I thought it was decent enough - better than many reviews suggested.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 05/07/2026 11:34:43 PM
View original postMeh. This is not a superhero movie, in more than one sense of the word. As far as the genre goes, it's more of a space opera adventure than the normal superhero setting and story. Superman is in it, but he doesn't do anything other than talk to the lead in flashbacks and video calls. And it's a superhero film, because that requires a superhero character, and there is absolutely nothing heroic about the protagonist. She's just an asshole who was handed massive powers, and utterly and absolutely refuses to do any good with them. Also, she's pretty incompetent. She frequently fails in ways she absolutely should not, and also is inflicted with incompetent writing, leading to a great many questions that begin with "Why doesn't she just..."
Space opera adventure, sure, but surely there's plenty of superhero movies/shows with similar arcs of the character being depressed, taking a break from their job, neglecting their responsibilities, etc, before getting pulled back in by the events of the movie? And same with the 'why doesn't she just' thing, it's hard to write fully logically consistent problems for superhero characters and most viewers don't think things through remotely as far as you do, so you get shortcuts all over the place...
View original postIt's a surprisingly uneventful trip, despite efforts to have danger and stuff, and extremely tedious for someone who is supposed to be "Superman, but a cute blonde." For the most part, she just goes around in the oh-so-original costume of a long brown coat, only donning the Supergirl costume for the climactic fight at the end. Frankly, it's more like "Starlord, but a cute blonde." And rather than a supporting cast of entertaining aliens, played by American actors, it's a side-kick and some background humans, played by foreigners, who are not made to speak properly like Alcock does. There are also timeouts to flash back to Kara's origin. It's weird and very very implausible, involving a Kryptonian city floating in space in a forcefield, which, to the utter shock and dismay of the scientists who set it up, begins to have food supply problems over a decade later, so an adolescent/new adult Kara was wrapped in tin foil and put in a big sphere with her pet puppy, and shot to Earth, to join Kal-el (incidentally, there is a line implying Kara's parents disapprove of Jor-El's controversial intentions for Kal's Earth career, but they are sending her to join him anyway). There was potential material there, and you could see a way for this origin to connect with Kara's repellant behavior and petulance, but the film never does the legwork, and does absolutely nothing to support what is close to her character's thesis line, where she compares herself to Clark, saying that he sees the good in people and she sees the truth. There is not one single second of footage of this iteration of Kara before this line is uttered that would inform her more cynical worldview or disenchantment with people in general. The line certainly has nothing to do with her behavior toward Ruthy, and she never evinces any suspicion or cynicism about people's motives. In fact, she's remarkably accepting and trusting of other people, and does not remotely demonstrate any ability or power to detect or anticipate selfish or bad behavior. It's like the whole line is just a random non-sequitur inserted into the film to shit on Clark. And when you consider that the opening scene features Krypto urinating on his picture, it's not hard to leap to that conclusion.
Her behaviour during that first encounter with Ruthie qualifies as 'cynical worldview and disenchantment with people in general', surely. I agree she seems naive when trusting that couple that runs the bar where she meets Lobo and letting them poison her, but then again considering how ineffective that poison ends up being, maybe that's more that she can't be bothered to be cautious.
View original postSpeaking of Clark, I stand by my contention from the latest Superman movie that this version is not portrayed well. He continues his socially-inept behavior when meeting Kara upon her arrival on Earth, insisting on talking to her in English for the benefit of the audience despite her inability to understand it and giving her a girly version of his costume, stating that it tells people they are good. So Clark is still retarded.
Yeah, that was a bit on the nose, having him act like your stereotypical American Karen who doesn't speak any other language and thinks if foreigners don't understand them at first, they should just speak louder - though he then immediately calls himself out about it.
I haven't seen this version of Superman anywhere else, so can't really comment otherwise.
View original postAnyway, another element of note in the film is the introduction of Jason Momoa playing Jason Momoa, dressed as a goth biker who was rejected from KISS for being a little too dull. People call him Lobo, and I suppose he is a comic book character, but his appearances in the movie are rather pointless, and they certainly don't establish any character for him. He's a gruff tough guy, kind of like Wolverine in the very first X-men movie. Actually, a lot like Logan, come to think of it, just without the very specific powers and signature costume & weaponry. Including having a slightly more positive relationship with the youngest prominent female character than anyone else. But all he really does is add to the moving parts of a couple of fight scenes.
True. I always enjoy watching Momoa and I did here too, but it's true he's rather pointless in this story.
View original postBack to the eponymous lead, she has absolutely no arc or journey. She just arbitrarily decides that Ruthy is her friend near the end, a development built on nothing more than "almost a whole movie has passed since they met". It's implied that she has made a major decision to change her life at the end, but it does not grow naturally from anything we have seen her do or experience. It's also hard to care much about her action scenes, because she's potentially so powerful that you can't see how she is in real danger, even in red solar systems, where she is all badass at hand-to-hand combat (with no explanation for any such training, and no real point in her personal time when she could have. She is living a civilian life on her Krypton remnant until she is old enough to be played by Alcock, arrived at Earth where she initially had to cope with suddenly being overwhelmed by superhuman senses, and become colloquially fluent in English as an adult, all well before her 23rd birthday). And of course, her behavior is consistently repellent in ways the movie seems to think are funny, from living on a complete pigsty of a spaceship where a dog pees at will, to eating and drinking random alien crap (literally, at least once) to sharing a spoon with her obnoxious dog. There is not feeling compelled to unrealistic aesthetic expectations and female standards of behavior, and not being actively disgusting, so that you feel uncomfortable on her behalf when seeing her lifestyle. Kara falling into the former category is just fine. There is no ideological/feminist/gender-politics reason accept or excuse her being firmly into the latter.
The 'absolutely no arc or journey' is the most important point I disagree with - which of course is going to have a big impact on how much one likes or dislikes the movie. Her relationship with Ruthie does evolve, she takes more and more care of her as the movie progresses, while Ruthie becomes comfortable enough with her to tear into her about halfway through, before apologizing later. Kara's failure to save the bar couple and their daughter, while not dwelled on much at the time it happens, does clearly leave a mark and makes her put much more effort into saving the 'brides' during the final big fight. I'm not saying any of this was particularly impressive or ground-breaking, but it seemed like normal enough superhero character development to me.
View original postThis is a pointless movie. There is not much of a story, not much of any characters, and it's like a duller, less diverse, extremely lower-stakes version of Guardians of the Galaxy.
I thought it was just fine - though it's true as I've seen mentioned in other reviews that considering the funk superhero movies as a genre seem to be in later, 'just fine' movies won't be enough to gain back fans. And this does seem like a movie intended to establish Milly's version of Supergirl for future movies, but without explicitly setting anything up in that direction. Presumably there will be future Superman films in which she'd have a large role, but seems like DC no longer dares to explicitly build a DC Universe after their several earlier attempts? Though I don't honestly watch enough DC movies to have a good view of where they stand.
Supergirl
- 28/06/2026 04:17:19 AM
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I thought it was decent enough - better than many reviews suggested.
- 05/07/2026 11:34:43 PM
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