Just under a year after Superman became the first blockbuster movie of the new James Gunn-supervised DC film universe, that same DCU suffered its first big flop in the form of the companion film Supergirl. The movie follows Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) as she deals with the trauma of watching the world around her die and attempts to help a young woman called Ruthye (Eve Ridley) who is seeking revenge for the murder of her family at the hands of Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Now that the movie has landed on HBO Max, it will presumably reach a larger audience that didn’t necessarily head out to see it in theaters over the summer. Those viewers may grapple with an ending that is interesting, but also not satisfying enough to spread more positive word-of-mouth about the project.
Even without that mixed reaction, Supergirl might have seemed like a counterintuitive choice for a second DCU film, considering that this world has access to the likes of Wonder Woman, Batman, the Green Lantern(s), Aquaman, and any number of towering DC figures. But Gunn wanted to make the movie, written by Ana Nogueira and directed by Craig Gillespie, because it was an adaptation of the recent and acclaimed miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. That series, collected in a single-volume graphic novel, was in turn inspired in part by True Grit, the 1968 Western novel by Charles Portis that was subsequently made into the 1969 film that won John Wayne his Academy Award, and the 2010 Jeff Bridges vehicle that became the Coen brothers’ biggest hit. Unusual fodder for a typical superhero franchise, in other words.
The film of Supergirl follows the comic pretty closely in its set-up. Though Kara’s ostensible home is now Earth, the story joins her on a trip to bar-hop far off-planet, in a galaxy without a yellow sun, which gives her (and her cousin Superman) such strong healing powers on Earth that she’s unable to feel the effects of alcohol. In the comic book, she’s specifically celebrating her 21st birthday in a place where she can get properly drunk; the film gives the impression that she’ll take any excuse to vacate Earth for one of these binges. (She mentions her birthday, but she’s turning 23; not exactly a momentous occasion.) She is approached by Ruthye — who narrates the story in the comic, with colorfully elaborate language that imitates Portis’s writing style — with a request to help her track down Krem, a cruel and pitiless space pirate who has senselessly killed her family. (In the comics, it’s just her father.) Kara demurs at first, not wanting to help a young girl get involved in the bloody business of revenge. But when her dog Krypto is shot with a poisoned arrow by Krem himself, she agrees to chase him down in hopes of procuring the antidote.
The eight-issue miniseries proceeds far more episodically than the film. Kara and Ruthye’s journey to find Krem is lengthier, more difficult, and involves more planetary stops along the way. The movie understandably streamlines their path, although it loses out on some of the color and sense of space that writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely lent the graphic novel. But both the film and the book wind up at the same dilemma: After defeating Krem, do the good guys then kill him for revenge?
Supergirl on HBO Max Ending Explained: Does Supergirl Kill Krem?
In Gillespie’s film, Supergirl has spent much of the movie attempting to convince Ruthye not to poison her own life with violent revenge. In the climax of the film, she pleads with Ruthye to let her life serve as her revenge, refusing to let Krem’s crimes define it. Ruthye ultimately relents, and does not kill Krem. Supergirl, however, then picks up Ruthye’s sword (inherited from her father), and after securing the antidote for Krypto, kills the villain herself. She feels guilt over letting him live earlier, resulting in the death of several innocents, and feels she, as someone whose life is already defined by a trauma outside her control, can shoulder that additional heaviness upon her soul. This decision also ties into the movie’s earlier discussion of the difference between goodness and righteousness.
On its own, this ending attempts to split the difference between the various stock types of revenge-quest endings. There’s the ending where the vengeance-seeker decides that revenge has too great a cost to go through with it; the one where that happens, but then the target forces the seeker’s hand and they have to kill in self-defense (typically an epic cop-out); and the one where the seeker of vengeance goes through with it, but finds their life irrevocably changed by this grim decision. Supergirl is arguably about that very quandary, and Kara does the difficult work of relieving Ruthye from the burden of deciding which cliche she’s going to indulge. Notably, Supergirl does not kill Krem in self-defense; though he might well pose a threat to her or others if left alive, she is not forced to kill him. She decides to, in a way far removed from what her cousin Clark/Superman would have done.
This is very much in keeping with certain comics interpretations of this character, not just Woman of Tomorrow. Though some comics and TV shows have depicted Supergirl as the cheerful kid-sister figure to Clark, many modern stories paint her as more disillusioned and scarred by her experience watching her world get destroyed, in contrast with the loving adoptive family that Clark experienced from infancy.
That said, World of Tomorrow has a very different, and far more interesting, end for this story. In the heat of confrontation, Supergirl and Ruthye spare Krem. Ruthye also learns that Supergirl’s presence on this mission was not actually to help Krypto, who did not need an antidote (only exposure to the Earth’s yellow sun, which he has long since received). She comes along to stop Ruthye from carrying out her revenge. Rather than killing Krem, the two women imprison him in the Phantom Zone (movie fans may remember it from Superman II or the 1984 Supergirl film), a no-man’s-land from which escape is effectively impossible. It’s basically an eternity in solitary confinement.
But Woman of Tomorrow then jumps forward in time (just as True Grit does), to an elderly Ruthye, who is visited by Supergirl. They release a now-elderly Krem from the Phantom Zone, and he reports that his decades of confinement left him with time to reflect upon his actions, which he now regrets. He begs for forgiveness for his wronging of Ruthye. She declines to forgive him, and hits him to the ground. It actually looks as if she might have killed him, but writer Tom King has since clarified that while she does hit Krem, she does not kill him. She simply declines to bless him with forgiveness. In the book Ruthye has written about the experience, from which the comic’s narration is taken, she reports (falsely) that Supergirl killed Krem.
So, essentially, the movie of Supergirl dramatizes what Ruthye writes in her book (which doesn’t exist in the film). Again, that ending makes sense enough as an ending to a mass-audience superhero movie. The comics version of Ruthye knows this (and also knows that putting this action on Supergirl will leave her to a quieter life). As an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, though, the ending feels simplified and unsatisfying. Maybe there’s a ghost of that disconnected feeling even for those who haven’t read the source material; the first half or so of Supergirl is a pretty strong representation of the book, despite a few changes, and in its second half, the movie drifts toward more familiar territory. The movie ending does what it can to offer some nuance and shading to a character who will next be joining her cousin in Man of Tomorrow, the Gunn-directed Superman sequel that swooped in and stole Supergirl’s subtitle as a show of hierarchy in this universe. As such, it’s illustrative of the difference between a story that’s free to actually end, like a stand-alone comics miniseries, and one that, however well-intentioned, must put the needs of the greater saga first.
Does Supergirl Have a Post Credits Scene?
No, Supergirl does not have a post credits scene! Shocking, right?
That said, David Corenswet does appear in the film’s final scene, in a coda that echoes Alcock’s own cameo in Superman.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Supergirl on HBO Max
