The Premise
Craig Gillespie directs, Ana Nogueira writes, and it's the second film in James Gunn's rebooted DCU. Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon) plays Kara Zor-El as a hungover, checked-out twentysomething who's been on Earth long enough to resent it and not long enough to care about it. Early on, a young alien named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) turns up asking Kara for help hunting down the man who killed her father, a warlord named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Jason Momoa shows up as Lobo. David Corenswet's Superman drops by to remind you which universe you're in. It's loosely built off Tom King's "Woman of Tomorrow" comic and it wears its space-western intentions on its sleeve.
The Case For
Alcock is the whole ballgame, and she's genuinely great. She plays Kara as bored, bitter, a little wrecked, and somehow still charming, which is a harder trick than the movie gives her credit for. Schoenaerts is a real actor doing real actor things as the villain, and Eve Ridley holds her own opposite him. Gillespie ("I, Tonya," "Cruella") knows how to shoot a smirk, and the interstellar-revenge frame gives the DCU something that at least isn't another Metropolis skyline. When the film lets Alcock be funny and mean, it works.
The Case Against
The movie around her is a shrug. Reviews across the board (58% on Rotten Tomatoes, per the aggregators) land in the same neighborhood: flat pacing, a script that keeps announcing its themes of grief and vengeance instead of dramatizing them, action beats that feel like assignments. Gillespie's voice gets sanded down into what one critic called "diet-James Gunn." Momoa's Lobo is a marketing beat wearing a character's clothes. At a reported $170M budget, the ambition on the page is nowhere near the ambition on the invoice.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you liked Alcock in "House of the Dragon" and want to watch her carry a bigger canvas, there's a real performance here worth clocking. If you're a DCU completist tracking the Gunn era, you have to see it. Fans of comic-accurate "Woman of Tomorrow" cosplay will get the beats they came for. Everyone else, especially anyone who bailed on the last decade of gray, glum superhero movies where the hero doesn't want to be the hero, will feel the runtime. If you thought "The Marvels" was a chore, this is that same chore in a cowboy hat.
The Ruling
SLOP because the raw materials are good and the movie squanders them. Alcock gives a movie-star performance. Gillespie is a real director. The comic it's cribbing from is sharp. And then Nogueira's script sits down and refuses to build scenes; it explains the emotional arc in dialogue and calls it drama. The revenge-quest structure needs escalation and it substitutes travel montages. Krem should feel like a genuine threat and he mostly feels like a plot function. Nothing here is preaching, so the Lecture Test doesn't apply, this isn't a themes-first movie, it's a themes-shaped-hole movie. The problem is craft: a $170M vehicle that mistakes putting the cape on a great actor for actually writing her a story. You can skip it and lose nothing. If you're curious about Alcock, watch the first twenty minutes and tap out.