What if Superman landed on Earth and chose evil? Brightburn (2019) had one of the best premises in modern horror and squandered it. We do a full post-mortem on why this James Gunn-produced film failed: underdeveloped mythology, a flat villain, a Terminator where there should have been Damien from The Omen, and a script that seems written in a weekend. With guest Steve Franco. If you love superhero horror, film theory, and asking "what could have made this better?" ...this one's for you.
In This Deep-Dive Analysis, We Deconstruct the Absurdity:
Want More Than a Movie Review? We also took an essential detour into business innovation and why terrible product launches (like New Coke and Tab) teach us valuable lessons about creativity and audience testing.
Check out Brightburn (2019) on Netflix and streaming platforms everywhere.
Learn more about the business analysis that kicks off the episode: Make Elephants Fly: How Radical Innovation is Remaking the World is available here: www.foundersspace.com/make-elephants-fly
00:00
Introduction
There's no conflict. It's like he's a human who's weird, but then he's just evil, and he loses all those human qualities.
They made Mom that much in denial, because it simplified the story. It made the rest of the plot easier to write. All right, so you know-
I'm good with these segues, huh?
Exactly.
This wasn't planned, audience.
It wasn't planned at all.
All right, welcome to the podcast, where we talk about the big ideas behind projects of all different kinds, books, TV shows, movies, video games, nothing's off limits.
My guest today is Steve Franco, a creative professional and a very good friend of mine. So Steve, aside from today's project, Brightburn, that we're gonna discuss in a moment, have you been reading or watching anything interesting lately?
Yeah, I've actually read a book called Make Elephants Fly.
It's a book about innovation, how you brainstorm, how you come up with new ideas, how a lot of startups that started out jumping to conclusions about what the customers wanted, actually had to backpedal and do more basic testing around how they would
actually launch their product or service. It's really interesting because there's so much creativity involved in business in general.
It's just really enlightening to see how companies move from that iteration phase when they're testing out different business models to actually growing and pivoting and pushing towards one specific model. It's a really good book.
Any particular creative ideas in that book that you're reading or anything that stood out to you is really interesting?
Yeah, it was interesting in terms of the restaurant industry.
Someone may have a great idea in terms of a new restaurant, but they want to jump into creating a full-fledged restaurant as opposed to, let's say, doing a pop-up restaurant or something called a cloud kitchen, where you start building your idea
around testing these dishes in a kitchen that you don't necessarily own, but that you're renting out, and how that can really help you figure out, do people actually want what I'm selling them? And I think that's the big basic tenet of the whole
That's interesting.
It reminds me of the sort of minimum viable product approach to designing an app or probably a lot of different businesses.
So the idea here is with restaurants, instead of just finding an empty space, creating a menu, getting alone, opening the doors and struggling for the first two to ten years to make it work. Yeah.
They're saying, dip your feet in in different ways, test it out, take advantage of all these empty spaces in malls maybe, or, you know, food truck or something like that, and just see if there's a demand and what it looks like for your product.
Is that exactly? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Really interesting. That is a creative approach.
Yeah, for sure. And I think it's a it's an approach.
I think that a lot of companies should use, especially when they're trying something new, you know, not throwing millions of dollars at it and then finding out, well, this isn't actually going to work.
But we really had a hunch that it would work doing those small tests. I think in life is important, too, you know.
I don't think companies ever waste that kind of money. That doesn't happen, doesn't it?
No, that's right. Especially like Amazon or those big tech companies. I don't think they ever do.
And with the exception of New Coke, I'm pretty sure that's an invention of the West.
And that's coming back, for sure.
I'm surprised there isn't like a nostalgia thing for New Coke.
You know, people were like revisiting things that everybody hated in the past and they love it now and it's cool to like it. I'm surprised New Coke has never made it over that hump.
I know that in Crystal Pepsi was the other one, right?
Delicious. Yeah, absolutely delicious.
Refreshing. I could use one right now. That and a Tab.
What happened to Tab?
Do they still have Tab?
I don't know. It was one of those things, I think, that I never really even saw around or I had heard about it. It was like a legend.
I think they had it in like Back to the Future. I think he drinks a Tab in Back to the Future or something, but I don't think I've ever seen a can of Tab in real life. Yeah.
The only time I recall seeing Tab is when I was with one of my parents, like my dad took me camping or fishing and we had driven hours away from the city and we stopped at some little country grocery shop that has like gas and everything, you know,
Gas White Claw and Tab.
Exactly.
Except instead of White Claw, this was pre-White Claw. It was just maybe vodka or moonshine and Tab, I guess, was that the early White Claw.
But yeah, there was always like one lone soda machine that was like the old style where you had like open it up, you know, and there was usually a Tab in there. I think that's the only time I recall seeing Tab.
You shake it and get your arm stuck to pull the can out.
Now, these were big luxurious glass bottles that you had to pull out of a fridge.
Oh, nice.
Basically, yeah.
That sounds really refreshing right now. It's like 100 degrees out.
Oh, yeah. That might be the only place they sold Tab. Maybe they still do.
Maybe if you own a gas station in the mountains, you get Tab.
If we were on a really big, big, big podcast right now, we have someone looking this up for us right now.
A big podcast team.
Yeah. It's a podcast research team.
If this was a big podcast, someone would be drinking a Tab while listening to it and going, oh my God, this is crazy. This is so weird. I never drink Tab.
I can't believe it.
I'm drinking Tab now. They'd have to pay. This is sponsored by Tab Moment.
All right.
That's enough of our Tab ad.
But if you're out there, Tab, get in touch.
Send me my five cents.
Slide into the DMs.
All right. Today's project is a 2019 film, Brightburn, directed by David Yorovsky, starring Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, and Jackson Dunn. I don't know what you thought about this movie.
I thought it was pretty good. What was your reaction?
I thought it was a solid 5 out of 10. I think it was kind of a mishmash of concepts that never really took form the way I think they intended them to. But we'll get into that in this podcast.
Yeah.
No, actually, let's go ahead and dive in. I want to know what you mean, like what ideas, what aspects didn't come together, didn't take form.
