Supergirl flies, then stumbles: Milly Alcock carries a film that can't get out of its own way

Milly Alcock's Supergirl lands in theatres on 26 June 2026 carrying the usual freight of a modern superhero origin story: a legacy hero, a dead planet, a cousin in red and blue, a desperate swing for cinematic relevance from a studio still rebuilding its comic-book slate. The film gives the young Australian actor a cape, a temper, and a planet-sized grief to carry, then asks her to do the carrying on her own. According to a 26 June 2026 review in the Hindustan Times, that is more or less the problem. The reviewer concludes that "Milly Alcock may save the day but cannot save this soulless action film that cannot even get the action right in most places," with the actor doing "everything in her power to shoulder" a project that has not been built to be shouldered.

The pitch, on paper, is a corrective. Supergirl — Kara Zor-El, Superman's older cousin, raised on the ruins of Krypton in this telling — gets a story about rage, exile and the cost of inherited power. The film wants to be angrier, stranger and more female-coded than the Man of Steel template that has dominated the last decade of DC features. What it actually delivers, on the evidence of the review, is a tedious mid-budget blockbuster: a star stuck inside a film that doesn't know what it wants to be, surrounded by supporting players who are given neither time nor motivation to register.

The actor and the assignment

Alcock arrives at the role with the only credential that has become non-negotiable in this corner of the genre: a reputation earned elsewhere. Her work in the limited series that prefigured House of the Dragon made her, for a moment, the most talked-about young actor on television; the surface joke in fan circles — that she could carry a feature with her eyebrows alone — stopped being a joke once the eyeballs actually appeared. The Hindustan Times review reads the casting as a net positive. Alcock's performance, by the paper's account, has the spark the film otherwise lacks: a cracked voice in the quieter scenes, a physicality in the fights that suggests an actor who has been briefed to treat gravity as optional.

The problem is what surrounds her. The reviewer singles out the action sequences as the film's most visible failure, writing that the film "cannot even get the action right in most places." That is a specific charge in a year when superhero films have been under pressure on exactly this front — overloaded third acts, weightless CG, and a sense that the genre's grammar has calcified. The reviewer's complaint is not that the film lacks spectacle; it is that the spectacle keeps failing to make spatial sense, that the cuts do not register the geography of a fight, that the camera seems unsure of where the eye is meant to land. For a Supergirl film, that is the one thing the film is supposed to be good at. Supergirl flies; flying is supposed to be the point.

A supporting cast with nothing to support

The other recurring complaint in the review is structural. A superhero film lives or dies by the quality of its second tier — the mentor, the love interest, the bureaucratic antagonist, the comic-relief sidekick who turns out to be the moral centre. The review's framing suggests that the supporting cast here is given no room to register, and that the film is unable to use its periphery to comment on its lead. The result is a feature in which Kara Zor-El's emotional through-line is the only thing the audience has to hold onto, and in which the world she is moving through — the planets, the villains, the small towns — functions as scenery rather than as argument.

This is the version of the failure the genre keeps repeating when the budget is too large and the script is too thin. The set-pieces get bigger; the relationships get smaller. The film accumulates running time without accumulating stakes. Audiences, increasingly, notice. The Hindustan Times review is one data point in a much larger pattern of mid-2020s superhero features being read as expensive and emotionally empty — a pattern that has already cost one major studio a reset and is currently costing another its box-office mojo.

What the film wants to be

To give the picture its due, the material the film is reaching for is real. Supergirl, in the better versions of the character, is a story about what happens when the most powerful person in the room is also the most displaced — when the home she is meant to protect is not the home she grew up in, when the cousin in the cape is treated as the public face of a family she is meant to keep alive in private. The film, the review suggests, gestures at this material without committing to it. The grief is gestured at. The anger is gestured at. The question — what does a survivor owe the dead? — is gestured at. None of it lands with the weight the premise implies.

This is also a film that lands in a year in which superhero features are being read more cynically than at any point since the genre's commercial peak. The Hindustan Times reviewer is not delivering a hot take; the reviewer is recording a fairly conventional mid-2020s complaint. The action is incoherent. The supporting cast is underwritten. The actor is doing more than the script allows. The studio has bet on a face and forgotten to bet on a film.

Stakes and what to watch for

The commercial stakes for the studio are larger than this one feature. The film is a tentpole for a slate, and a slate is a multi-year bet on a tonal direction. If the picture underperforms, the natural temptation — and the one that has played out repeatedly this decade — is to reach for the next reset, the next continuity, the next tonal reinvention. The other temptation, less common, is to write a better script.

For Alcock, the picture is less damaging than the review implies. A young actor in a soulless blockbuster is a familiar type; the relevant question is whether the actor is allowed to do anything else soon. The Hindustan Times review's strongest note is that the actor, given the material, is doing the most with it. The film, given the actor, is doing the least.

How Monexus framed this: the wire has read the film as a star turn wrapped in a flat vehicle; the review's load-bearing claim is that the action sequences — the genre's one non-negotiable — are the part of the film that has most visibly failed.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/hindustantimes