Episode two finds the guys discussing the 2019 horror film "Brightburn," which presents a dark take on the Superman origin story. They delve into the film's themes of nature versus nurture, puzzling choices by the characters, and the apparent complete and total lack of forensics in the Brightburn universe. Looks like we've got a cold-blooded killer on our hands, and he's not even old enough to drive...YEAAAAAAH! -------------SPOILERS AHEAD-------------
Episode two finds the guys discussing the 2019 horror film Brightburn, which presents a dark take on the Superman origin story. They delve into the film's themes of nature versus nurture, puzzling choices by the characters, and the apparent complete and total lack of forensics in the Brightburn universe. Looks like we've got a cold-blooded killer on our hands, and he's not even old enough to drive...YEAAAAAAH!
Check out Brightburn (2019) on streaming platforms everywhere!
Make Elephants Fly: How Radical Innovation is Remaking the World is available here: www.foundersspace.com/make-elephants-fly
-------------SPOILERS AHEAD-------------
Reach the pod at DontEncourage@gmail.com
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There's no conflict. It's like he's a human who's weird. Mm-hmm. But then he's just evil and he loses all his human qualities. They made mom that much in denial because it simplified the story and made the rest of the plot easier to write. Right. So, you know, I'm good with these segues, huh? The, exactly.
This wasn't planned. Audience wasn't planned at all.
All right. Welcome to 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 Bright Burn that we're gonna discuss in a moment, have you been reading or watching anything interesting lately?
Yeah, I'm actually, um, reading a book called Make Elephants Fly. Mm-hmm. 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 was, it's really interesting cuz there's so much creativity involved in business in general. It's just really enlightening to see like 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 particularly creative ideas in that, uh, book that you're reading or anything that stood out to you as really interesting? Yeah, it was interesting in terms of like the restaurant industry, how someone may have a great idea. In terms of a new restaurant, but they wanna jump into creating a full fledged restaurant as opposed to, let's say, doing a popup restaurant or something called the cloud kitchen, where you start building, you know, your idea around testing these dishes in the kitchen that you don't necessarily own, but that you're renting out.
And how that can really help you figure out, you know, do people actually want what I'm selling them? And I think that's like the big basic tenet of the whole book, figuring that part out and then scaling from there. Oh, that's interesting. It reminds me of the sort of minimum viable product approach to designing an app, or I think probably a lot of different businesses.
So the idea here is with restaurants, instead of just finding an empty space, creating a menu open, getting a loan, opening the doors, and struggling for the first two to 10 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 and malls, maybe, or uh mm-hmm.
You know, food truck or something like that. And just see if there's a demand in what it looks like for your product. Is that, does that sound right? 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 gonna 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, does it? No, that's right. Especially like Amazon or, or those big tech companies. I don't think they, they ever, they ever do, with the exception of New Coke.
I'm pretty sure that's an invention of the waste that's coming back though. For sure. I'm waiting. 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 and, uh, crystal Pepsi was the other one, right? Mm-hmm. Delicious. Yeah, absolutely delicious. Refreshing. I could use one right now. That and a tab. What happened to tabs? 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, they had it in like, uh, back to the future. I think he drinks a tab and back to the future or something, but I don't think I've ever seen a can of TAB in real life. You, 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 stop at some little country grocer grocery shop that has like, uh, gas and everything, you know, produce and all that.
There was gas, gas, white claw and tab. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Except instead of White Claw, this was pre White Claw. It was just maybe vodka or moonshine in tab, I guess. Is that the early White Claw? Uh, 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 arms stuck to pull the can out? No, these were big, uh, 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 a hundred degrees out. Oh yeah. That might be the only place they sold tab.
Maybe they still do. Maybe if you own a gas, we're gonna have to, in the mountains you get, you get tab. If one, if we were on a really big, uh, big, big podcast right now, we'd have someone looking this up for us right now. A big podcast team. Yeah, the 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 you. This is sponsored by tab moment. All right. That's enough of our tab ad fully expect you, but, but if you're out there tab, send me my 5 cents slide into the dms.
All right, so today's project is a 2019 film, bright Burn, directed by David Roski, starring Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, and Jackson Dunn. Uh, 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 five, outta 10. I think it was kind of a, a mishmash of concepts that never really took form the way I think they intended them to.
Ooh. But we'll get into that in this podcast. Yeah, no, actually, let's, uh, let's go ahead and dive in. I want to know what you mean. Like, uh, what ideas, what aspects didn't come together. Didn't take form. I just thought that it was really lacking a backstory or a, a real motivation for what he was doing.
