The burn is bright

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a–run for your life.

Get ready to be meet Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn), who has one of those sweet, alliterate names that rolls right off the tongue. Like Clark Kent or Lex Luthor or Michael Meyers. He’s brilliant too because despite not paying attention in class, he’s immediately able to rattle off how wasps are more violent than bees and engage in brood parasitism or some other foreshadowing mumbo jumbo like that. Because saying Brandon’s not from around here is a colossal understatement.

The majority of this film concerns the drama felt by Brandon’s parents, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman). Because not only is there not a book about how to raise a child, there is most definitely not a book about how to raise a child from outer space. Then they start discovering more and more evidence that there son is an alien Damien Thorn. Like any parent, you naturally don’t want to believe that. Until, like Gregory Peck and Live Schreiber, you have too.

The highlight of this movie is the performances of Dunn, Banks, and Denman. The former two for delivering a believable, emotional performance and the latter for being sufficiently creepy. The horror elements are also well done as they show how terrifying someone with Superman’s abilities, and no moral compass would be.

The only major problem that I have with this movie is that there are a couple of things that you would expect to be mentioned again, but aren’t. Brandon’s powers first manifest when he’s trying to start up the lawnmower, and he accidentally tosses it a mile back and into the air. And if that didn’t damage the lawnmower enough, Brandon sticks his hand into the running blades and utterly destroys them. How did he end up explaining that? Or his father coming across him eating a fork. Or what about Brandon’s crush, Caitlyn (Emmie Hunter), whose hand he ends up crushing (it’s in the trailer). The last we see of her is [spoiler] when Brandon drops off some flowers so she won’t be mad at him anymore and say that he’s going to “take care of” Caitlyn’s mom. The woman who doesn’t want her daughter to talk to someone who deliberately broke her hand. My best guess is that the rest of Caitlyn’s scenes got cut because the domestic violence overtones were getting a little too uncomfortably real. Unlike Brandon laser eyeing someone, where you can say “it’s only a movie.” [/spoiler]

Brandon draws his symbol at each of the crime scenes in this movie, which Sheriff Deever (Gregory Alan Williams) notices.  So Deever immediately heads out to the Breyer residence, because the symbol looks like two Bs. I found myself going ‘what’ a little at this point. Because unless he somehow figured out Brandon was an alien, how could he have possibly thought he could have done any of things he does.

This is a minor things, but I found myself wondering what year this movie takes place in. Tori is seen using a cell phone during the climax, but that is the only indication that it’s the present. Earlier in the film, we see that Brandon has Victoria Secret’s catalogs hiding under his bed. Do you not have access to the internet, because I don’t think kids do that anymore. Though I suppose this movie could be employing a deliberately anachronistic style like Batman (89). [spoiler] My other minor thing is James Gunn regular Michael Rooker shows up at the end playing a J. Jonah Jameson equivalent. Which is only odd because he’s the one Marvel character in a world of DC people. [/spoiler]

This next paragraph is going to be beside the point, but this movie had awful marketing. Because the trailers imply that Brandon turns evil due to being bullied, like in Chronicle. In the film itself, Brandon doesn’t seem to receive any more than the typical amount of teasing that twelve-year-olds’ receive. [spoiler] The real cause is Brandon’s ship telling him to take over the world. Which they totally stole from season two of Smallville, but whatever. This movie takes that idea and goes in a vastly different direction. [/spoiler] I also appreciate the marketing people feeling the need to put the ending of the movie in the g*****n trailer.

Brightburn is the perfect thing to watch now, with people already suffering from superhero fatigue. Because it takes the genre in a direction, it doesn’t usually go in. Darkman, Hellboy, Swamp Thing and a couple of other films that I could name merely stick there toe into the horror genre, instead of going all in. The only thing that might be just as good or better than this is The Boys (2019). A series which offers a similarly brutal attack on the superhero mythos, but extends it not just to the superheroes themselves, but the seedy corporate underbelly that has grown around the industry.