Milly Alcock Is the 'Supergirl' That Makes Sense

Superhero films have been trying to figure out Supergirl for decades. The 1984 Helen Slater version arrived at the tail end of the Christopher Reeve era and felt inherited rather than earned. The character has cycled through TV iterations and animated appearances since, each one orbiting Superman’s mythology without ever establishing a gravitational pull of its own. The problem was never Kara Zor-El. The problem was that nobody had quite worked out who she actually was, underneath the cape.

Craig Gillespie’s 2026 film, based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s acclaimed comic run, at least understands the question. This version of Kara is not the wide-eyed, optimistic cousin of Kal-El that popular culture has defaulted to for years. She is something considerably more complicated: a woman who watched Krypton die, who spent years in survival mode before landing on a planet that already had a Superman and therefore didn’t quite know what to do with her, and who has been carrying the weight of that displacement ever since. When James Gunn described her as “much more hardcore” than previous versions, that wasn’t marketing language. It was a genuine reorientation of the character.

Milly Alcock carries all of that without making it feel like a burden the film is dragging behind it. Her Kara is guarded and occasionally reckless and capable of a warmth she doesn’t entirely know how to express, and Alcock moves between those registers with a naturalness that the writing doesn’t always support but her performance does regardless. She emerged from House of the Dragon with a reputation for playing young women navigating impossible circumstances with more composure than anyone around them deserves, and she brings exactly that quality here. The suit fits. More importantly, the character fits.

The film’s aesthetic leans hard into the source material’s cosmic brutalism, all alien landscapes and red sun light and a grungier visual grammar that has more in common with the Furiosa end of the spectrum than anything the MCU has produced. It is not always elegant, and the cinematography makes some choices that prioritize mood over clarity in ways that don’t always pay off. But the ambition behind the aesthetic is coherent, which is more than can be said for most superhero films operating at this scale.

The relationship between Kara and Ruthye, the young girl whose revenge mission drives the film’s plot, gives Alcock something to work against, and the dynamic between them is where the film finds its emotional footing. Ruthye’s bluntness and Kara’s reluctant protectiveness produce a texture that straightforward hero-versus-villain structures rarely allow.

Supergirl will not be everyone’s entry point into the new DCU, and it carries the uneven energy of a franchise still working out its own internal logic. But Alcock makes a case for this character that has never been made before with quite this much conviction. Whatever the DCU builds around her next, the foundation is there.

Supergirl is available now on Cathay Pacific‘s award-winning inflight entertainment system.