Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a strange beast — a film that is simultaneously too faithful to its source material for mainstream audiences and not quite faithful enough for the readers who love Tom King’s nine-issue run. Director Craig Gillespie brings his considerable visual craft to Kara Zor-El’s solo debut in the DC Universe, and Milly Alcock’s performance is the best thing in the film by some distance. But the story — an interstellar revenge odyssey told through the eyes of a young girl named Ruthye — struggles with the tonal gap between the comic’s formal literary ambitions and what a $170 million superhero blockbuster needs to deliver.
The critical split is reflected precisely in the numbers: 55% on Rotten Tomatoes versus 76% on Fandango, with the professional critical consensus running cooler than the audience response. This is a film that people who like it tend to really like. What they like is Alcock, Momoa’s Lobo, and a DCU that’s finally willing to be strange and uncomfortable. What they’re less enthusiastic about is the film’s structural awkwardness, its pacing in the middle hour, and the question of whether a 1h 50m runtime can do justice to the character beats the story is attempting.
The Cast
What the Film Gets Right
The best version of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a film about grief, powerlessness, and what it means to be the strongest person in the room and still not be able to protect the people you love. That story is in here. Kara Zor-El in this film is not the Supergirl of the Arrowverse or the 1984 film — she’s bitter, scarred from her Kryptonian childhood, and functioning on a birthday trip where she’s deliberately left her powers behind via a red sun lamp when everything goes wrong. The vulnerability that creates in those early sequences, and Alcock’s performance communicating it, is genuinely effective.
Jason Momoa as Lobo is the kind of casting that sounds absurd on paper and works completely in practice. Momoa’s physicality is exactly right for the Main Man, and his comedic timing in scenes opposite Alcock produces a double act that’s genuinely fun to watch. The film is most alive in scenes between Kara, Lobo, and Ruthye — the unlikely trio dynamic that King’s comic built its emotional architecture around. When those three characters are together and the film lets them breathe, it justifies the adaptation.
Where It Struggles
The source material is a nine-issue comic told in a highly formal literary style, with Ruthye’s narration doing an enormous amount of structural and emotional work. Ana Nogueira’s screenplay preserves the narration conceit but the prose doesn’t fully translate — what reads as considered and deliberate on the page can feel slow and distancing on screen, particularly in the film’s second act when the interstellar journey requires a lot of ground to be covered at pace.
Krem of the Yellow Hills is the film’s weakest element. He needs to be a credible source of genuine dread — a man who does something so unspeakable that Kara abandons her restraint in pursuit of him across the galaxy. Matthias Schoenaerts is a capable actor but the script doesn’t give him sufficient screen time or specific menace to fully earn the weight of vengeance the rest of the film hangs on. The crime that drives the narrative is established but Krem never quite coalesces into a villain who justifies the emotional stakes.
The 55% Rotten Tomatoes score is partially a genre problem: critics who find superhero films formally exhausting are unlikely to be charmed by a film that is still operating within the genre’s structural conventions even as it reaches for something different thematically. The film’s ambitions are real. Its execution is uneven. Both things are simultaneously true and the score reflects that tension rather than being a straightforward judgment either way.
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| Milly Alcock Is PerfectEvery scene she’s in. Alcock’s Kara is ferocious, grief-stricken, and surprisingly funny when the film allows it. This is the performance that justifies an entire franchise and the DCU made the right call with this casting. | Krem Is UnderwrittenThe villain who drives the entire film’s revenge narrative needs to be terrifying. Schoenaerts is capable but the screenplay doesn’t give Krem the screen time or specific characterisation to fully justify the weight of the story built around him. | Second Act PacingThe middle hour drags. The interstellar journey structure requires covering a lot of narrative ground and the film struggles to maintain momentum across it. King’s comic used Ruthye’s narration to compress time efficiently; the screen equivalent is less graceful. |
| Momoa’s Lobo Is a RevelationNobody knew Jason Momoa was this funny. His chemistry with Alcock is the film’s most reliable pleasure and the comedic double act between Kara’s restrained fury and Lobo’s chaotic enthusiasm is exactly what the middle act needed more of. | The Tonal CompromiseKing’s comic is genuinely grim and formally literary. A $170M DCU blockbuster has to be something else. The film occupies an uneasy middle ground between those two things rather than fully committing to either, and the 55% RT score reflects critics noticing that gap. | Ruthye’s Narration Doesn’t Fully TranslateWhat works as deliberate literary prose on the page can feel slow and distancing on screen. The narration conceit is preserved but not fully reimagined for the medium, and it creates friction in sequences where momentum is needed. |
| Craig Gillespie’s Visual CraftGillespie brings genuine visual ambition to the Kryptonian sequences and the alien worlds. The film looks like it cost $170 million. The production design for the alien landscapes and Krypton flashbacks is the film’s most striking technical achievement. |
The Verdict
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a better film than its Rotten Tomatoes score suggests and a more compromised one than its Fandango audience number implies. The truth is somewhere in the 65-70 range: a film with a genuinely extraordinary central performance, an inspired comedy double act in Alcock and Momoa, and real thematic ambitions — that doesn’t quite stick the landing on its villain, pacing, or the translation of King’s literary sensibility to blockbuster format.
Milly Alcock is the DCU’s next great superhero and this film establishes that definitively. The question now is whether James Gunn can build a DCU around her that gives her better material. On the evidence of this film, she’ll elevate whatever she’s given. The franchise is in good hands. The film around those hands is imperfect but genuinely worthwhile.
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