I just thought that it was really lacking a backstory or a real motivation for what he was doing. It's like, okay, we've got a kid, they find him in the woods, he gets basically adopted and raised by the human family.
Then all of a sudden, one night, he's now evil, and we don't know anything about why that's happening. Then not only is he evil, but now he has superpowers.
He's like an evil superhero, and he just wants to take over the world because he's being told to by, I guess, his alien family or something. He's been activated, kind of like a sleeper agent.
I think those movies can work when you know why this person or this supernatural being is being activated in this way, what's the bigger plan here, except just taking things over. It falls flat.
It's kind of like The Omen meets a superhero movie, meets Insidious, you know? And you're kind of taking all those concepts and doing the idea sex, bringing everything together, and now we're going to have a new movie.
This is going to be a really interesting concept, but I don't know. There were some interesting aspects. I thought the special effects were really well done.
How he's kind of just flying through that diner, or he's in one spot in the diner, he's moving towards the woman who he's going to kill, presumably, and he ends up in the end of finding out that he did.
I thought that was really the strong part, and the acting I thought was really good. I think Elizabeth Banks is a really good actress, and I thought the kid they chose was creepy enough that he was good for the role.
One of the things I wanted to talk about, and we'll get to eventually, is what you think might have made this story work a little bit better. I had a few notes and you hit on one of those right away.
I'm going to break it out of what you were saying to specifically talk about it, but basically, this is a 12-year-old boy who up to that point in his life were led to believe was basically human, with nothing really exceptional about him, except for
the fact that he was very smart. And we find out later in the movie that he's never bled, but that's revealed much, much later. So we have this boy who seems like a sweet kid, right? Everybody likes him.
He seems kind of shy. It doesn't seem particularly strong or aggressive or anything like that. And then the pod, I guess, the alien pod that delivered him to Earth, reprograms him.
And from then on, he is evil. And I think that's a real weakness in this story. I think they were trying to play off of the Superman myth too much or Superman story too much.
So they just said, OK, if you're watching this movie, you're familiar with the Superman story. All that is in your head. Take that for granted.
This story basically builds on that. And I think that was a mistake because it missed the opportunity to do what would have been really interesting, which is explain why he goes evil other than to just say he was reprogrammed.
Yeah, I think that would, you hit on a really good point. That would have really added to the story in such a big way. Why he was turned on in the first place in terms of just turning into an evil kid from having been in Wyatt age 12.
Are there others like him? Or is he just gonna single-handedly destroy the world, just fly around and blow up buildings? It's like they show you at the end, but he's destroying their town.
Right. Is he activated only when he's really angry? Because that's what it seems to allude to.
He's playing a role of being a good kid, and he still tries to up until a point where he can't control himself anymore, it seems like.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's very vague. I read it more as from the point when he sleepwalks to the device, the device starts reprogramming him and he quickly loses his humanity to the point where he basically acts like a robot.
Remember the sex talk with dad in the woods, and he's like, now? Should I do that now? He's supposed to be 12, not like an android.
They stripped away his humanity really thoroughly, and his morality and his common sense very quickly by this reprogramming. But there's no hint of an explanation of why or to what purpose, or like what the strategy is, or the alien plan.
Like, is he just supposed to become this super badass who causes lots of problems on Earth? There was a drawing he did of destroying the Earth with his heat ray vision or laser vision or whatever, but that didn't really, that's not much of a plan.
No. It's, you must say, a really inefficient plan, right? You send this alien child, you drop him in the woods.
What if no one found him?
Yeah.
That would have been interesting, like, does he just get eaten by wolves out there or it makes no sense? Or they planned this whole thing from the beginning, obviously, to have him crash land right near this couple who happened to want a child.
None of that was explained. He just ended up there and they're just assuming that they're going to take him in.
There was a sort of weirdly out of place bit early on. I think it was supposed to be foreshadowing when he's in the classroom and he's learning about insects and the teacher asked him.
Yeah, different between bees and hornets and he kind of goes off on that. He talks about a species of hornet that basically trick other creatures, other species of hornet to raise their young.
I guess that was what we were supposed to think the aliens were doing here, but it really wasn't clear or how that helps them at all. The original Superman story, baby Superman, is sent to Earth because his planet is destroyed.
He's a lone survivor and he's sent to a planet where he has a chance of surviving.
As I recall, unless they've reconned it, which I'm sure they've done a dozen times, he lands on the farm in Smallville, just by chance and is raised by kind people who are a little bit older and don't have any kids of their own.
That was all meant to be, I think, fortuitous, and they've explored what would have happened if Superman had landed in other places and been raised by other people, which is a more interesting way to explore Superman being something different than
what he is. This takes all of that out of the character. This little boy lost all initiative. He stopped being like a person in the story and he just became a tool, like an object to further the narrative.
I think that's one reason why a lot of the time it felt flat. It's like a monster movie, but we're supposed to believe that the mother cares almost in a delusional fashion about him.
It doesn't really give you that much to create a sequel out of. It's like, what are you going to do now? It's him against the world, but he's a one-note Terminator-like character now.
He doesn't care anymore. They showed at the end when he's just flying around, blowing up buildings, drawing his tag on the grass or the wheat fields or whatever. He wants everyone to know it's him.
It falls flat. There were some interesting, I guess, interesting parts or some parts that had that tension aspect when he's chasing that waitress in the diner. Thought that was well done.
I thought when he goes after his aunt in the house, how he keeps triggering the alarm system or the lighting system, the motion detectors in the backyard.
I thought that was pretty interesting, the way they did that and how she doesn't end up getting killed, and it's actually the uncle. I wasn't expecting that. That was a nice little twist.
But it seems like it didn't really... Those moments didn't last long enough to build the right amount of tension. You know, as soon as you kind of realize what was happening, it was done.
They kind of close shop on that scene. From the time he shows up to her house to the time when the uncle dies, it's really accelerated. So it doesn't really give you that sense of foreboding that you might get otherwise.