Mm-hmm. 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, and then all of a sudden one night, He's now evil and we don't know anything about why that's happening. And then not only is he evil, but now he has superpowers. He's like a, 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 kinda like a sleeper agent. So I don't know. I think those movies can work when you know why this person or this, you know, supernatural being, is being activated in this way. Like what's the bigger plan here? Except just taking things over.
It kind of falls flat. It's kinda like the omen. Meets a superhero movie Meets Insidious, you know, and you're kind of taking all those concepts and like doing like the idea sex, like bringing everything together and now we're gonna have a new movie. This is gonna be a, a really interesting concept, but I don't know.
There were some interesting aspects. I thought the special effects were, were really well done. How he's kind of like just flying through that diner or you know, he's in one spot in the diner, he's moving towards the woman who he is going to kill presumably, and he ends up and you end up finding out that he did.
I don't know, 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. And I had a few notes and you hit on one of those right away. I'm gonna kind of 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, uh, 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. He 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, okay, 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've 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've 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, and why at age 12, are there others like him or is he just gonna single handedly destroy the world, just fly around and blow up buildings like they show you at the end?
Yeah. Like he's destroying their town, right? He clearly has. Is he activated? Only when he is 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 like 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. Mm-hmm. Remember the sex talk with dad in the woods, and he's like, oh yeah. Now should I do that now?
I mean, he's supposed to be 12, not like an Android. You know? Yeah. They stripped away his humanity really thoroughly in 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. Yeah. But that didn't really, that's not much of a plan. No. It seems like 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've 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. Yeah, and they're just assuming that they're gonna 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 is in the classroom and he is learning about insects and the teacher asked. Yeah, different difference 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.
So he's a like a lone survivor and he is sent to a planet where he has a chance of surviving. And I, as I recall, unless they've reccon it, which I'm sure they've done a dozen times, he lands on the um, farm in Smallville, just sort of by chance and is raised by kind people who are a little bit older and don't have any kids of their own.
Mm-hmm. So that was all meant to be, I think, Fortuitous and they've explored what would've 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. Yeah. Uh, like an object to further the narrative. And I think that's one reason why a lot of the time it felt kind of flat. It's sort of like a monster movie, but we're supposed to believe that the mother cares almost at a delusional fashion about him.
And it doesn't really give you that much to create a sequel outta like, what are you gonna do now? Yeah, it's him against the world, but it's, he's a OneNote, kind of Terminator like character. Now he doesn't care anymore. Right? Like they showed at the end when he's just flying around, blowing up the buildings, drawing his, I guess his.
Tag on the, on the grass or the wheat fields or whatever. He wants everyone to know it's him. It falls flat. There was some interesting, I guess, interesting parts or like some parts that had that like tension aspect when he's chasing that waitress in the diner. Mm-hmm. Thought that was well done. I thought when he goes after his aunt in the house, how he keeps triggering the, uh, the alarm system or the lighting system, the motion detectors mm-hmm.
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 attention.
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. Yeah. 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, 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, he didn't take off running. No, Brandon was gone. Right. 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. Yeah. All right. So you mentioned a few things. One is where would you go with 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 liked the way you put it.
There was some interesting horror in this film. There's a lot of body horror in this movie. Uh, a lot of sort of creepy physical violations of people. Um, 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, you know, 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.
Uh, and that just same thing like almost every single time with slight differences, but too similar. That's a good point. Very good point. Because it's not like they're subtle about it either, you know? Mm-hmm. He'll say like, you're in big trouble. Or the share. If you tell the sheriff, you're in big, so you know the sheriff's gonna die.
He literally threatens people. He threatens adults multiple times. 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 kinda like everything is foreshadowed so it doesn't like throw a curve ball at any point.
Like, you know, 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. Just like that's such an, an easy device to use. Yeah. See 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. I know there's a lot going on, but you were saying No, I was gonna say, we should probably take a break from, um, 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 ho at. Uh, I think largely because we're both aware on some level that it could have been a good movie. They could have been a really good movie and some people probably really enjoyed it. And if they did good for them. Like, I'm, I'm jealous.
Uh, I didn't hate this. Like you said, it's kind of a five outta 10. 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, uh, Hollywood Jail Project. I don't know if you recall, but he got fired by Disney after some, uh, I think, uh, 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 it 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 and 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, uh, 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 Rucker, who was in Guardians of the Galaxy and has a great relationship with James Gunn, is in the, uh, 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 storyline. Or the way it developed from a directing standpoint is 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. Yeah. Good. Sorry. And a good way to get back into Hollywood, right? Yeah. 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. Uh, 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 associated with his name didn't, uh, kill the project.
