Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,
When James Gunn was announced as co-CEO of DC Studios in October 2022 — tasked with soft-rebooting a cinematic universe that had already lurched through multiple false starts — otherwise reasonable, well-informed, and critical “cinephiles“ immediately believed every word out of his mouth. From the promise to focus on original ideas with strong scripts, to the supposedly independent nature of his creative control, so-called “free thinkers” assumed, with great excitement, that the man chosen to shepherd a multi-billion dollar franchise was not only One Of Them, but a true artist’s artist — one who would, above all else, honor the source material. Two months later, an oddly intimate video posted to social media unveiled 10 projects, all of which were certainly real and totally in the works, to thunderous applause. Particularly celebrated was Gunn’s plan to adapt Tom King1 and Bilquis Evely’s 2021–22 comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which he called “amazing” and “award-winning” pitching it as “a big science fiction epic.”
Now, just over three years later, Supergirl — which quietly dropped the Woman of Tomorrow subtitle somewhere in its development cycle — is out in theaters. And man does it suck.
Following Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), cousin of Superman (David Corenswet), the film opens with its hero in a bit of a rut: blacking out across the galaxy on a birthday pub crawl and dodging calls from Clark. With her is breakout star Krypto the Dog, whose presence in last summer’s Superman accounted for, at minimum, half of that film’s goodwill. For some reason, Supergirl immediately writes him off, poisoned by the film’s villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, who also steals Kara’s ship in the process. Krem had murdered the family of Ruthye, a thirteen-year-old girl, in the opening scene; she finds Kara and asks for help tracking him across the galaxy, ultimately to kill him as revenge. The three-way setup is at least efficient: Kara needs the antidote to the poison Krem wears around his neck, Ruthye needs someone to help her find him, and both of them need to cross the galaxy in order to learn a lesson or two.
Despite the frankly criminal choice to sideline Krypto, the film’s initial setup is not terrible. The road-trip nature of Kara and Ruthye’s quest could lend itself nicely to sci-fi epic, allowing the audience to see a multitude of planets, aliens, and ships. Instead, Kara travels from a gray, broken-down space bus to a literally dying planet and then finally to an empty world full of dirt. Many aliens appear on this very short trip, but they are all also gray and, save for one or two, simply speak English. There is an alien bar — long a staple of sci-fi adventure and reliably the most interesting locale in any such story — where a live band inexplicably plays a parody of “The Girl from Ipanema” and the lights are seemingly never turned on. Occasionally, Kara or Ruthye will be in a dimly lit ship, lying in a cave, or sitting in a cage.
One of Gunn’s key promises was that no film would go into production without a strong script. His approval method seems flawed, because the script for Supergirl is really quite bad, and oddly inert. Kara does not quite learn or change on this journey — beyond not being drunk, I guess — and after spending the whole trip pleading with Ruthye not to kill and declaring it will taint her soul, Kara ultimately kills Krem while announcing she is doing it for revenge. Flashbacks gesture toward a more interesting movie, with the destruction of Krypton beautifully rendered, if only because it recalls better films. They arrive with almost no warning and expand the DC Universe considerably; Kara, it turns out, was not born on Krypton itself but in Argo City, which survived the planet’s destruction only to slowly die anyway when its core was discovered to be made of Kryptonite. All of that lore exists so that we can understand that Kara’s depression stems from witnessing her mother’s death and never processing it. In a movie about Kryptonians, this drawn-out, non-linear origin story is more tedious than revelatory. Of course her mom is dead. They are all dead. That is somewhat the point.
So why is Kara less sad by the end? Beyond saving Krypto, she’s taken down Krem, who runs a galaxy-wide operation kidnapping women to forcibly repopulate an all-male race. If you expected that to be handled with tact, I’m sorry to report that the victims are seen sparsely, primarily in a very-2016 coded scene wherein they rise from the rubble like angels and proceed to operate a giant machine gun, mowing down dozens of aliens. Worth noting: every woman in this trafficking ring is a human-adjacent alien, implying some broader racial hierarchy in this universe that the film has absolutely no interest in exploring. Weird!
A sex trafficking ring taken down by a female superhero might naturally lend itself to something resembling a feminist film. Luckily, director Craig Gillespie — the man behind Dumb Money and Cruella — is committed to female empowerment. In one sequence, Kara flies in to save the day, “powerfully” calls herself a bitch, immediately gets poisoned with Kryptonite, and is rescued by womanizing alien Lobo (Jason Momoa??), who rides off on a flying motorcycle and, as his parting words, addresses her as “tits.” Some of the identity politics of the late 2010s may feel dated in 2026, but it’s possible that hiring a female director for this particular story might have been a good idea. Gillespie is also seemingly incapable of blocking an action sequence, though that likely has less to do with his gender and more to do with his general hackishness.
Ultimately, even if you find something to enjoy in DC’s latest outing, the whole exercise feels pointless. Around the same time Gunn announced his new universe, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, done with his cost-cutting and debt-erasing, was fattening up his most valuable properties, preparing for a sale. That sale, to Paramount, was announced in February of this year and is expected to close in a matter of months. With a shockingly muted marketing campaign and an overall amateurish feel, one is left to wonder whether Supergirl simply exists to keep the lights on long enough for the deal to close. But hey: at least we can all take comfort in the fact that James Gunn has read the comics.
Signing off,
Max Bolen
Bought Woman of Tomorrow years ago, and never read it.
For those unaware, Tom King was also a CIA Agent who helped plan the invasion of Iraq. This has genuinely no bearing on this review and does not necessarily diminish his skills as a writer, but it felt almost dishonest to not mention it somewhere. He did not write this movie; he did write the upcoming Lanterns. He has only written 4 superhero books that are thinly veiled metaphors for why his PTSD is more sad than the deaths of millions of Iraqis, which when you consider his massive output is perhaps the best you could hope for. Yes, I used to read comics.
We really enjoyed it!