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Cultural Apologetics Column
This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 03 (2026).
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[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Supergirl.]
Supergirl
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Written by Ana Nogueira
Produced by Peter Safran and James Gunn
Starring Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet, and Jason Momoa
Feature Film (PG–13)
(Warner Bros. Pictures, 2026)
There is a wistful realization in Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” of looking back with knowledge one lacked in youth.1 It is a remarkably human sentiment that underscores how age grants us the burden of memory: names, faces, regrets, the realization that life is often measured less by what we gain than by what we lose. Seger’s song is ultimately about perseverance, about continuing to move forward even as the years accumulate and the road becomes less certain. It is, in its own way, a song about a very particular kind of grief.
That may seem like an odd place to begin an essay about Supergirl.
For decades, Kara Zor-El has existed in Superman’s enormous shadow (to be fair, hasn’t every superhero?). To many casual audiences, she has simply been “Superman’s cousin,” another Kryptonian with the same powers, another hero in a red cape. Yet the character has undergone something of a resurgence in the last decade as new writers discover and excavate the things that make her compelling.2
Unlike her famous cousin, Kara remembers Krypton. She remembers her parents, her neighbors, their language, the ordinary ins-and-outs of a civilization that no longer exists. Superman lost a world he never knew; Supergirl, by contrast, lost the only world she had ever called home. That distinction gains quite a bit of traction and opens up a whole new acreage of narrative real estate for both characters.
James Gunn’s DC Universe understands this. Rather than presenting Kara as just a younger, hipper Superman, the new film Supergirl (2026) is far more interested in exploring how someone survives a catastrophe they never truly escape and carries the memory of that catastrophe as a result, without allowing said memory to become the sum total of one’s identity. There are questions here about formation, about suffering, about whether grief ultimately defines someone who spends a considerable amount of time running — or, perhaps in this case, flying — against the wind.
A Little History. Supergirl herself has been around for far longer than some realize. Kara Zor-El first appeared in Action Comics #252 all the way back in 1959, created by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino during the Silver Age of Comics.3 At the time, DC Comics was expanding what became known as the “Superman Family.” Readers had already embraced Superboy, Krypto the Superdog, and other supporting characters, and Supergirl was initially conceived as another extension of Superman’s mythology.
Like many comic book characters, Kara’s publication history is something of a tangled web. She has been rebooted, reimagined, erased from continuity, and restored more than once. Following the well-known Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event in 1985, DC famously eliminated her altogether, believing Superman should once again stand as the sole survivor of Krypton. Various replacements adopted the Supergirl mantle over the next two decades, but none quite captured what Kara Zor-El specifically brought to the storytelling table. It wasn’t until 2004, when Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner reintroduced Kara Zor-El to the modern DC Universe, that the character reclaimed her place. Since then, writers have treated her as one of DC’s more psychologically rich protagonists.
That evolution reached its fullest expression relatively recently in Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (DC Comics, 2022), the Eisner-nominated limited series that serves as the primary inspiration for director Craig Gillespie’s film.4 The story borrows as much from classic Westerns as from traditional hero comics, the influence of True Grit being unmistakable.5 The story is largely told from the perspective of a young alien girl named Ruthye Marye Knoll, whose father is murdered by the ruthless brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills. Desperate for justice, Ruthye encounters Kara during what should have been a birthday celebration beneath a red sun — a rare opportunity for a Kryptonian to experience life without extraordinary powers.
Instead, Kara finds herself drawn into Ruthye’s quest for vengeance, becoming the Rooster Cogburn to Ruthye’s Mattie Ross. Together they cross distant worlds, scouring the forgotten corners of the galaxy in their pursuit of Krem. Woman of Tomorrow is, plainly, an interstellar revenge story. But it also proves to be something a bit more reflective. Ruthye believes she is searching for justice, but Kara realizes she is trying to prevent another grieving child from becoming consumed by the same anger and loss she herself has carried for years.
Gillespie’s Supergirl takes the vast majority of its inspiration from this story, and wisely resists telling another Superman-style origin story. Instead, the movie adapts what is arguably the first Supergirl story that fully understands the unique dramatic territory Kara occupies. The story here is about grief attempting to reproduce itself and whether someone who has spent her life carrying loss can teach another person that vengeance is not the same thing as justice.
