James Gunn's Superman Has The Same Climax Problem As Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel

This article contains spoilers for the end of "Superman."

James Gunn's "Superman" is a fun ride with a great cast, but it's also filled to the brim to the extent that you barely have a moment to catch your breath. An early scene where Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) interviews Clark Kent (David Corenswet) as Superman provides a nice break after the action-packed intro, suggesting that a similar ebb and flow will continue throughout the rest of the movie. Instead, we hardly get another slow moment from that point on, as the film cuts frantically from one frenetic set piece to the next until credits roll.

While the movie could have benefitted from some more time spent building out a proper character arc for Clark (or, really, anyone), the comic book-y action is so colorful and fun, and the energy of the film is so fresh, that you likely won't mind too much about wild pacing. That is, until you get to the climax of the film, where things sort of stagnate. Locked in combat with Ultraman, who's revealed to be an imperfect clone of himself created by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), Kal-El enters a lengthy slugfest that takes him across Metropolis as it's destroyed by an interdimensional rift.

While that all sounds cool, and there are highlight moments throughout, the climax fight runs into the exact same problem that plagued the end of Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel" — when you have Superman fight someone with his same powers, the result just isn't that interesting. In both films, the big battle at the end basically amounts to two wrecking balls smashing into each other in midair. It's exciting in concept, but it gets old quick.

Superman has a neat selection of powers for asymmetrical fights, and the 2025 film gives him plenty of those. His duel with the kaiju in the middle of Metropolis, for instance, is really fun because of how he struggles to reduce damage and casualties while also delivering heavy blows to the creature. Or, it can be fun to see him take on a huge group of enemies, as he does at the very end of the movie when Luthor sends in his Raptor squad. Both of those fights show off the full range of Superman's powers and have a lot of dynamism. But when the battle is symmetrical — when he's just fighting one other person who can fly, punch hard, and shoot lasers out of his eyes — the moves get stale fast.

It was a problem in "Man of Steel," and it's a problem in James Gunn's "Superman." It also probably doesn't help that the Ultraman fight happens right after a much more interesting two–on-one where Clark battles both Ultraman and the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) in a baseball field. Running that lengthy exchange right into another long one-on-one just makes the ending drag a bit.

It's striking that the most creative and memorable fight scene in the whole movie doesn't involve Superman at all, but instead shows Mr. Terrific taking down a whole platoon of Lex's military commandos. More unique powers often lead to more inventive action scenes, and this is a great example.

I want to emphasize again that I really liked "Superman." It's fun, it's flashy, and it gets the tone just right. But by the end, I was also struggling to pin down what the movie was actually about. There is so little time spent developing the character or building out any broader ideas. Given how long the climax goes on for, it's hard not to think that some of that runtime could have been spent better in slower moments peppered throughout the film.

When he goes back to see his parents in Kansas and recover from his injuries near the end of the second act, Clark has a line that should have been the foundation for his character in the movie: "I'm not who I thought I was." The betrayal that his Kryptonian parents actually sent him to Earth to conquer it leaves him flailing, doubting his own nature. That's a great place to build a strong character, but it's the only line in the entire movie where he actually grapples with the idea.

Similarly, Luthor is a great villain, but embracing the campy tone of the older Superman comics also means that his motivations are pretty cartoonish. With so little time spent on either the hero or the villain, the film feels more like it's run on rails, like the ride they'll inevitably build at Six Flags. As the setup for what's meant to be a sprawling cinematic universe, "Superman" does the job just fine, but I can't help but wish it had more meat on the bone and less time spent smashing action figures into one another.