Uh, 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 is 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, uh, more than double, which is generally good because that typically covers advertising. I think this movie was a success, not a huge success. Uh, I think the biggest problem in, uh, making a sequel probably has to do with the fact that the reviews, uh, 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 five outta tens, more or less. So I think you're Yeah, definitely on the right track. Uh, so briefly, the plot, as you said, is an alien pod lands, uh, on a farm in Kansas, near the town of Bright Burn 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 re-imagining 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 uh, 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.
Uh, one of his classmates realizes it, and Soly Butcher, he basically kills or severely wounds everybody, with the exception of his aunt, who he just sort of traumatizes, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And then in the end he murders his mom and the end. That's about 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 seven.
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. It's like six movies, right? He's, I'm trying to think around the original, but that one's interesting cuz it's more of a slow burn, his father diplomat.
So yeah, 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 like a sinister, manipulating type of character. He 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 accident, all the deaths around him appeared as accidents, if I recall correctly. So mm-hmm. 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 Briar. Mm-hmm. Way more. And I think that made him interesting, almost like an adult in a child's body. Uh, whereas like, that's really creepy. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. It's very creepy to have that as opposed to just a regular kid who goes Terminator.
Yeah. Which isn't really that compelling. And he doesn't hide anything very well, like we were saying earlier. No, he wants everyone to know. Like 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. Yeah. 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 gonna shoot you in the head.
You know what I mean? Yeah. There was nothing that would tell you that he wasn't gonna do that. He doesn't even like find a, a deer or find something to shoot at. He just has him walk in front of him and, okay, I guess I'm gonna 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, mm-hmm. 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 uh 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.
Right. 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 gonna text her sister, like, this is weird, your kid's acting really weird and threaten your kid's 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, uh, sent a 12 year old home in the dark and then texted her husband that she was gonna sleep after she complained a little bit about her house and her ringer being off.
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 gonna wake up while this stuff is happening with her husband and the kid pulling the kid out of the closet. Yeah. And driving him home. She doesn't say anything. He's yelling at him.
That's right. Right. And they're storming through the house and there's no. She's just out alcoholed. 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. Mm-hmm. Like Brandon's signing his crimes.
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 pee.
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, it leads him to make mistakes, but he's using the victim's blood to sign a crime because he is angry. Like it's really weird. I think there was a, it was a real struggle to sit and watch these people make some of these mistakes and uh, I think probably the biggest movie Sin of All was Elizabeth Banks's character being so devoted to him no matter what he did, right?
Mm-hmm. And so delusional about the way that he acted. Did you notice that? Like they really had to up the ante 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 ac dc version of his initials, right? Yeah. Like there's no meaning to what he does now. He's just a, an evil superhero bent on destroying the earth.
Yeah. With laser eyes, some sort of, it's gonna take a while. Super villain. I wish it would've happened in this movie, frankly. I think it would've made from 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 term, 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 gonna change the whole dynamic of the movie.
Cause the dad's gonna be on board, so it's gonna 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 let's every other ridiculous thing in the movie happen up until that ending where she gets dropped from like 30,000 feet, I guess.
Cause there was a plane up there too. Yeah, 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 that 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, you know, turned or.
You know, 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've been a more interesting, uh, 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.
Mm-hmm. So that would've been more compelling and could have even set up an ending where instead of him killing his mother, she starts helping him. Mm-hmm. And she thinks that she's the influence that keeps him from completely destroying the earth. I mean, if you think about an 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 reigning him in a little bit. There'd be a, a different balance point between an evil Superman and the rest of the world. Mm-hmm. And I think that would be more interesting than, 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, cause things just 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. With the mom. She's too smart because the dad was easy. 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 the main character, she's the main character, right? I guess. I guess so. Right. It can't be, um, Brandon Breyer, because he's basically a prop. He's not really an actual character, or at least he's not a three dimensional character, so it, 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, I'd been so focused when I was watching it just around how silly it was. Mm-hmm. All these, like that, what you're calling the death pattern. Mm-hmm. I was just following that. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. 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 cuz it was basically like no time at all before he was gonna 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 gonna do? I wonder? And then all of a sudden he's doing, he's enacting his plan as soon as you hear the, uh, with the little girl mentioning her mother. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna do something about that. I believe the next scene was him in the diner going after the mom. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's real close if not the next.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So instead of what you're describing, which is a pretty bland pattern, if mm-hmm. The story had been more about the mother versus the programming that was in him activated by the ship, kinda like the mom verse the pod more or less. Mm-hmm. 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, you know, 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 is hunting or killing people, if they played off of the Superman story in more interesting ways, and instead of like, this movie just basically exists on top of the classic Superman origin, uh, 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 the 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, uh, 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, you know, for this character would've 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 responsible for what they get instead of what it is.
