Before anything else, a quick thank you to Accessreel, Warner Bros Australia, and Event Cinemas for the early screening. With that said, I deliberately sat with Supergirl for almost a full day before writing this, because it's the kind of film that deserves a fair, considered take rather than a knee-jerk one. Having let it settle, here's where I've landed: this is a good movie, anchored by a genuinely strong lead, that keeps tripping over its own baffling decisions.

Supergirl is the 2026 film directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, the second entry in James Gunn and Peter Safran's new DC Universe, adapted from the Tom King and Bilquis Evely comic Woman of Tomorrow. The premise, kept brief, is essentially True Grit in space: a jaded, hard-drinking Kara Zor-El is pulled into a galaxy-spanning revenge mission alongside a young orphaned girl. As a fellow Australian, I'll happily admit there's an extra bit of pride watching Milly Alcock front a film this size, but my praise for her isn't sentimental, it's earned.

Alcock does a properly good job as Kara. I'll be upfront that I enjoyed her more in the second half, once the early drunk, slurring, stumbling characterisation eased off, but at no point did I stop believing her. The emotion underneath the attitude lands, and she sells what Kara is feeling throughout. That's the hardest part of a role like this, and she carries it with real conviction. It's no surprise that the broad critical reaction has singled her out as the best thing in the film.

My first real frustration is how desperately the movie protects its family-friendly rating. You can feel it in nearly every action sequence. There are beats literally obscured behind a blur effect, or pushed just off camera so you never actually see the impact of what's happening. It's distracting, and it undercuts the grittier, rougher tone the film is otherwise reaching for. My honest reaction was simple: let her off the leash. Bump it up a rating and commit. Kara is not Superman. She's a more jaded, harder-edged character by design, and she's earned the right to have that edge shown properly without the camera flinching away every time.

My biggest problem, and I know this puts me at odds with a chunk of the reactions out there, is Lobo. For me, he was comfortably the worst part of the film, to the point where I'm choosing to mentally file those scenes away and pretend they didn't happen. Jason Momoa campaigned for years to play this character, and I came away with a lot of questions and very few satisfying answers about how it was handled.