And he basically throws the uncle up against the garage door, disappears, the uncle for some fascinating reason just decides to take off and leave his wife alone in the house.
Yeah, I actually really puzzled over that. I thought I must have missed something, like I wasn't paying attention enough. But after the uncle gets knocked against the garage door, why does he get in his car and drive away?
It doesn't make any sense at all, because he didn't run away.
The boy didn't take off running.
No, Brandon was gone. He just vanished.
He just vanished, but he could be in the house where his wife is. So this guy just decides to jump in his car and drive as fast as he can away from his wife and his house, which seems really, really odd.
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a few things. So much to talk about in this movie.
All right. So you mentioned a few things. One is where would you go to the sequel?
And I'd like to come back to that at the end. You also brought up something which I thought was problematic. And I like the way you put it.
There was some interesting horror in this film. There's a lot of body horror in this movie. A lot of creepy physical violations of people.
And I think that's meant to both make the audience members feel more vulnerable and be more aware of how scary, invulnerable, super strong, super fast creature like Superman could be if he decided to be bad.
Like we view him as our hero and our savior, but he's actually quite dangerous and horrifyingly capable of harming others with very little effort. So I think that's what they were trying to play up with a lot of that part of it.
But they repeated a pattern over and over again. And you were saying one is they didn't really spend enough time with the kills, I guess, with setting it up, establishing tension. And then the person gets killed or dies or whatever.
What I found was really frustrating is that they kept repeating the same pattern where somebody underestimates Brandon and then he kills them. And that was pretty much every single kill. Like in many cases, they realize something's up with him.
And then the next interaction is they underestimate him in some way and then they're dead. And that's just same thing, like almost every single time with slight differences, but too similar.
It's a good point. Very good point. Because it's not like they're subtle about it either.
You know, he'll say like, you're in big trouble or if you tell the sheriff, you're in big trouble, so you know the sheriff's gonna die.
He literally threatens people. He threatens adults multiple times.
Yeah, it's game over for them and it just keeps showing you that same pattern over and over again. There's no sense of mystery to what he's gonna do next.
It's kind of like everything is foreshadowed, so it doesn't like throw a curve ball at any point. Like you can just play it piece by piece.
The mom's gonna eventually find out that the way that she finds out through that silly notebook that you saw earlier. Yeah. It's like that's such an easy device to use.
The notebook under the bed. He's clearly not that smart, right? Unless he just wanted his mother to find it.
That's the other part of this whole thing. He hides that shirt between his closet or the dresser and the wall. There's a lot going on.
But you're saying?
No. I was gonna say we should probably take a break from criticizing this story and the plot, and maybe back up a little bit and set the stage for it. Because you're right.
I mean, there's a lot in here that we could poke at. I think largely because we're both aware on some level that it could have been a good movie. It could have been a really good movie.
And some people probably really enjoyed it. And if they did, good for them. Like, I'm jealous.
I didn't hate this. Like you said, it's kind of a five out of ten. I might give it a six because they managed to keep the budget down and make their money back.
So, you know, and some of the acting was good. And it's kind of cool to see variations on stories that I read when I was a kid. All that is kind of interesting.
So anyway, backing up a bit, I think this was James Gunn's Hollywood Jail Project. I don't know if you recall, but he got fired by Disney after some homophobic tweets that he had put out there 10 years before, something like that.
You know, when he was doing Slither, I think was that movie. Around that time, early in his career, he had tweeted some things that got dug up. I think he'd long since deleted them, but you know, everybody always saves everything on the internet.
And so he was thrown into Hollywood jail. In this particular film, he took a producer credit and he had one of his friends direct it. The director was one of the editors and actors in Guardians of the Galaxy.
He had like a bit part in that movie. And the director also previously directed The Hive in 2014. I don't know if you remember that one.
I don't think it made much of a splash at the time, but it's another kind of vaguely insect-themed horror film. It's basically about experiments. I think it's a Russian scientist experimented in creating a hive mind and then plugging people into it.
And then, of course, Michael Rooker, who was in Guardians of the Galaxy and has a great relationship with James Gunn, is in the credit scenes with the Injustice League at the very end. So what do you think about that?
Do you think this was James Gunn's way of taking a backseat but continuing to work? And actually, this is really his project or not?
That's a good question. I mean, I don't know the relationship between, besides the fact that they're friends, that what you just mentioned, the director and him as producer.
But I'm sure he had a lot of creative input into the story line or the way it developed from the directing standpoints as he has so much experience directing. I think he definitely had a lot of input in it.
And I'm not super familiar with his work outside of seeing Guardians of the Galaxy. So I would think so. It would make sense.
Sorry. And a good way to get back into Hollywood, right, would be to have credit as a producer, have influence on the finished product, and then kind of get yourself back when the dust settles.
Yeah. I mean, I think this was a way to stay busy and working. I think his brother got one of the writing credits for this.
Again, my guess would be that James Gunn decided this was a great way to kind of pull his name back. So that like the controversy says it was name didn't kill the project, but allow him to continue to work.
So I'm guessing he probably wrote a lot of this and he probably weighed in heavily about a lot of the major decisions.
And then he just took the opportunity to help some people that he's friends with advance their careers and get some credits and things that they wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
But they did keep the budget down and like I said, it did make its money back more than double, which is generally good because that typically covers advertising. I think this movie was a success, not a huge success.
I think the biggest problem in making a sequel probably has to do with the fact that the reviews, you know, critics and popular opinion was pretty mixed. It wasn't like some people loved it and some people hated it, which is almost better.
It was a lot of 5 out of 10s more or less. So I think you're definitely on the right track.
So briefly, the plot, as you said, is an alien pod lands on a farm in Kansas near the town of Brightburn, Kansas, I believe, which is where the movie gets its title.
The family or the husband and wife living there, we see via books on their shelves are unable to have a child.
They apparently, we don't see this, we see a dream sequence reimagining of this later, but apparently they go out in the woods, they find the pod, they find a baby inside, they decide to raise it as their own.
Fast forward about 12 years and the boy is about to turn 12.
