What if the baby adopted by Kansas farmers turned out to have superhuman strength, to fly and to emit deadly lasers from his eyes - but he used his powers for evil instead of good? What if the kid turned out to be more frightening than the little bleep from “The Omen”?
Produced by James Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy”), written by Gunn’s brother Brian and his cousin Mark, and directed with admittedly gruesome style by David Yarovesky, “Brightburn” is a nasty twist on the superhero origin story - a kind of inside-out version of the “Superman” legend. He displays no emotion when hearing a beloved family member has died.Īnd yet Dad and Mom (especially Mom) remain in a state of denial, to the point where we’re almost wishing for the little demon to REALLY act out so they’ll finally face reality. He tears the door off a chicken coop and turns the chickens into bloody chicken potpie. He wears a creepy mask and makeshift cape. He crushes and breaks the hand of a classmate. He fills a notebook with gruesome drawings. When the “boy” turns 12, he starts acting out in ever more violent ways. Sure, he LOOKS normal, but come on, Breyers: Aren’t you just the least bit curious and concerned about this human-looking being from another planet? The kid never bleeds, never gets sick, never suffers any kind of injury. Rated R (for horror violence/bloody images, and language). I dare you to tell me that fetuses do not, at one point, look like these dudes.Screen Gems presents a film directed by David Yarovesky and written by Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn. On the other hand, it’s unsettling to think of your insides as the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars. On the one hand, it’s a miracle of nature that humans can go from two cells to billions and start out basically looking like any other animal embryo ( for real) to a person. Instead, your embryo, and later your fetus, will run the gamut from insect-looking aliens, to lizard-looking aliens, to Admiral Ackbar-looking aliens (aka, Mon Calamari), to the creepy big headed gray aliens that were, like, everywhere in ‘ 90s iconography (why were we all so into those aliens back then?), and a million other little nightmare creatures in between, until they emerge as the adorable squishy nightmare creature you love. So it’s not even like your baby looks like one type of alien forever. There are a lot of changes that take place over the course of your tiny invader’s stay in your uterus, and yet somehow, at times it seems like each development is creepier than the last. Never have I found this to be truer than when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. So by the transitive property (if a=b and b= c then a=c, which is literally one of two things I remember from math class), it stands to reason that real life will often remind us of science fiction. Science-fiction is a reflection of our fears, hopes, shortcomings, or vanity. That’s the window dressing the fanciful devices that lure us in and trick us into thinking about our world and nature in a more nuanced way. The fact that these stories take place in a dystopia is usually beside the point.
The beauty of science fiction is that when you get down to the bones of most works, they’re never really about space, or aliens, or dinosaurs reconstructed from fossilized mosquitoes and frog DNA. Also, Wall-E is my personal hero and life coach. Now I’m not going to claim to be the Grand High Poobah of the genre, but I’m not someone who claims to love sci-fi by saying, “Oh! I love Star Track! Captain Kurt and Dark Vader are totally cool! I’ve always wanted a lightsaver!” Let’s put it this way: Between the ages of 11 and 14, all of my birthday gifts were Star Wars-themed. Here is something some people don’t really know about me: I’m kind of a sci-fi geek.
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