Brightburn (2019)
Evil Has Found Its Superhero.
When I saw the trailer for this movie a while back, I had (at least I’m pretty sure) the same reaction as everyone else: So, it’s evil Superman? That’s probably what the pitch meeting was like too for that matter. If that’s what they want to do though, go for it - an unstoppable villain makes for more thrills than an untouchable hero anyways. Admittedly, I had this on the back burner for quite some time - I was never really a fan of Superman, and kind of figured that it would be sharing a lot of the same beats, even if it was a horror movie instead of a superhero movie. Still, what better season to bring it out than that of spook-tober, where ghouls and ghosts are abound and some choose instead to dress as villains in a town where the Brightburn.
For real, the struggle to make sensible lead ins gets harder every time. Construction-wise, this movie isn’t terrible. It has plenty of daytime scenes, even if most the terror parts happen in the dark of the night. That happenings at night are good for reasons we’ll get into later, but even said night scenes keep from being pitch-black about their lighting, so it’s never AvP:R levels of “this isn’t a movie, this is a hour long sound clip.” The benefit of the pitch (that of horror movie Superman) is that it can draw that crowd who goes “why yes, I do wonder what superman would be like if he was just a giant wanker instead of goody two shoes.” The unfortunate side of that same pitch is you already have a good amount of what to expect going in, dampening some of the potential surprises as things go in. It’s good that it hits those notes, but it’s also just a tad sad that it does hurt the overall fortune-telling quality of seeing whats about to happen just because you know the material the idea probably came out of. This also ties in past the plot elements and into the actual flow of things as well.
The plot for what it’s worth is essentially a horror movie styling of coming of age - instead of going good it goes bad. The pacing ties in here, where it does it’s normal movie trappings like foreshadowing and the likes, but also has this front end that comes with a slowness of super and horror, building up things it plans to do later. It works for the narrative, but when things later double back on things or get tossed aside later for a different thing, it could potentially agitate someone if they take their movies a bit too seriously. Less so the overall pacing being bad, as it’s really fine and standard feeling for the type of movie it’s trying to play out, it suffers more from classical tropes. Not all of these are good tropes either, things like characters making incredibly bad or nonsensical decisions regardless of the intent behind them. Sometimes you can chalk it up like you would for other bad slasher decisions - like running in a bad direction because “oh, they were probably just scared stupid” - but other times a character will make a decision like they forgot an element they elaborated on earlier in the movie, then get surprised when the results turn out like we the watchers expect because we didn’t forget what they said and we were giving a reinforcing scene to further enhance that understanding.
So the parent’s and our mask-wearing weirdo are the leads here, and the parents do a decent job of acting their little hearts out. The kid is a mixed bag of sometimes doing a really good job, and other (most) times kinda having a rather emotionless dead-air look on his face and he stands about. Could be that’s what they wanted, that they wanted him to appear alien or sociopathic or something, at which point I guess he did a good job acting - but it largely leaves him feeling somewhat bland in most scenes where he’s not being verbal. It works great when the mask is on - hearkening back to the old slasher villains of masked silence, all intent and bloodstains. The somewhat ho-hum of the character also makes the shift to evil feel less like a natural choice and more like a plot convenience, banking for all intents and purposes on the old “voices in my head told me to do it” route - which is fine, and ironically also falls into the exact same reason why I never really cared for the superhero everyone probably thought about when watching the trailer for the movie - it feels less like this big fleshed out thing, and more of a just because. One parent gets to be the voice of reason, and the other gets to be the voice of love - but in the end they both also feel like they made some pretty stupid choices across the run time. Support characters do fine, and honestly when it gets into it’s horror elements most people do a good job if in nothing else but having rather believable reactions.
Ha ha, baby boomer.
Even if the characters or actors weren’t impressing you, they do a good job delivering their lines. It’s audible, it’s balanced well with everything else going on, and they can do a good job of conveying emotion. The other audio elements also do a good job - the music supporting the film and whatever emotions or tensions it wants to build quite nicely, and unlike the most recent public domain entry into the reviews, this one also knows when to let the background scoring shut up. The background punches and little side noises also all sound good here, from squishing things to burning things you never really quite get the impression that it was sort of just lazily added in. Probably a good thing too, as although it’s pretty mundane at the start, with simple evil voices being the elaborate standoff, thing start getting real crashy and wooshy and fancy by the end.
Of course, the sounds aren’t the only thing getting fancy by the end. Visual effects help tie in with the audio elements to make some pretty cringey scenes - one of which is in the trailer involving some eye-glass. Violence is abound in the later segments, progressing from childish hand-breaks to full on mist-ifying people. Eye lasers, flying people, breaking and destroying vehicles and structures and bodies all comes off looking well done, with perhaps one element in the final stretch that looks perhaps a bit overly cartoony. Costumes don’t get nearly as much time to shine in any way, largely being a modern attire sort of thing good for picking out who is who but not much else. The cape and mask combo of the main villain could be cool for some, but in all honesty I’m not a big fan of the mask design. It’s a bit of a droopy “grandma made me this hat and I made it evil” look that despite the red eyes looking quite gnarly especially when used in those dark horror moments just never hits the bar of menacing to me. Of course, it’s also no real surprise that anyone would guess who he was even with the mask, since he didn’t bother to make a full body costume, and just goes about wearing his normal clothes in combination with it - doesn’t leave a whole lot of mystery room there.
The horror elements work alright. On the one hand, you never really get to the point where you feel like “whose going to survive?" as much as “which person gets it next?” It’s the inverse of unstoppable hero - by the time you hit Friday the 13th part 9, you don’t even pretend to think about if the villain is going to be beat because they’ll just be back next time. Here, it’s literally set up in both dialogue and visuals that the kid is invincible, outside of a single scene. If, like me, you’ve watched a lot of movies and the likes you also may be in the mindset by then that you nearly immediately ditch it amounting to anything because of how strong they are setting up the villain to be, and simply just ask the movie to at least bring it back around so it isn’t a wasted scene by the end. Of course, being invulnerable doesn’t dull the levels of danger presented by this little satanic universe spawn, it simply swaps the horror element from a thoughtfull where it’s a back and forth play of power to a straight slasher sort of feel - how’s the next person going to get it? That said, it uses powers like flight and speed quite well to tie in with the cat-and-mouse or spookier elements, so it’s totally not a waste of the genre for people who want more than just violence and gore.
Villain name: Mopey Sockhead.
Admittedly still not a preferred movie, Brightburn offered up about what I expected it to from the trailer. It was fun enough to watch, and had a few stand out moments - but just as it had that it also had some real wall-knocker character decisions and a surface level reasoning. It’s funny that my first thought was Superman but horror, because my interest level and enjoyment level where about the same in both. It’s a cool concept either way though, but I don’t look forward to someone deciding to make a movie about a man that gets bit by a spider and turns into a were-spider to butt-web people by the light of the moon in downtown New York.