He wakes up in the middle of the night, is drawn to the barn where the pod has been stored secretly, and essentially reprograms him or activates dormant programming in him that makes him evil and commands him in an alien language to take the earth.
That sound good so far?
Sounds about right, yeah.
Okay, and from then on, he stops being a cute little human boy. He is a clearly like a snake in the grass, like almost like a robot that pretends to be a boy some of the time, but not particularly well. He doesn't do a good job of hiding his powers.
His parents realize it. One of his classmates realizes it, and subtly but surely, he basically kills or severely wounds everybody, with the exception of his aunt, who he just sort of traumatizes, I guess.
Yeah.
And then in the end, he murders his mom, and the end.
That's not right.
Okay.
That's it, good summary.
I really like that you mentioned the Omen, because I actually made a note to ask you if this is Damien in The Omen 7.
22:22
Superman Story Comparison
It doesn't really seem to be very different. Can you think of any major significant differences between Brandon Breyer and Damien in the Omen series?
Not really. Six movies. I'm trying to think around the original, but that one's interesting because it's more of a slow burn.
His father a diplomat, so just little by little, it starts getting revealed who he is.
I don't really think there are too many differences between the two characters, except in this one, it's extremely rushed and he turns into more of a, like you said, more of a robot than a sinister, manipulating type of character.
He's just kind of, how do I say this? He's like a more Terminator than he is Damien and the Omen.
That's a really good distinction.
Very creepy.
All the deaths around him appeared as accidents, if I recall correctly. So being suspicious of him took more, right? I think there was like one person who was suspicious of him or maybe two.
There was a supernatural mystery around him that was also interesting, and he was very intelligent and very sneaky, but he still seemed more, way more human than Brandon Bright, way more.
And I think that made him interesting, almost like an adult in a child's body.
That's really creepy. That's a good point. Yeah, it's very creepy to have that.
As opposed to just a regular kid who goes Terminator, which isn't really that compelling.
And he doesn't hide anything very well, like we were saying earlier.
He wants everyone to know. He mentions his superior intelligence. He questions his reaction to his uncle being killed.
He's just so neutral about it. In the way he says, you know, I loved him, I had nothing to do with it, was ridiculously unconvincing. So he was just in a sense toying with them.
But for the audience, it's not that satisfying. There's not a slow way of them figuring it out piece by piece. It kind of just kind of all happened at once.
Hey, let's go out hunting, I'm going to shoot you in the head. You know what I mean? There was nothing that would tell you that he wasn't going to do that.
He doesn't even like find a deer or find something to shoot at. He just has him walk in front of him and okay, I guess I'm going to shoot my kid now. It's too easy.
Well, you're pointing out a few things here.
One of them is people in this story aren't too smart. No. They're not real clever.
No one really. Maybe the sheriff was sort of clever to figure things out, but the clues were just literally put on his desk in front of him. So that was kind of random.
Brandon's not particularly smart. He doesn't cover his tracks. He's blatant.
He threatens people. There's an obvious connection between him and everyone that gets killed pretty much. It's not smart.
People realize that something's up, like his dad watches him chew a fork into a wrinkled mess. And then what does he do about it? He gets immediately distracted by like lingerie photos, I think, that his son had and like the...
Oh, yeah, that's right.
The autopsy picture or whatever, right?
He completely forgot about the fork or just chose not to address it. As you mentioned earlier, the uncle gets thrown up 10 feet into a garage door which breaks. He gets up and the 12 year old who did it is gone.
So, he gets in his car and drives away from his home.
As fast as he can. Where are you going?
I don't... Yeah, and five minutes before that, this little boy, this 12 year old boy shows up at his aunt's house, threatens her, and then she sends him home and he goes home. And does she call his house and call his parents?
No.
She texts her husband that she's turning off her ringer.
That's a good point.
I thought that she was going to text her sister, like, this is weird. The kid is acting really weird.
Your kid is on the road or whatever in the middle of the night, like, heads up, he came over here to like threaten me or something.
But no, she just sent a 12 year old home in the dark and then texted her husband that she was going to sleep after she complained a little bit about her house.
And her ringer being off, well, what was that there for?
So that, I guess to show that her bedtime routine is turning off her ringer and that she's not going to wake up while the stuff is happening with her husband and the kid pulling the kid out of the closet and driving them home.
She doesn't say anything. He's yelling at it.
That's right.
Right. And they're storming through the house and there's no, she's just out cold. She's really tired.
Yeah.
So there's a lot that doesn't make sense.
There's a lot that it seemed like it was there for a reason, but that reason either got cut out or didn't add up.
Like Brandon signing his crimes. Right. You mentioned that earlier.
Like he's got his little tag there.
What?
Why? If he's at all interested in keeping his identity secret at all, which apparently he is since he wears a creepy mask and he threatens everybody who wants to out him before he murders him. He smashed that girl's hand in the middle of PE.
He signs all of his crimes. He threw his dad against the wall. Like I know earlier you were saying sometimes he acts from anger and it leads him to make mistakes, but he's using the victim's blood to sign a crime because he's angry.
Like it's really weird. I think it was a real struggle to sit and watch these people make some of these mistakes. And I think probably the biggest movie sin of all was Elizabeth Banks' character being so devoted to him no matter what he did, right?
And so delusional about the way that he acted. Did you notice that? Like they really had to help the auntie on her level of denial.
Yeah, they really did.
She was in utter denial no matter what was in front of her. She would kill people in front of her and she still would say, you're still a good boy.
Yeah, that was really, really bizarre. And then in the end, she underestimated him and he killed her.
And you think he would be tagging these crime scenes with some kind of alien symbols, not just like a cool like ACDC version of his initials, right? Like there's no meaning to what he does.
Now, he's just an evil superhero bent on destroying the earth with laser eyes.
It's gonna take him a while. Like some sort of super villain. I wish it would have happened in this movie, frankly.
I think it would have made for a more satisfying end to the story.
And guarantee that there's no sequel. That would be the other.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, any thoughts on why the mom was extra delusional in this movie?