Like you said, it's just a terminator from space. 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 onto cuz it causes that conflict, right? Yeah. Like 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 right?
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. And if you'd had, the mother and the father have a growing conflict over this and at one point the father, you know, 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, right. Just don't do it Right cuz you never know what you're gonna get. You know, it's a box of chocolates, it's gonna be bad. Yeah. Could be a coconut in there could be a landmine. You have no idea what you're gonna get in that box of chocolates. Literally. It could be a, a kid with laser eyes. It could be a kid with laser eyes.
I think I got a on like that one day. And a sneaker, uh, hood that he wears looked like a big sneaker that he was spinning over his head. Like a Chuck Taylor? Yeah. 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, uh, old Yeller him.
He got shot and then he just appears with that weird mask. Like was Where was it? I know. And the Cape. Yeah. 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, uh, peeling the onion back, you know? There's always something that's not really working.
I think maybe that was supposed to be his, like, uh, sorry. His, uh, 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, you would've 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 wanna get your opinion on this, cuz 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, there are 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 with the vampire isn't really scared of a cross or a garlic. I like those moments in movies cuz it adds that little bit of like, oh, this is, this isn't your typical zombie or vampire movie. Say, taking those two examples when they behave in a way that you're, that's very unexpected.
Like zombies are maybe supposed to be slow, but then 28 days later makes them super fast. I like that. Yeah, absolutely. 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 that would happen for 70 years or whatever.
So let's get our equipment to go out there and kill 'em. Head shots, everyone remember, uh, which is just too far. I like yours. Where in this movie? I think that would be something to the effect of mom and dad talking late at night and you know, 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. And 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. Right, like flat out line 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 SUPERPOWERED 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 superpowered person, right?
But they don't seem to, to have any frame of reference for this stuff. You know, Michael Rucker refers to a Half Man, half Sea Monster that's flipping ships in the Pacific or the 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 that he refers as 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, he doesn't have comic books or he doesn't, but it doesn't explain. 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. Yeah. Right. Well, it's an alien thing. They all wear capes and masks. I guess there's there alien culture that we never get exposed to. I don't understand why he wears that in the first place.
There's no absolutely no need for this kid who keeps saying he's superior to humans. You know, flat out, they make him out to be like extreme, 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.
And also to be clear, the Superman story. Gave reasons for these things a little bit better. Even the like original one that was written mostly for kids to read. They explained 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, uh, you know, Cape would get shredded. So if I remember that was correct. So anyway, um, 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 you know, wrap it up dark, ending the end.
It just seems like it was a movie that was maybe written in a weekend. Yeah. Put together really quickly. What if a pod lands with a baby and a family adopts him? Yep. All right. Go. You know what I mean? Like an hackathon. What if Superman but evil? What? Okay, let's crank it out. Yeah, 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 it just, that's supposed to be like three minutes or something, you know? Yes. And they move the camera really slowly to fill time. So, uh, couple other things. Would you have liked to seen more about the aliens that sent him?
Absolutely. I think that would've been a really important thing to show, even allude to, or if they're mythological, you know, like there's a history of aliens on this planet. Something happens every 500 years or something. They've tried to destroy the earth before anything. Yeah. Beyond just a garbled message, a reprogramming of a kid, and now he kills everything.
Yeah. Yeah. It would've definitely helped a lot, you know? Some type of backs. 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's 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 his human qualities. It's to stark a, 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 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 Yeah. A, a human boy that needs to like weave his way into society before the big reveal. He's already turned, he's back. Right? Well, he doesn't need any, he's not gonna be able, but he's not gonna get a job as a journalist if he doesn't preserve his human identity.
That's right. Come on, think, think about these things. I know. I can only edit so much out. Come on. I, I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Journalism's 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 is murdering people.
She just called for the cops. Right? The cops show up, they radioed in. That there was a what, a two 17 or whatever, what is that? Mm-hmm. Like a murder homicide or something like that? Yeah. 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.
Right. So the idea that the plane was the one committing the murder, you know? Right. And he successfully framed the plane. They just gloss right over that. Like, no one's gonna be like, Hey, uh, 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, yeah, it doesn't matter. Skip right over. That 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 stu sometimes and then dropped straight down. No.
