Review of Brightburn (2019) by Joshbreviews — 25 Jun 2019

I really wanted to like this movie, but the story was so bad.

Easy stuff first - music was okay; it wasn't in the way, and it didn't stand out. Visuals were good; special effects of the superman powers were fine. The practical effects were also good. Acting was good - the actors and actresses did what they could despite the awful script and story.

Okay so basically this movie is just an excuse to make a Superman Slasher Film. That's it. From the trailers, it really looked like they were gonna deconstruct Superman's origin story. However, after around 30 minutes all of that is thrown away. Instead of this Clark Kent stand-in slowly being driven into madness and a life of evil, he is instead made to be evil because of his stupid spaceship giving him vague orders to "take the world". What a cop-out. Instead of opening up an intelligent discussion about parenting or one's responsibility to society, the film throws all that potential away because of the spaceship issuing commands to the boy. That takes away any potential depth to the acts of evil the boy commits, as well as any hope of redemption (not that redemption in this story is necessary). So yeah, this thing gets -6 points for having an extremely terrible story that's a waste of time.

I don't mind gore when it serves to punctuate a point a film is trying to make. For example, war movies are often hyper-violent to accentuate the horrors of war. Rorschach in Watchmen was absolutely brutal and merciless in his self-defense techniques, hammering in the point that he's a practical, no nonsense, no compromise individual. But in Brightburn...it's just violence for the sake of violence. It's mind-numbing. It's really not entertaining to watch all these people die because their deaths aren't particularly meaningful. The dead characters just died because they got in the way of a superboy who went insane "because reasons." Super lame.

And what's worse is the darn movie has the audacity to tease a horror-hero cinematic universe, with the "hero" from Super. Goodness. That was a terrible movie, too.

Anyway, yeah, don't watch this. Waste of time. Absolutely wasted potential.