A meteor crashes into a farmer's field in Brightburn, Kansas in the early 2000s. Anyone with a hint of knowledge of the Superman mythos knows what happens next. Twelve years later, Tori and Kyle are raising their very own adopted alien. It would have been interesting if this movie had gone down the road of an illegal alien in America, but instead it went with a singular premise, "What if Superman was evil?" Oh, DC has already visited that in many many Elseworlds or alternate-Earth versions including a couple who fought for Russia or Germany. And there are the other companies who have done their own versions of evil super-men, such as the Homelander from Garth Ennis's The Boys, now a very well done TV show of its own. But few have visited the idea of how the sending of a super-powered being to a planet such as ours, where he is a god over our meek selves, might be intentional.
Brightburn frames itself as a thriller or horror. It's one of those flicks where it would best be seen without any knowledge coming in, but seriously, how is that possible in today's age? So most viewers come at it like the knowledge we have of what's going to happen to all the counselors in the camp next to the lake. Thus, the movie is all about how we get from crash landing in farmer's field to all the flying & killing and laser eyes. And the tension of decently built scenes which go exactly where we expect them to. And a really really creepy superhero costume analog.
That is both the failure and the success of the movie -- in that we know exactly where its going, and Yarovesky doesn't diverge from that flight path in the least. So, we know that once Brandon starts getting alien messages from the crashed alien ship in the barn, he is going to end up killing a lot of people. And it's not that the movie does a bad job of delivering this to us, it's more that... well, it could have been more. Why is Brandon switched on like a evil, red lightbulb? Was he a machine and not a person all along? Does he forget the emotions he had while Tori and Bryce were raising him? Was the intention of the aliens to have him gain his powers at puberty and become a child conqueror? The movie could have been more intriguing, more involving, if it had just approached some of these ideas instead of *ping* let's go burn people with laser eyes and disembowel them for fun.
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