Supergirl is like a blend of Star Wars movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, and 2025's Superman, but the proportions are all off. It's not a bad movie, but it's also not very fun.
Milly Alcock is Kara Zor-El, cousin to Kal-El, AKA Clark Kent, AKA Superman. She's surly, disillusioned, turning 21, and celebrating by making a pub crawl across the universe, preferably on planets with red suns, since she can't actually get drunk on planets with yellow suns, like Earth. Her sole companion is her rambunctious dog, Krypto. After space pirate Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) shoots Krypto with a slow acting poison dart, Kara joins forces with the orphaned Ruthye (Eve Ridley) to find this common enemy. Ruthye wants to kill Krem, and Kara needs the poison antidote he carries.
In flashbacks we learn how Kara made it to Earth years after her cousin, and Superman (David Corenswet) does make a brief appearance. The band of space pirates Krem leads are also human traffickers, kidnapping young girls to be breeders for their all male society, but unlike in Fury Road, these girls are never anything but background players in need of saving. And the pubs Kara crawls are filled with all the creative alien scum and villainy you'd expect to find in the likes of Mos Eisley.
Craig Gillespie directs, but it seems producer James Gunn can't resist his usual urge to include Earthly pop songs in a story that only briefly includes stops on Earth. That Kara's record collection and iPod (!) would be filled with the hits of Earth makes sense, but I am not convinced The Girl From Ipanema is a tune that would have reached the song list of an alien lounge singer on some distant planet.
Milly Alcock is really winning as Kara, but she's stuck in a gloomy and repetitive movie that feels like it has been overstuffed with violent dudes - including Jason Mamoa as Lobo, for some reason - as a way of overcompensating for the fact that the two leads are girls. (Well, one is a girl. Supergirl is a woman, and why she's called "Supergirl" and not "Superwoman" does not go unnoticed.) I fear if this movie doesn't do well, this may be the last we see of this Supergirl, which is a shame because I really would like to see what she could accomplish back on Earth with her old cousin Kal-El.
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