Movie Review: Brightburn

Brightburn

Director: David Yarovesky

Starring: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn

Rating: R

Runtime: 90 minutes

If ever a movie felt like it came from a graphic novel, it is Brightburn. Spinning from the minds of the Gunn family and produced by James Gunn himself, Brightburn has lofty expectations with the names attached and the admittedly good trailer that was cut for it. Was it able to reach these goals? Let’s rip the door off the freeze and find out.

Brightburn is about the Breyer’s, a couple who live on a farm and are having trouble conceiving until one night something falls from the sky and lands on their property. What they pull out from the wreckage is a near-infant child who seemingly has no parents…what a match made in Heaven. They decide to raise the child as their own under the name Brandon, who they say is adopted. Everything works out fine until Brandon starts to discover more about who and what he is. The movie wastes no time. In less than five minutes, Brandon arrives on Earth and grows up to the age of 12, where the film really begins.

The pace is borderline break-neck, so much so that at times it feels like we are just treated to small situations and we jump between a lot two to three-minute scenes. The ninety-minute runtime was obviously the cause of this, and while the pacing makes sure the movie is never dull, the material seems like it needs time to breathe. The first thing I thought of when I saw the trailer for Brightburn was Joe Hill’s The Cape, so maybe this story isn’t the most original. We are basically talking about Kal-El arriving at the Kent Farm and using all of his powers for evil, which is probably more likely than being the squeaky-clean Superman.

The ending managed to leave it open for another movie, and I can say that I would watch a sequel. The idea of Brightburn deserves more time and more build-up of characters. We rarely get to know anyone in the movie before they are disposed of in some way. At times it suffers from what a lot of movies suffer from, which is trying to make the film all high notes and then roll credits. This dampens the substance that is there and makes no use of the secondary characters, and in a small town called Brightburn in Kansas, there must be great characters, right?

I want to wrap up with two observations that I think modern movies suffer from and Brightburn was just the latest offender. Brandon grew up in 2006, so we can stop using lenses to make the home videos look like they are from the 80s. I have a daughter who was born in 2007; the technology was much better than the decade I was born in. The movie takes place in what seems to be 2016, but the local police department is basing their investigation on a file of papers with Polaroids clipped to them. If you want your movie to use this technology, then set the film in the time where that was being used. This movie could have easily been set two or three decades prior since no modern technology impacted the events in the film.

The runtime of Brightburn makes this an easy recommendation. It moves so fast and is so short that you never feel like it is wasting your time, even though this review is stating that it should have been longer. If you would like to see a creepy child playing an evil superhero, and you can stand a couple of scenes of gore, then you should see it.