LogFAQs > #922884293

Thanks for your A-List responses guys

I just got back from Brightburn, if anyone still wants opinions on that, here they are (with lots of spoilers I guess):

I worked at a comic book store for 6 years and in that time we had a customer named Glenn who would come in twice weekly. You know a Glenn: He's always wearing shorts, even in the winter, he has a chain wallet, a Megadeth T-Shirt and one of those hats only old people wear.

Glenn would often try to strike up conversation with us. He was very obviously a lonely guy. Glenn was private but over 6 years I got glimpses into his life: He had some medical problems and his strange attitude was off-putting to some people. The strange attitude would lead to conversation starters such as:

"Dude, wouldn't it be rockin' if Spider-Man was actually, like, a Spider, and he cocooned and ate people?"

When he was told he was going against the core of the character, Glenn would double down. He didn't care if he had a bad idea, he was just happy he had you in a conversation.

Glenn would love Brightburn. Hell, if Glenn were the shadow writer for Brightburn, I wouldn't be shocked. I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out Brightburn was actually about Glenn in some other reality.

My point here is: Brightburn is a movie every comic nerd has discussed already. "What if Superman were evil?" Does that make it bad? Not necessarily.

What does that make Brightburn then? Is it some fantasy wish fulfillment? Well, I'm not sure, because I don't think Brightburn is sure.

That movie is well structured, well shot and even well acted. But there's something missing there. Whether it's Brandon, the main character, feeling like he skipped a few beats to get from "shy, bullied kid" to "murdering alien machine" or the brutal execution scenes that tried to make the movie more than it needed to be.

Brightburn was in desperate need for a possible redemption arc for Brandon. We see him bullied once and then his parents tell him "No" and after that he finds out he has super powers and immediately becomes a murderous sociopath. Was it the alien ship his family keeps in the barn out back telling him to do this? Maybe. It's not clear. It seems to me it was just a kid who snapped once given an ounce of power.

The movie really doesn't play with any internal struggle at all and it suffers for that. Once it gets going Brightburn doesn't really stop. Brandon goes on a rampage, his parents struggle with their new reality and... that's it, I guess.

There was a Spider-Man one-shot that tied into the first Spider-Verse arc. It was around 20 pages and was the issue unfortunately sandwiched in between the first appearances of Spider-Gwen and Peni Parker SP//DR. "I Dated A Teenage Spider" was a retelling of Spider-Man's origin, only in this universe Aunt May is dead and Uncle Ben beats young Peter Parker with his belt.

So in this brief 20 pages, when Peter turns into a Spider-Monster and eats Uncle Ben and lays eggs inside Mary Jane, you completely understand his brief arc.

Brightburn needed more of that. Superman turned out to be Superman because his adoptive parents loved him. Brightburn... Has the same exact set-up, just with vastly different results. If played differently, this movie could have been great, but as it stands, Brightburn is just an edgy Glenn wank-fest come to life.

tl;dr: It's not great but it's not awful. It could have been so much more.
---

drooling while eating
Advokaiser is my rock