Grief and the Supergirl. The most compelling parts of the film are when the narrative refuses to treat grief as a problem that can simply be solved. Kara never “gets over” Krypton. There is no emotional breakthrough that suddenly restores what she has lost. Grief, the story suggests, does not disappear so much as it becomes part of the landscape of a person’s life. The danger lies in whether grief becomes one’s master. Unlike Superman, who was formed almost entirely on Earth by Ma and Pa Kent, Kara’s formative years were spent in Argo City of Krypton, followed by its destruction. She remembers her parents and their conversations, and remembers watching all of it disappear.
Modern psychology recognizes trauma as something that permanently rewires our expectations about the world. Those who have experienced profound loss sometimes begin to anticipate loss. The future becomes something to survive rather than something to anticipate, while relationships become fragile because everything feels temporary.6 In this framework, hope itself can begin to feel risky, even dangerous.
Kara embodies much of that outlook. She is not cynical in the fashionable, sarcastic, or ironic sense. She is weary, and Milly Alcock carries that particularly well in her portrayal of the character. She has seen enough to know that sometimes the most undeserving of people die, and justice is often insufficient or incomplete. She is not opposed to helping people outright, but one senses she is doing so almost against instinct, as though goodness has become a discipline for her rather than a spontaneous disposition.
While at first glance it might seem like Kara is mentoring Ruthye (played here by Eve Ridley), the relationship really works both directions. Ruthye constantly forces Kara to confront the person she has become. Kara sees in Ruthye the same consuming desire for vengeance that could very easily have defined her own life. In that sense, Ruthye functions as a mirror. The ending is particularly striking because it refuses to offer a sentimental resolution. Kara prevents Ruthye from becoming the one who takes Krem’s life but then turns around and kills him herself. She refuses to allow Ruthye’s adulthood to begin with an act of vengeance. The burden of violence, rightly or wrongly, becomes Kara’s to carry rather than the child’s.
One need not agree with every moral implication of that decision to appreciate what the story is attempting to say. Kara has finally learned that grief reproduces itself and that pain, left unchecked, always seeks another victim. The wounded become the wounders. Vengeance promises closure, but more often it simply recruits another participant into the same cycle. By the time the credits roll, Kara has not packed grief away so much as interrupted its dangerous inheritance. She cannot restore Krypton, nor can she give Ruthye back her family. What she can do, however, is prevent someone else from being blown away by the wind.
Naomi and Ruth. Scripture treats grief as a condition through which faithful people must continue to live. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the opening chapters of the book of Ruth.
Naomi leaves Bethlehem during a famine with a husband and two sons. By the time she returns, her husband and both sons are dead. For an ancient Israelite woman, this is as much an economic, social, and existential tragedy as it is an emotional one. Her identity has been buried with her family.7 So complete is her sense of loss that she tells the women of Bethlehem to stop calling her Naomi (“pleasant” in Hebrew), and instead call her Mara (“bitter”), “for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me” (Ruth 1:20).8 It should be one of the more startling speeches in the Old Testament because — unlike many pastors who attempt to handle this narrative — the text never rebukes her for saying it. Naomi is not corrected for grieving, and neither is Ruth.
Ruth’s famous declaration — “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge” (Ruth 1:16) — is often read at weddings, detached almost entirely from its context. In reality, though, these words fit more accurately at a funeral. It is the language of a young widow who binds her future to another widow with no guarantee that either of them will ever find security again. Their journey to Bethlehem is a long walk undertaken with empty hands and zero certainty, not a victory march.
The book of Ruth never once pretends Naomi’s sons return. It never suggests the years in Moab can somehow be reclaimed. Even the birth of Obed at the story’s conclusion does not undo what came before. Redemption — in this case literally, as that is the purpose Boaz serves in the narrative — is actually not presented as a reversal. It is, however, presented as God’s refusal to allow tragedy to possess the final word in either woman’s life.
That strikes me as remarkably close to what Supergirl is attempting to explore, albeit imperfectly and unevenly. Kara cannot restore Krypton any more than Naomi can recover her family. Neither woman is offered the fantasy of “beginning again” as though the past had never happened. Both must, however, reckon with whether the worst thing that has happened to them necessarily becomes the defining thing about them.
