108 min | PG-13 | June 26, 2026 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Kara Zor-El watched Krypton die slowly while her baby cousin escaped clean. Now she crosses the galaxy on a revenge quest with a grieving girl and a stolen ship. The cape is the same. The wound underneath is older.
Kara Zor-El is not the hopeful farm boy who became Superman. She survived Krypton the hard way, stranded on a shard of the dying planet and watching everyone she loved go cold around her. When a child named Ruthye turns up looking for the man who murdered her father, Kara reluctantly joins an interstellar hunt for the killer. Craig Gillespie builds the film as a space western about grief and the price of vengeance. The story has something on its mind and never stops to lecture you about it.
Milly Alcock plays Kara with a hardness the part needs. She is not selling wholesomeness. She plays a woman who has already lost everything and treats her own power as a burden more than a gift. Eve Ridley plays Ruthye with a stubborn grief that keeps pushing against Kara’s reluctance, and the two build a real rapport out of mutual damage. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem as a villain with reasons rather than menace. Jason Momoa wanders in as Lobo and chews exactly the right amount of scenery. The performances carry the weight the plot sometimes sets down.
Gillespie works from Ana Nogueira’s adaptation of Tom King’s comic and stages this as a road movie across alien worlds instead of a city-saving spectacle. The change of scale is the whole point. After the bright metropolis optimism of the recent Superman, this film goes darker and quieter and lets its themes breathe. The production design favors lived-in grime over chrome. The action arrives in short brutal bursts rather than endless noise.
This is a film about whether vengeance and mercy can live in the same person, and whether someone built almost entirely from loss can still choose to be good. It raises those questions and trusts the audience to sit with them. It does not always solve the tension between an intimate character drama and a franchise that needs to keep moving. The pieces do not lock together perfectly. But this is a genuine attempt at a different kind of superhero film, and the attempt mostly earns its keep.