I think it was a good device in terms, not a good device, but a device to illustrate the fact that he could do anything around the small town, easily tied back to her son.
And if she's in denial, then him getting caught is going to just play out in a much longer fashion until the end. Because if she starts formulating a plan early on, it's going to change the whole dynamic of the movie.
Because the dad's going to be on board. So it's going to turn into like the parents against the kid. And that's a whole different thing going on.
So having her be in denial so long, lets every other ridiculous thing in the movie happen up until that ending where she gets dropped from like 30,000 feet, I guess. Because there was a plane up there too. I think that's why they did it.
I don't see any other way that they could make her a really rational character who's not in denial and have it play out the way it did.
Well, I think what you said could work if they had made her realize that he was what he was, but that a conflict between her and her husband had been like whether or not he was redeemable.
Instead of denying that he has super abilities or that he's doing bad things, which is what she did, if she had accepted those things, but then thought that he could be turned or raised or the evil programming could be countered, if she had thought
she understood better what was happening to him and that her love could help him become a hero, then I think it would have been a more interesting second part of the film or second half of the film or so. Like if she had dropped the denial and
accepted it and they'd had a conversation and an argument and dad had been like look, we have to destroy him and mom had been like we can fix this, you know, he's our boy, we can love him into being a good guy and then dad ended up getting killed and
mom in a way would still support her son because she said all along that he was, he could be good and wouldn't really blame him if she disagreed with her husband. So that would have been more compelling and could have even set up an ending where
instead of him killing his mother, she starts helping him and she thinks that she's the influence that keeps him from completely destroying the earth. I mean, if you think about it, an evil Superman, what chance would anybody have? Superman could
just trash pretty much everything, especially if you don't know what his weakness is. His mother, you know, keeping the lid on it a little bit and raining him in a little bit, there'd be a different balance point between an evil Superman and the rest
of the world. And I think that would be more interesting and it would better mirror the Superman story in that respect. So they could have done that.
The only reason I can think of, and I think this is kind of what you're saying, is that they made Mom that much in denial because it simplified the story. It made the rest of the plot easier to write.
You know, just things sort of follow one after the other, nothing really deep or complicated happens. You can repeat the same death pattern and then you're done.
I wonder if they backed into her character, like made her that much more in denial once they realized, wait a minute.
Oh, yeah.
We've got a problem here.
Right, she's too smart.
Cause the dad was easy. Cause the dad is like, something's wrong, he's not my kid, let's do something about it.
That's a really good point. Maybe as they were drafting the story or developing the story, the mother character had to be scaled back in terms of her intelligence and the amount to which she naturally would drive the story.
Because she really doesn't drive the story that much.
No.
And I guess she's the main character. She's the main character, right?
I guess. I guess so.
Right. It can't be Brandon Brier because he's basically a prop. He's not really an actual character.
At least he's not a three-dimensional character. So it would have to be her. So she's the main character, but she doesn't drive the story.
Is that why we don't like this?
Maybe. I hadn't thought about her in that way. I guess I just had been so focused when I was watching it, just around how silly it was.
All these, like that, what you're calling the debt pattern. I was just following that. Okay.
One, two, three. Basically, I wonder if even the timing of each one of those segments is exactly the same.
Yeah.
Almost like it fits in like a puzzle.
Like a simple song.
The discovery. Oh, now. Oh, yeah.
The threat. Okay. Wait five minutes.
Because it was basically like no time at all before he was going to do something about it. They even add scenes really that broke that up to build tension. Like they would in a normal thriller.
Like, what is he going to do? I wonder. And then all of a sudden, he's doing, he's enacting his plan.
As soon as you hear the little girl mentioning her mother, I'm going to do something about that. I believe the next scene was him in the diner going after the mob, right?
Yeah. I mean, it's real close, if not in the next. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
So instead of what you're describing, which is a pretty bland pattern, if the story had been more about the mother versus the programming that was in him, activated by the ship, kind of like the mom versus the pod, more or less, or the aliens that it
represents, then you could have had those moments where someone's kind of mean to him or becomes an obstacle. He does the sort of hunting thing and they underestimate him, and then he kills them.
And then there's a period of redemption where his mother steps in, and it seems like he's going to be better and okay.
And then something bad happens and he goes out and kills someone again, and then mom tries even harder and more desperately to redeem him. And then he goes out and does it again. And then finally you have a showdown.
That's a slightly more interesting pattern.
Right.
Another thing I thought might make it a better story is if in mixed in, in those periods of redemption, or maybe even in some of the parts of it where he's hunting or killing people, if they played off of the Superman story in more interesting ways,
instead of like this movie just basically exists on top of the classic Superman origin of his youth, you know, they just added on, you know, from one point on it sort of changes and everything prior to that is basically the same. If they had him
develop and played off of key moments in different ways, like, I'm trying to think off top of my head, Superman loses his father, it's a tragedy. You can't save them.
I think the best example of this is the 1980s movie, where as a young man, he has this power, but even with all this power, there's nothing he can do to save his father from a heart attack.
And that's a really, really important lesson that teaches him a lot about valuing people and humanity and using his powers responsibly and their limits and so on and so forth.
A moment like that, if you presented it and then played off of it, for this character would have been much, much better than what happened where he just grabs his father and lasers him through the face. There really wasn't a lesson there.
It didn't change the character at all.
And doing so, they missed an opportunity to take the existing Superman story and then play off of it in a way that develops the characters and makes you at times maybe feel something for this child or in a way maybe even conclude that people are
That's a really good point.
I think you need those humanizing moments and those are the movie or the moments that as an audience you really hang on to because it causes that conflict.
If there was a moment where his mother was in danger and he was protecting her, it would throw you on the side of like, maybe there is something to this guy after all.
He's not just pure evil, but then maybe you find out later that he needs to protect the mother for some other ulterior motive. That could have worked.
Because he's still vulnerable and he needs to appear human. If you'd had the mother and the father have a growing conflict over this and at one point, the father not being an all good person, abuses or assaults the boy's mother.