One of the worst lies the Christian can peddle is that grief is an illusion or that suffering is somehow good. Scripture never speaks that way. Death is not called a friend but an enemy (Romans 6:23; 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54–55). The Bible does not celebrate famine, widowhood, exile, or the grave as hidden blessings in themselves. Naomi is not corrected for calling herself “Bitter,” and the psalmists are not berated for lamenting, and Job is never told to smile because God has “a wonderful plan.” Even Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus despite knowing resurrection is only moments away (John 11:35). Christianity has never pretended that evil is somehow secretly good. It insists, rather, that God is good in the presence of evil, which is a far more difficult claim to make.
Unfortunately, much of modern Christian culture has developed an allergy to lament. Too many churches rush grieving people toward closure, as though healing were measured by how quickly one can smile again. Every tragedy simply must become a testimony by Sunday, and every funeral service just has to end with some kind of moral lesson. Every loss must immediately be reframed as “God needed another angel,” or “everything happens for a reason,” or “they’re dancing on streets of gold in their glorified body now.” All of that distorts or contradicts biblical teaching and sound pastoral practice. And to a large degree, the people sitting in the pew listening to the well-meaning pastor dispense this kind of reductive rhetoric to “the flock” know this — it just requires someone bold (or irritated) enough to stand up and declare that the king is not wearing any clothes, and if he tries to borrow the robes of theology, they won’t fit him.
Nor does Scripture tell believers to simply “move on.” That is sentimentality masquerading as hope. It is denial. Grief is the appropriate response to a world that is not as it ought to be. It is evidence that something worth loving has been lost. To grieve is not a failure of faith; in many cases, it is an expression of love refusing to deny reality. The Christian hope has never depended on pretending death is harmless, but on proclaiming that death is an enemy Christ intends to destroy. There is an enormous difference between saying, “This is good,” and saying, “God will not allow this evil to have the final word.” The former trivializes suffering. The latter is the gospel.
The Christian answer is not, has not been, and never will be that grief is an illusion. The Christian answer is resurrection, God’s declaration that death itself is not ultimate. Until that day, believers do what Ruth does. They rise the next morning. They go to work. They care for one another. They continue on. Grief is borne forward.
Supergirl, for all its flaws as a movie, grasps at this notion. Kara Zor-El cannot change what happened to Krypton. She can only decide what kind of woman its memory will produce. And that question is worthy of more than just a superhero.
—Cole Burgett
Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He currently serves as the Assistant Director of Online and Nontraditional Learning at Corban University, as well as an Assistant Professor of Theology. He writes extensively about theology and popular culture.
NOTES
- Bob Seger, “Against the Wind” track 1 on Side Two of Against the Wind (Capitol Records, 1980).
- See Tom King, Bilquis Evely, and Matheus Lopes, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (DC Comics, 2021–2022). This 8-issue series is among the most acclaimed comic titles of the 2020s and is the primary source material for the 2026 film adaptation.
- Action Comics debuted in 1938 with the first appearance of Superman, an event widely regarded as the beginning of the modern superhero genre and the Golden Age of Comics. The Silver Age (roughly 1956–1970) was characterized by a revival of superheroes, brighter science-fiction storytelling, expanding shared universes, and the introduction of many popular legacy characters such as the Flash (Barry Allen) and the X-Men.
- See King’s comments on the series in William Goodman, “Tom King Started in Comics. After a Detour in the CIA, He’s Shaping Hollywood,” Men’s Health, June 25, 2026, https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a71729294/tom-king-supergirl-movie-comics-interview/.
- Charles Portis’s novel True Grit (Simon & Schuster, 1968) has been adapted into two films of the same name, released in 1969 and 2010.
- Trauma is understood as an experience that reshapes how individuals perceive safety, trust, threat, and their expectations of the future. Traumatic experiences can alter cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses long after the original event has passed, leaving survivors to anticipate danger even in otherwise safe environments. See chap. 3, “Understanding the Impact of Trauma,” in Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services: Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series 57, HHS Publication No. (SMA) 13-4801 (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/.
- In the social world of ancient Israel, widowhood without sons meant far more than personal bereavement. It entailed loss of economic security and legal protection, as well as inheritance and one’s place within the household structure. Naomi’s lament reflects much more than the death of her loved ones. For an excellent look at this period of Israel’s history, see Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, vol. 6, The New American Commentary (Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1999).
- All Bible quotations taken from the ESV.
