Brightburn Review

The evil Superman movie. I had no idea what to expect when I saw this trailer, but I was rather amused. I do know the trailers and the marketing were plastering James Gunn's name all over this as if he wrote and directed this movie. Nope. That's not true. The actual director is a dude by the name of David Yarovesky, whose only previous feature-length directorial effort is a 2014 called "The Hive" that I don't think anyone's heard of. So that was a bit of a red flag for me. Someone producing the movie can mean just about anything, thus you can be a bit deceptive with your marketing pulling off something like that. That's why I loved it when "Deadpool 2" was advertised as "from the studio who brought you '27 Dresses' and 'The Devil Wears Prada'" because that totally made fun of how ridiculous marketing can be. Although with a closer inspection, David Yarovesky played a Goth Ravager in "Guardians of the Galaxy" and the screenplay for "Brightburn" was written by Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn, brother and cousin to James Gunn. So this does appear to be a Gunn family effort putting this together, even if James Gunn himself may have had a smaller role than the other three as simply a producer. So can Gunns and friends pull off a successful evil Superman movie?

For those of you who aren't as crazy into this movie nerdom as me and may not know what I'm talking about when I say "evil Superman movie" or "Brightburn," allow me to elaborate. "Brightburn" is a movie that takes place in Brightburn, Kansas. There's a married couple living out on a farm in more of the outskirts of town who really want children, but haven't been successful at it. One day a little spacecraft crashes outside their farmhouse with a young boy in. As the boy grows up, he learns that he is special. He can fly. He has super speed. He has super strength. He has laser vision. But instead of deciding he needs to protect this Earth, the evil voices in his brain are manipulating him into destroying Earth. So yeah, evil Superman. Some people have asked me if this is a rip-off of Superman where they are blatantly and lazily copying Superman because they don't want to write their own story. To that I say, no, not exactly. This is more of a Superman parody, if you will. They purposely took the story of Superman and flipped it on its head, asking what would the universe look like if Superman was evil. Thus I would say this is a rather clever concept that they came up with.

No, this is not Warner Bros. or DC. And since they have no desire to pay royalties to either, none of the names from the comics are used. But everything directly parallels the story. Brightburn is our fictional town instead of Smallville. Brandon Beyer is the name of the kid instead of Clark Kent. His adopted parents are Kyle and Tori instead of Jonathan and Martha. Things like that. But outside the names of people and places being different, all of the events of Superman's origins are perfectly paralleled. Thus this makes this essentially an Elseworlds type of story if you're familiar with those comics. If you're not familiar with the comics, the Elseworlds stories were non-canonical stories where the writers of stories wrote a whole bunch of "What if..." stories with the DC characters. Thus, as I've explained, "Brightburn" asks the question of "What if Superman were evil?" The answer is that the world would be in a lot of trouble, especially for those that start to make this kid angry. And if there's no one he can cleave to as family or friend, then you might as well start saying your prayers because that means the Apocalypse is upon us. A supervillain origin story where there is no hero of equal strength to counteract this villain spells a lot of trouble for the average citizens that end up stuck in his path.

Yes, this is a horror film. And yes, this is a rather violent and gruesome horror film. When I saw the initial trailers, I wasn't sure exactly where they were going with this in terms of content, but there is no holding back when this kid gets angry. I usually have a pretty good stomach for blood and violence, but there are moments when I even had to look away. To the movie's credit, though, it avoids becoming an all-out slasher flick. I thought they were going to rush through this kid's origins in the first 30 minutes or so and spend the final hour with him killing everyone and everything in his path. But that doesn't happen. This is actually a pretty slow burn. I think we may have gotten halfway through the movie before he got his first kill in. Given that this is only a 90-minute movie, that means we spent a long time building this thing up and I thought that was going to be a problem. I was ready to say that this could've used 20-30 more minutes to flesh things out, but it ended up being fairly evenly paced. This is not a complex plot at all and thus the Gunn family decided they didn't need a full two hours to successfully tell this story. I commend them for that. Most movies and TV shows love milking out every minute they can get, but in this instance they decided that they didn't need to.

That's why I found myself really appreciating this. This is not a horror film that's focused on all of the jump scares, graphic images and blood, while having the story and characters being more of an afterthought. This is a story-based horror film that focuses a lot on the family relationship. We have great performances from Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as two parents who consider it a miracle that a baby boy landed from space since they were wanting a child so badly. This was an answer to a prayer of sorts. And as they raise this kid, they love him as their own and simply tell him that he was adopted. They certainly don't know he has powers and even when they start to figure out that strange things are happening, they refuse to see him as anything but a good kid. When people start suspecting that he's behind certain things that happen or others want him locked up for things he did at school, these parents turn a blind eye to all of that because they refuse to believe that he's bad, even though he did fall out of the sky. I feel this was a very compelling and believable arc. No one wants to believe that their kids are anything but perfect little angels and I think that is an excellent parenting attribute. Seeing the good in your children helps them see the good in themselves.

On the flip side of things, their strong love of this child makes him a rather likable kid. He's not just a being that is pure evil. At least not at first. He knows that his parents love him and that helps him lean towards wanting to be good. But his little spaceship that his parents hid in the barn is manipulating him into doing things that he initially doesn't want to do. The younger actor playing him is Jackson Dunn and I think he has to be given a lot of credit here for successfully pulling of a conflicted young child who is having trouble making sense of it all. Because they played this angle up so much in the movie, it almost makes the trailers spoiler territory. A lot of the advertising is focused on this evil kid chasing people and doing crazy things, but the bulk of that takes place in the middle portion of the film, leaning towards the final act. Yet I'm not going to get too mad at the marketing because the first third of this movie is hard to focus solely on when you're trying to sell a horror film. You don't want to advertise this is a nice family drama, then scar your audience when things start to hit the fan, if you know what I mean. You want to get that horror audience in the seats. But hopefully you'll get the right horror fans in the seats who are willing to be patient because the kills are few and far between.

I think the biggest negative here that I have is that there is an abundant lack of hope in this movie. The family elements of this are excellent and seeing this nice kid devolve into this soulless monster is rather depressing, but given his unstoppable Superman-like powers, when someone unintentionally angers him without realizing who he is or what he is capable of, you know there's zero hope for that individual. Often in a story like this, you'll eventually have the hero swooping in to save the day. But given the unconventional nature of this film, that plot element doesn't exist. And yeah, it's an interesting question to ask, but when it comes to the point of no return, all the energy and life is completely sucked out of this film as there's no other potential outcome outside the fact that the world is screwed. Usually horror films have an element of hope to them, but when you have evil Superman and no kryptonite or Lex Luthor to match up with him, the movie ends up just slowly draining all the life out of you and aren't left with an emotional punch like a similarly-themed movie in "Chronicle." Thus you end up wondering what the overall point in answering this question was. But still, I enjoyed the journey of this film enough that I feel comfortable giving "Brightburn" an 8/10.