Leading up to its June release earlier this year, it would be an understatement to say I was excited to witness Milly Alcock take on her debut lead role as the heroic badass Supergirl in Supergirl (2026). Though I've never been a die-hard fan of the DC universe, it was hard to fully grasp the unrealistic portrayal of Kara Zor-El in the TV hit series Supergirl (2016). It beggars belief that a normal human woman could always appear in full makeup and a bouncy blowout, let alone a hypersonic, crime-fighting alien. I was ready for something different, a new version of the Hollywood heroine. As the trailers suggested, Craig Gillespie (the directorial genius behind Cruella, Lars and the Real Girl, and I, Tonya) had promised exactly that, offering a more realistic depiction of Supergirl as tough, moody and humanity's distant relative.

Four months after release and it’s safe to say no one is still thinking about Supergirl (2026). Coming off the back of movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), Wicked for Good (2025) and of course Barbie (2023) where the director has leaned towards stylising for a female driven audience, Gillespie’s interpretation feels like a gut punch from a twenty-pound alien. 

The opening homage to Superman volume four is nostalgic bait, quickly undercut by a messy room, leaking vodka and Krypto, her dog, pissing on a clipping of Superman's latest heroic feat. We pan to Kara, waking hungover in a teenager’s cesspit and then are thrown into a montage of Kara’s introduction video for alcoholics anonymous. The following set up is simple enough: Kara turns 23 and decides to mark the occasion with an intergalactic bar crawl, hopping from red-sun planet to red-sun planet in search of the kind of oblivion only a near-invincible alien can afford. One unmemorable villain introduction and an awkward Supergirl and sidekick encounter later we are fed some poor attempts at dry humour, a scene of Krypton biting alien balls and what feels like an unsatisfying climax when he is poisoned by the film’s main antagonist Kren of the Yellow Hills. 

By now you’re about a quarter of the way through the movie, and you may be looking for a quick exit. What was going through scriptwriter Ana Nogueira’s head when she wrote a scene where Kara buys popcorn made from slug excrement and quips “this tastes like shit” upon trying some, I don’t know. Then there's Jason Momoa’s chain-smoking motorcycle-riding bounty hunter Lobo, a bad drunken imitation of KISS’ Gene Simmons and an unneeded addition to the plot. His uselessness to the plot has me wondering if the writer, director and producer sat down and thought of reasons to keep a certain type of male audience, wondering why they’re watching a female led movie at all, entertained. Or maybe Momoa got lost and wandered on set from a completely different, considerably weirder movie. Maybe if he hadn’t, there would be more room in the budget to write a proper arc for Supergirl’s revenge seeking sidekick, Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley in her first big break. 

The most frustrating part? Alcock is, by every measure, an embodiment of the alternative female character representation we need in Hollywood right now. Her brief, scene-stealing cameo in last year’s Superman promised a version of Kara who could carry her own film on charisma alone, but that’s exactly where the film and fans fail to understand each other. Supergirl arrived in Superman’s lair as an unimpressed drunkard, gone before she could be properly introduced, and that’s exactly the version I saw on screen in the cinema. Fans of Superman (2025) were so hungry for more of the selfless, adorably flawed hero that they forgot Kara, who was nothing like her cousin. Unlike Clark, Kara is sent to earth after she witnesses the death of her mother and the imminent death of the rest of her home planet Krypton. Her hero arc is thus much different and much more difficult for her to quickly accept. Fans forgot this, and after years of being fed an unrealistic version of the character, their quick comparison to a far less traumatised Superman meant Supergirl was judged, dismissed and forgotten. 

That's the real disappointment, and it’s the one I keep coming back too. This is a Supergirl movie explicitly built to ask why the “girl” in her name gets treated as smaller than the “man” in her cousin's, but it flinches every time it gets close to answering effectively. Gillespie, a director who has spent the last several years turning stylised, female-led stories into culturally trendy moments, seems allergic to let this one be as sharp, or strange, or angry as its lead clearly wants it to be. 

None of this is Alcock's fault. She's magnetic in every scene the script allows her to be a person instead of a plot device, and it's not hard to imagine a leaner, meaner cut of this film. I think a version that was willing to sit in Kara’s boredom and rage instead of rushing past it would beautifully deliver the “alternative route” the marketing promised. What we got instead was a movie dressed in punk aesthetics, a stupid suit that doesn’t do anything and a plot that felt like it was written to embody an unimpressed teenager. Four months later that's the whole problem, because those who made the film didn’t care enough to take a risk, so we don’t care to remember it.