Based in part on the graphic novel Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely (who gets a planet named after her here), the film finds Kara Zor-El, aka Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, on an extended intergalactic birthday bar crawl. Like her cousin, she is a survivor of the doom that came to their home planet of Krypton, but she was old enough to remember her parents and whole life that were lost in the cataclysm. She has never really gotten over the trauma and that trauma is fueling her current interplanetary bender. All of that is interrupted when she encounters Ruthye (Eve Ridley) who wants Kara’s help in extracting revenge on the alien Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the leader of a band of slavers and brigands who have killed her family. Kara is resistant at first, but after Krem poisons her dog Krypto, she agrees to help track down the brigand down in order to get the antidote.
A number of superhero stories are in some way about trauma – Looking at you, Batman – Supergirl actually does address the idea somewhat. Alcock gives a solid performance as a young woman who acknowledges her grief but yet is afraid to let go of it. While she warns Ruthye about the dangers of acting on her grief, she seems unable to take her own advice. Perhaps she is mistakenly thinking that doing so would also mean letting go of her memories of her parents.
And while the superhero film genre has grown and evolved over the last several decades, Schoenaerts’ lead villain Krem feels like a step backwards. Outside of just being first the inciting incident and an obstacle in Kara and Ruthye’s journeys, Krem is a pretty flat, uninvolving villain. Marvel had this problem with a number of its early MCU installments before making a concerted effort to give them a bit of depth. Schoenaerts works hard to hard to give Krem some life, but to no avail. It’s a sad state of affairs when you have a villain shoot a dog with poison that will cause a slow and agonizing death and one still can’t work up that much reaction to him.
Lobo has been a fan favorite since his the late 1980s, and many genre fans have argued that Jason Momoa would be the perfect actor to play him. But his introduction into live action here feels cursory, and a bit of a let down. As a bounty hunter with no qualms about killing or committing large amounts of mayhem and property damage, his attitude stands in contrast to the warnings Kara tries to give to Ruthyie about revenge killing. However, the film doesn’t take advantage of that connection.