And that's what triggers him to kill his father or something like that. It also adds this element of what made him what he is. Is it the alien programming or is it the fact that his parents weren't perfect people?
Like in the Superman story, what is he a reflection of what made him the way he is? Instead of what we have, which really seems like what I'm assuming is a totally unintentional argument against adoption. Right.
Just don't do it.
Right.
Because you never know what you're going to get. It's a box of chocolates.
It's going to be bad.
Could be a coconut in there, could be a landmine. You have no idea what you're going to get in that box of chocolates.
Literally, it could be a kid with laser eyes.
Could be a kid with laser eyes. I think I got a heart like that one day.
And a sneaker hood that he wears. It looked like a big sneaker that he was putting over his head. Like a Chuck Taylor.
Did you notice how quickly he put that stuff on too?
Yeah, and it came from nowhere. When his dad took him out in the woods to old Yeller him, he got shot and then he just appears with that weird mask. Like, where was it?
I know.
And the cape. It never shows you his interest in comic books at all.
You don't even know if they exist in this world.
Right. It's like peeling the onion back, you know. There's always something that's not really working.
I think that was supposed to be his, like, sorry, his telephone booth moment, like the Clark Kent turns into Superman. Yeah. Maybe that's what they're trying to show you.
I guess something about his alien programming drove him to, you're right, you know, it would have made way more sense if he'd had one superhero comic book at some point, or he'd walked past the television with a superhero with a cape or a mask on or
like literally anything. I want to get your opinion on this because I thought about this and it's a little bit off topic.
You know how sometimes you see a movie and that movie has in it something that is a big part of pop culture, like, for example, zombies or superheroes or werewolves or whatever it is. In some movies, no one in the movie has ever heard of this thing.
Like, it could be, you know, oh my God, there's vampires everywhere and they're like, oh, they're these weird people that are like drinking blood. This is crazy. And then in other movies, occasionally, they're like, oh, it's zombies.
Oh, it's vampires. Oh, we know what this is. This movie, I couldn't get what they were doing.
But anyway, what's your opinion? Do you like when the people in the movie have heard of the thing that they're fighting?
Like if it's a well-known trope in science fiction or horror, for example, or do you prefer that they have no idea what that is, and for some reason it doesn't exist in their culture?
I like it when they know it exists, but they start fighting it the way they think it should be fought. And then there's a twist, say the vampire isn't really scared of a cross or a garlic.
I like those moments in movies, because it adds that little bit of like, oh, this isn't your typical zombie or vampire movie. Say, taking in those two examples, when they behave in a way that's very unexpected.
Like zombies are maybe supposed to be slow, but then 28 days later makes them super fast. I like that aspect.
I think that's good. That's like a nice middle ground, right? You get those comedies where they're like, oh, it's the zombie apocalypse.
We've all been hearing about what happened for 70 years or whatever. So let's get our equipment to go out there and kill them. Headshots, everyone remember, which is just too far.
I like yours where in this movie, I think that would be something the effect of mom and dad talking late at night and arguing over the fate of, I've already rewritten this movie, but arguing over the fate of their son and dad saying, he must have a
weakness. There must be something. In all those stories, they always have a weakness, don't they? What is it?
What do you think it is? And mom being like, I don't know, nothing. Like flat out lying to protect him, right?
So dad goes sort of hopelessly after son, and mom realizes too late, maybe that she made the wrong choice, or decides never to reveal his weakness, something like that.
But I think that's more walking the line than what we got, which is a bunch of people who, including the news reports at the end, nobody seems to know what a super powered person would be. So I guess that doesn't exist in their culture. I don't know.
I guess not, but there's video of the super powered person Right, but they don't seem to have any frame of reference for this stuff.
You know, Michael Rooker refers to a half man, half sea monster that's flipping ships in the Pacific or the Asian Sea or something, I don't know.
Oh yeah, that's right.
And then the...
Like a mythological creature.
Right, and then the Wonder Woman character, here first is like a witch, basically.
So it seems like they're using myth or supernatural as a frame of reference, and they're not at all... It must be a world where there are no superhero comic books or movies or...
Maybe that would explain why he doesn't have comic books or he doesn't... There's no reference to any movie.
But it doesn't explain why he has a cape and a mask.
Exactly, that's a good point. So if he just invented it, that was his thing?
Well, it's an alien thing. They all wear capes and masks. I guess.
There's an alien culture that we never get exposed to.
I don't understand why he wears that in the first place. There's absolutely no need for this kid who keeps saying he's superior to humans. They make him out to be like extremely flat out, extremely arrogant.
He thinks he's beyond that. Why would he care? They can't do anything to him.
I think probably the authors and the director and maybe James Gunn as well didn't feel like they needed to explain things like that because again, they're building this on top of the Superman story.
Also, to be clear, the Superman story gave reasons for these things a little bit better. Even the original one that was written mostly for kids to read, they explain this stuff a little bit better.
I think his cape was his blanket and he used it because it was the only thing that was indestructible like him. Otherwise, his clothes and his cape would get shredded. So, if I remember, that was correct.
So anyway, I guess they felt like they didn't need to explain this stuff and they didn't really need to build a universe or even a full mythology around this.
They could just take their story and use the Superman story as the backbone and then just go on from there. Focus on some good kills and wrap it up, dark ending the end.
It just seems like it was a movie that was maybe written in a weekend. Put together really quickly, what if a pod lands with a baby and a family adopts him? All right, go.
Like a hackathon.
What if Superman but evil? Okay, let's crank it out. I think that's all it is, really.
And they just focused on some decent kills. I'll bet the script was short and there were sections of it that just said kills them. And that's supposed to be like three minutes or something.
Yeah, and they moved the camera really slowly.
It took a little time.
So a couple of other things. Would you have liked to see more about the aliens that sent him?
Absolutely. I think that would have been a really important thing to show. Even allude to or if they're mythological, there's a history of aliens on this planet.
Something happens every 500 years or something. They've tried to destroy the Earth before. Or anything beyond just a garbled message, a reprogramming of a kid, and now he kills everything.
