A Hero with a Hangover
Milly Alcock gives Kara Zor-El anger, grief, and comic recklessness, but Supergirl keeps sanding its strange space-western edges into familiar franchise machinery.
The verdict
Milly Alcock gives Kara a bruised, unruly pulse that the surrounding space western only intermittently deserves.
Minor spoilers ahead
The first useful thing Supergirl does is refuse to make Kara Zor-El a sunnier copy of her cousin. Milly Alcock’s Kara drinks across planets, avoids intimacy, and treats heroism as an obligation she would rather postpone. The posture is comic, but the grief beneath it is not. She remembers Krypton not as an inherited story but as a home she watched disappear.
That difference gives Craig Gillespie’s film a promising center. This Supergirl can save people and still resent the universe that keeps asking her to care. The problem is that the movie around her is less willing to remain difficult.
A promising mess at the center
Alcock plays intoxication and anger without turning either into a costume. Her Kara is funny because she is impatient, not because the screenplay pauses for a joke. Even when the effects become busy, Alcock keeps a physical sense of someone who has enormous power and no stable place to put it.
Krypto helps reveal the softness she tries to conceal, while the young Ruthye gives the story a revenge plot and an ethical argument. Their journey through a rough cosmic frontier allows the film to borrow the shape of a western: damaged travelers, a pursued villain, temporary alliances, and landscapes where law has little meaning.
The arrangement should feel stranger than it does. Too often the film translates its unusual comic-book source into the recognizable beats of a franchise adventure. Kara may be unruly, but the structure surrounding her remains obedient.
Director Craig Gillespie. Image hosted by CinePixo.
Grief treated as production design
The destruction of Krypton gives Kara a different psychological relationship to loss than Superman. He grew up with absence; she carries memory. Supergirl understands this distinction intellectually and sometimes visually, but it does not always allow grief to alter the movie’s rhythm.
Pain becomes one more piece of backstory to be activated between action sequences. Alcock works against that simplification. A glance or sudden retreat can suggest the history the dialogue has already explained too cleanly.
Gillespie has previously shown a taste for protagonists whose damage creates abrasive style. Here, the demands of the larger DC project appear to pull in the opposite direction. The movie wants Kara to be a barfly, a survivor, a protector, and an accessible new franchise lead. It rarely lets those identities remain in conflict for long.
