal to families? that’s the most likely option with how lobo and superman are still in the story and portrayed as cool and awesome for the big brothers and dads who might be watching, with the 80s music and guardians of the galaxy vibe trying to court them as well. but this is also trying to be an uplifting feminist movie for the girls in the audience, and adding men being cool badasses combined with the tropes of other male-centric superhero movies in this day and age just feels so… out of touch? like, why would any young women or families want to watch this movie? its just a worse version of every superhero thing they’ve already seen, even if you discount the failings of the main story. it feels like it should’ve come out 15 years ago, it has every marvel movie trope down to the hero having to earn their costume. young people are currently flocking to theaters for stories about people they can relate to, and i truly believe that supergirl had the opportunity to capitalize on that because she is one of the most relatable heroes! she has her baggage, but she still goes through it and lives life on earth to its fullest because she loves the people, whether its her cousin or classmates or fellow super-heroes from the 30th century. this movie is the exact opposite of relatable, it wants her main conflict to be her relationship with krypton but it isn’t given enough time to fully flesh out any first-gen immigrant aspect of her character, in the same way the previous superman movie didn’t flesh out his second-gen immigrant aspect well. there’s just nothing to for me to latch onto in this movie as a young woman and a comic fan, which is exactly the audience a supergirl movie should attract. instead, it is a corporate movie made solely to put more money in the pockets of a war criminal and serve as the second chapter in warner brothers’ third attempt at a cinematic universe. if there is anything relatable in kara or her story, it is purely from milly alcock trying to save this awful script. there’s nothing human about it, its the last breath of a dying studio and brand who only know how to do one thing to keep going: make bad movies