What did they say? Like we think he had a tree cuz he was drunk. Like I think he swerved cause of a deer. Right. And they wanted hit. Tree was middle the road and nothing's damaged. Just the road has a giant like imprint of the front of a car. I don't know. Just so, 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'd 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 gonna get made. So what are we waiting for? It writes itself. What are you doing this weekend? What are we waiting for? What are doing? This weekend we're writing a, uh, 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.
Right. So, you know, I'm good with these segues, huh? The, exactly. This wasn't planned. Audience wasn't planned at all. The post credit sequences, uh, have the injustice league is what I'm gonna call 'em. Like other creatures, maybe children who also seem to have actually, they don't all look like children, 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 man Hunter. Um, he's just basically one of those gray aliens. You know, the people draw, but they put a cape on it. Mm-hmm. 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 in, a guy in a red suit, I think with a shotgun.
Did you recognize that guy? I didn't, no. Okay. That looks almost identical to the main character from Super Ray Wilson, also from the office, much like the, uh, the lead male actor in this, the father. Anyway, Ray Wilson played, uh, 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 like 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 left and she's the Wonder Woman and came to the modern society to Rick Havoc.
And the Aquaman character might actually be a half man, half sea, monster kind of creature. And none of them may be a, a mermaids. Right, exactly. Like a mermaid maybe. Like, what was it? A little mermaid? The um, the evil witch who's half octopus, half woman. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So he might be one of those probably.
So, yeah, I didn't know. I think I was tuning out at that point. Yeah. I don't blame you. Um, 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, um, like steal the resources or what?
Prepare for their invasion. Like 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. Yeah, so I think it was that simplistic. Okay. He was just sent to destroy the earth for some reason and not extract any resources from it.
Right. Because he doesn't seem to be doing that. In those post credits, right? No, 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 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. No. It's a very dumb, dumb plan. You know what also could do that? A missile? Yes. A very powerful missile. Yep. Sent from an alien galaxy instead of this pod with this 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 that they just didn't think they needed to develop the mythology. I guess it just makes it kind of flat. Otherwise, this could have been really interesting. Yeah, it definitely could have been. But you didn't a new movie for that Bright burn too.
Should start writing Bright burner. Bright burner Sanders. Yeah. Also, he didn't have like a nemesis or anything. There was, 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. Uh, I'm gonna put money on that.
All right, 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? I, to your point, I think he really does need some type of nemesis, or else you really don't have a story.
Mm-hmm. 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, we still have to establish that, right?
Like what's going on. So it's either discovering what his motivation is, then fighting him. Or having established his motivation in this movie where, which didn't happen. Yeah. So it's difficult to do a sequel unless you're gonna do a lot of heavy lifting. In the beginning of that, sequel 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. Mm-hmm. Or give the aliens that are driving him a presence and a character and 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.
Mm-hmm. Uh, otherwise it just would be more of the same, I guess. Yep. It's not even really a story left is there. Without doing all that, you have to basically write another version of that movie. Ooh, what about this? That's 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. Uh, that might be more interesting. That would be really interesting. Yeah, it would be, parts of it would be interesting, I guess. Or if they have to fight the aliens because they Oh, yeah. Mess with their plan. They find out that they're not gonna be able to go through with whatever master plan this was.
Right, that they still have to reveal in this movie, and they come and it's like an invasion movie or they send someone else. All right, so you got another terminator, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Or they could kill him 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 yes, 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 wanna lose the whole planet, so Yeah.
And they're monstrous in different ways and work together for more interesting reasons. You know where, I mean, basically they're layered characters. And then you could develop that, that would be a more interesting universe, for sure. Yeah. All right. That makes, makes me feel better. Yeah. There's something there.
There's something there you could work with. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Anything else that you wanna say about this, uh, 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, thought out.
Any movie, there's gonna be plot holes. Mm-hmm. But this is just one plot hole after another, which I think really can stand up on its own as being a, a good movie. Yeah. What's your ultimate take on it? I agree a hundred percent. They could have done a few things here or there to flesh out the mythology just a bit.
And that alone would've been great. Or if they, if you're gonna 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, uh, consistent with each other at less of a pattern so that they're more surprises there and very easily just give him moments of seeming redemption.
I think that would've 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 cuz I really liked the idea. And if somebody else wanted to take another stab at doing a their own version of classic story, something as classic as Superman and turning it to evil, I would be interested.
Mm-hmm. I would love to see what you would do with that, but I don't think, uh, another movie would be justified for a while. I think it would have to be, well actually, what is it? Um, the Amazon series did this. Oh. 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, 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, uh, discussing the great and not so great, uh, 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, uh, un unwrapping a little bit and exploring.
I'd love to get that recommendation. Uh, 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.