Yeah, it would have definitely helped a lot, you know? Some type of back... I think with this type of movie, you need some kind of backstory.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you know what I mean? You can't just have this humanoid-type character, who then you turn into a Terminator, who also happens to be an alien, and have that all work together seamlessly.
Because each one of those in the story doesn't have enough motivation. There's no conflict. It's like he's a human who's weird, but then he's just evil, and he loses all those human qualities.
It's too stark a contrast for a movie like this.
It's boring, and I think what you're saying is, this movie needs more of its own mythology. Yeah. I think that's absolutely true.
It's the only way to really get you thinking more along the lines of, you know, why is he doing what he's doing, as opposed to, that seems really silly.
They better tell me why he's doing what he's doing. And then there's no payoff at the end. Yeah.
All we got was take the earth repeated, which presumably means enslave it so that we can show up later and something.
And take it down that airliner?
Well, the airliner, I think was for cover.
Why does he even need cover?
He doesn't.
But at that point, he's so beyond being a human boy that needs to like weave his way into society before the big reveal.
He's already turned. He's back. He doesn't need anything.
But he's not going to get a job as a journalist if he doesn't preserve his human identity.
That's right.
Come on.
Think about this. I can only edit so much out. Come on.
I hadn't thought about that, but you're right.
Journalism is out of the question.
Okay. This film feels sloppy. I don't think that's fair, but the cops who showed up at the end when the mother called, of course, at no point did she say, my son has superpowers and he's murdering people.
She just called for the cops. The cops show up, they radioed in that there was a 217 or whatever. What is that?
Murder, homicide, or something like that. So the authorities must know that the cops showed up and were investigating a murder, a homicide. And I think they heard the officer killed the second one, or they're aware that some things were going down.
So the idea that the plane was the one committing the murder, you know, and he successfully framed the plane, they just glossed right over that.
Like no one's going to be like, hey, before the plane crashed that didn't injure you at all, was there anything going on at the house? Was anyone murdering anyone or anything like that? They just, it doesn't matter.
Let's skip right over that, it doesn't seem important.
There's no forensics in this world at all.
Yeah.
The plane crashed, there's blood everywhere on that house. He's blasting his way through the house in all these different directions, through the roof, through the windows. He destroys that sheriff, his body's everywhere.
Better example of this no forensics thing.
We can't tell that the vehicle was dropped straight down into the road.
Right, right, right. That's a really good point.
He was drunk.
I forgot to mention that one.
And he launched up, like drunk steers sometimes, and then dropped straight down. No, what did they say? We think he hit a tree because he was drunk?
I think he's sort of because of a tear.
Right, and then what?
He hit a tree or something? And nothing's damaged. Just the road has a giant imprint of the front of a car.
I don't know.
Again, it's one of those movies when you and I have talked about this a million times. We came up with a plot that's silly, or I propose that to you. You would poke holes in it immediately.
I would go on not to write it, or if I did write it, I'd never tell you. I put it in a drawer somewhere, and that would be the end of my Hollywood dream. But somehow in Hollywood, the opposite happens.
No, that sounds like something we could definitely sell for a few million dollars. Go pitch it. It's going to get made.
So what are we waiting for?
It writes itself.
What are you doing this weekend? What are we waiting for? What are you doing this weekend?
We're writing a witchy Wonder Woman sequel.
Well, that sounds good.
Alien Witch meets Wonder Woman.
All right. I'm glad you said Alien Witch because I have this question.
I'm good at these segues, huh?
Exactly.
This wasn't planned, audience. It wasn't planned at all.
The post-credit sequences have the Injustice League is what I'm going to call them, like other creatures, maybe children who also seem to have, actually, they don't all look like children.
49:02
Sequel Concepts
So they look like individuals of different ages, I think, who have, who mirror the Justice League in a dark way. You have one of them that looks like Martian Manhunter.
He's just basically one of those gray aliens, you know, that people draw, but they put a cape on it. It's just a hand drawing. There's a description of the Aquaman monster creature.
There's the witchy Wonder Woman. And then one of them is a guy in a red suit, I think, with a shotgun. Did you recognize that guy?
I didn't know.
Okay.
That looks almost identical to the main character from Super, Rainn Wilson, also from The Office, much like the lead male actor in this, the father. Anyway, Rainn Wilson played kind of a want to be Batman.
It's sort of a comedic take on that, where he's supposed to be like a vigilante, but he doesn't have any skills. And that's exactly the uniform that he wore in that comedy, that dark comedy.
So I think the implication there is that the rest of the Injustice League is not actually connected. They're not connected to each other. I think they are all unique and they have unique origin stories.
So the Wonder Woman character might actually be a witch, you know, witch coven, all women, and then one of them like laughed and she's the Wonder Woman and came to the modern society to wreck havoc.
And the Aquaman character might actually be a half man, half sea monster kind of creature, and none of them may be real.
A merman.
Right, exactly, like a merman. Like, what was it, a little mermaid, the evil witch, who's half octopus, half woman.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so he might be one of those, probably.
Yeah, I didn't know. I think I was tuning out at that point.
Yeah, I don't blame you. But this is the kind of stuff I pay extra attention to, sadly.
I see that.
Yeah, so I don't think they were related, and I think if they did sequels, if they developed this further, that's probably what they would do. They would probably do a unique, unrelated to the Aliens take.
I think in the DC universe, Superman's origin is not related to all the other Justice League origins, and I think they were just copying that. That brings us back, in my mind, to the Aliens' plan again.
Was the plan for him to destroy the Earth, enslave the Earth, to be raised by humans and then leave and come to their planet, to steal the resources, or prepare for their invasion?
These other evil people aren't supposedly, I don't think, supposed to be working with him.
I mean, from that drawing, they showed it really quickly, right? He's just above the Earth with his laser eyes destroying it. So I think it was that simplistic.
He was just sent to destroy the Earth for some reason, and not extract any resources from it. Because he doesn't seem to be doing that in those post credits, right? He's just blowing things up.
Yeah, apparently arbitrarily.
