DC could have played it safe with Kara Zor-El: a sunnier, younger cousin still fundamentally cut from Superman's cloth. Supergirl goes a different way. This Kara isn't looking for hope so much as trying to figure out whether hope has ever actually done anything for her, and Milly Alcock plays that exhaustion and anger like she means it — someone who remembers Krypton too clearly to treat it as anyone's inspiring origin story.
Alcock doesn't play Kara as Superman's rebellious cousin. She plays her as someone who never got the luxury of forgetting what was actually lost.
The film finds its strongest idea in Kara's uneasy partnership with Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a girl hunting the man who destroyed her family. Director Craig Gillespie frames it as a cosmic revenge western, and the pairing works whenever the script lets the two actually argue: Kara knows vengeance doesn't fix anything but isn't stable enough to act like she believes it, while Ruthye's total certainty is exactly the kind of simplicity Kara secretly misses.
Trouble is, the galaxy-hopping plot keeps pulling focus from that relationship. Every new planet brings a new visual idea, a new supporting face, a new set piece — and few of them leave much of a mark before the story's moved on again. Matthias Schoenaerts brings real menace to the villain Krem, but the script never gives him more than "final obstacle" to work with, so the revenge Kara and Ruthye are chasing never gets as complicated as the film clearly wants it to feel.
Alcock carries the film through all of that. She slouches, rolls her eyes, treats violence like an inconvenience she's already tired of — and when she finally does get serious, you feel the gear-shift. The action is best when it leans into that physicality: Kara plows through buildings and machinery rather than floating gracefully past them, even if the digital backdrops occasionally flatten into the same weightless CGI geography that's dulled a dozen other superhero movies this decade. Krypto the dog, meanwhile, quietly does more character work than half the film's dialogue, giving Kara something to care for that doesn't ask anything of her in return. Jason Momoa's Lobo shows up, makes noise, and leaves without shifting the story's emotional direction — fun in the moment, but clearly on loan from a different movie.
The film is also visibly straddling two jobs at once: a self-contained grief story, and the connective tissue for a bigger DC universe. Alcock keeps that tension from swallowing her performance, and the inevitable comparison to Superman actually clarifies what makes her version distinct — his optimism was built on Earth; her grief showed up already fully formed. That's a sharper, stranger movie trying to get out from under a more conventional one, and the humor's timing doesn't always help: just as Kara's mourning gets interesting, the plot supplies another planet or another eccentric distraction.
