Last year, James Gunn’s Superman tried to rebrand the most straight-laced, goody-two-shoes superhero in pop culture as “punk rock”. Now, Craig Gillespie’s adaptation of Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s celebrated 2021 comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow introduces the one major DC character who actually possesses a recognisably punk sensibility, only to sand away almost every abrasive edge that made her compelling on the page.

This is the second theatrical entry in the rebooted DC Universe overseen by James Gunn and Peter Safran, following Gunn’s take on the Man of Steel. Instead of committing to Kal-El’s Kryptonian super-cousin Kara Zor-El as the traumatised cosmic drifter whose anger exists in permanent dialogue with impossible ideals of heroism, Supergirl reduces its eponymous hero’s first feature-film outing to the same faux-anarchic house style sludge that has metastasised across every superhero film touched by Gunn since Guardians of the Galaxy.

The film follows Kara, played by Milly Alcock, who survived the destruction of Krypton with memories fully intact, unlike her infant cousin Kal, who reached Earth too young to remember anything beyond the mythology later constructed around his origins. She celebrates turning twenty-three by hauling her super-dog Krypto across an interstellar pub crawl on planets orbiting red suns, exploiting the one astronomical loophole that temporarily deprives Kryptonians of their powers and allows her to drink herself into a rare state where survivor’s guilt finally shuts up for a few hours. 

The premise immediately distinguishes her from Superman, whose unbridled optimism stems from his ordinary upbringing in Kansas. Kara instead carries lived memories of cultural extinction that continue to haunt her. Ana Nogueira’s writing gestures towards that interiority through a flashback sequence set in the last remnants of Krypton in Argo City, yet every revelation is just further spoon-fed exposition.

The screenplay’s inability to organise Kara’s inner life inevitably weakens every (non-canine) relationship orbiting her. The film pairs her with Ruthye, an adolescent girl played by Eve Ridley whose parents and brother are butchered by the space pirate Krem of the Yellow Hills, before she embarks on a galaxy-spanning revenge mission. Kara initially refuses to involve herself until Krem shoots Krypto with a poisoned dart whose only known antidote remains in his possession, turning the story into a race against the clock to save a very good dog.

In the original comic, Ruthye served as our point of entry into the story, recounting Kara’s actions years later as though she had travelled alongside an almost mythic frontier hero whose unwavering belief in mercy survived repeated confrontations with unimaginable cruelty. That framing transformed the journey into an examination of heroism itself because we witnessed Kara’s morals slowly accumulate through Ruthye’s admiration. This adaptation shifts the narrative almost entirely into Kara’s perspective without constructing an equally compelling interior framework to replace it, leaving Ruthye stranded as another broadly sketched teenage sidekick whose personality rarely extends beyond solemn declarations of vengeance. Krem fares even worse because Matthias Schoenaerts receives almost nothing beyond an impressive collection of facial piercings, while the remainder of the NPC ensemble feels stiff and stranded across visual effects that never materialise into convincing environments.

Alcock largely escapes the wreckage because she seems to intuitively understand Kara beyond whatever the writing fails to articulate. Every exhausted shrug or sarcastic deflection, and every fleeting moment where Kara’s guilt punctures her cultivated indifference suggests that the Australian actor constructed the emotional continuity independently of the material surrounding her. Almost everybody else of any consequence (including a forgettable turn from Jason Momoa as Lobo) is pure collateral damage.

The production’s drab visual identity proves just as dispiriting. Gillespie previously translated the damaged interiority of protagonists like Tonya Harding in I, Tonya and Estella in Cruella into a distinctive cinematic language through an irreverent visual confidence that reflected their unstable psychology. Almost none of that survives here. Supergirl is suffocated with dull, digitised textures across anonymous LED volume horizons and interchangeable alien settlements that appear assembled from recycled concept art discarded after Guardians of the Galaxy. Krem’s army of Brigands too, fare no better as antagonists because they amount to little beyond recycled Ravagers, lifted wholesale from Gunn’s space-punk iconography after every trace of swagger and visual invention has already been extracted from them. 

Gunn did not direct Supergirl, though his creative DNA has become so deeply institutionalised within the rebooted DC Universe that his fingerprints remain visible across almost every other major creative decision as well. Each aggressively curated needle-drop and every wisecracking grotesque recalls sensibilties that once felt idiosyncratic in his work at Marvel before endless repetition has since transformed them into egregious templates. In fact, Kelty Greye and KidMotel’s rendition of “The Middle” might genuinely be the most catastrophically misjudged musical cue in a blockbuster this year.

The film’s political imagination is almost as impoverished as its visual one. Nearly a decade after Wonder Woman convinced Hollywood that a former IDF soldier’s wooden line readings and boardroom feminism constituted some sort of cultural milestone, what distinguishes Supergirl is not what it believes but how conspicuously it avoids believing anything at all. Every supposed act of feminist conviction or self-determination feels sterile and focus-tested. Replace Kara with almost any interchangeable female supe, and remarkably little about its performative empowerment would change. It possesses no discernible worldview beyond the exhausting blockbuster ritual of congratulating itself for discovering that women can also anchor billion-dollar consumer products.

I disliked Gunn’s Superman despite appreciating Corenswet’s fundamentally decent interpretation of Clark Kent, and Supergirl only deepens my skepticism toward this incarnation of the DC Universe. It embodies exactly the kind of aesthetic monoculture Martin Scorsese warned was swallowing mainstream cinema and is simply the latest casualty of that cultural regression.

Supergirl is currently running in theatres