Basically, the plan is we send something to an alien planet that mimics the people that live there. They raise it, and then at some point, it develops its abilities after a certain age, and then it slowly matures until it destroys the whole planet.
I guess that was a plan. Not a very well thought out plan. It's a very dumb plan.
You know what also could do that?
A missile.
Yes, a very powerful missile sent from an alien galaxy instead of this pod and hoping for all these things to fall into place.
Yeah, and he's vulnerable to the metal it's made from. So weird plan. One of their biggest problems was they just didn't think they needed to develop the mythology, I guess.
It just makes it flat. Otherwise, this could have been really interesting.
Yeah, it definitely could have been, but you need a new movie for that. Brightburn 2. Should start writing.
Brightburnier?
Brightburnier Sanders.
Yeah, also, he didn't have a nemesis or anything.
There was really nothing stopping him from doing anything.
That might have been more interesting if it had ended with this idea that there was somebody out there who might slow him down, instead of he's just gonna run right over the earth and then presumably destroy it or not.
If he had been affected by his parents, even if he killed them and it left him with something that might get him to hold back, I don't know.
You know, I was just thinking during this podcast, we probably thought about this movie more than the writers did when they were writing it. I'm gonna put money on that.
Alright, so if you were gonna do a sequel, would you follow the aliens in this and develop more of that idea? Would you follow these other characters? Do you have any thoughts about what you would do with this property if it was handed to you?
To your point, I think he really does need some type of nemesis, or else you really don't have a story.
There has to be something to get in his way. So I'd have to introduce a new character.
In terms of introducing those other characters, I don't know, I think for a movie like this, it might get really convoluted unless they were all getting together to fight him, which could be interesting.
But since there was nothing really established in terms of his motivation, you still have to establish that, what's going on.
So it's either discovering what his motivation is, and then fighting him, or having established his motivation in this movie, which didn't happen.
So it's difficult to do a sequel unless you're going to do a lot of heavy lifting in the beginning of that sequel. It kind of has a flashback into how he came to be, or throughout the movie just kind of showing what's going on here.
Because otherwise, it's just villain, heroes trying to stop villain, and we don't really know why. They call it flat or something like this when you're trying to establish a human boy who then becomes this like alien villain.
So basically, you'd have to give him a character or give the aliens that are driving him a presence and a character in a story.
And you'd also have to introduce at least one other character that could slow him down or stop him or have a chance of defeating him. Otherwise, it just would be more of the same, I guess. There's not even really a story left, is there?
Without doing all that.
You have to basically write another version of that movie. That's not really a continuation.
What if, though, instead of making the same mistake and trying to just put another movie on top of existing DC continuity, those other members of the Injustice League, those other creatures, right, or those other people or whatever they are, figured
out his weakness and tried to fight him or stop him or slow him down. But they're also not good. So, you have evil versus evil in a way. That might be more interesting.
Yeah, it would be.
Parts of it would be interesting, I guess.
Or if they have to fight the aliens because they messed with their plan, they find out that they're not going to be able to go through with whatever master plan this was.
They still have to reveal in this movie and they come and it's like an invasion movie or they sent someone else. All right, so you got another Terminator, basically.
Yeah, they could kill them in the beginning and then the evil people or the evil team or whoever's left, they have to work against the aliens who come. Maybe there are more of these things and they have to fight them.
Those are all great ideas or those are, I guess, at least better ideas and more interesting.
Right. Just so they can ensure their survival, even though they might hate each other, right? There might be conflict within them.
Yeah, they hate humans, but this is their planet and they don't want to lose the whole planet.
So yeah, and they're monstrous in different ways and work together for more interesting reasons, you know? I mean, basically, they're layered characters and then you could develop that. That would be a more interesting universe.
For sure.
All right, that makes this week feel better.
Yeah, there's something there.
There's something there.
You can work with.
Yeah.
Absolutely. All right, anything else that you want to say about this favorite movie of yours?
It wasn't horrible. There were some interesting points that they could have explored. I think overall, the way it was pieced together was just not really well thought out.
Any movie, there's going to be plot holes, but this is just one plot hole after another, which I think really can stand up on its own as being a good movie. What's your ultimate take on it?
I agree 100%. They could have done a few things here or there to flesh out the mythology just a bit, and that alone would have been great.
Or if you're going to abandon all that, like you were saying, make the, or I guess we were saying together, make the moments where he is stalking someone less predictable and less consistent with each other, less of a pattern.
So that there are more surprises there and very easily just give him moments of seeming redemption. I think that would have been really a lot more interesting, a lot more compelling and explained his mother a lot better.
But as it was, it was pretty by the numbers, pretty flat, pretty predictable through most of the story, which is unfortunate because I really like the idea.
And if somebody else wanted to take another stab at doing their own version of classic stories, something as classic as Superman and turning it to evil, I would be interested. I would love to see what you would do with that.
But I don't think another movie would be justified for a while. I think it would have to be. Well, actually, what is it?
And the Amazon series did this.
Oh, what's the Boys? The Boys, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, the Boys did basically the same thing. They just added their own mythology.
They have their own Justice League.
But instead of them being a thin two-dimensional character dropped on top of the existing story that's been told about each of those types of characters, like their Flash character is not Barry Allen just now he's bad, right?
They're all much more nuanced and mixed. They're not bad as much as they're not good. And that is a much better version of this.
So I guess we got it. I guess we got the version that works a lot better. Although boy, they that show goes in its own directions for sure.
All right. Any last words before we wrap it up?
No, I had a great time on the podcast again. Always love discussing the great and not so great aspects of a movie.
Yeah, I appreciate it. Anytime you or anyone listening, come across something that you think is interesting and worth discussing, preferably if it has a good creative idea in it, that you think is worth unwrapping a little bit and exploring.
I'd love to get that recommendation.
The only two requirements I have is that it's fiction and that whatever it is, it's at least complete or released or finished or the idea is fully developed, so we can talk about it within the context of the entire idea and not just part one or
something like that. Thanks again for being on. I really appreciate it and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you. Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.