The movie industry is changing on basically all fronts. The digital age has marched forward like the relentless rise of Skynet's machine army and dragged us all kicking and screaming with it. As many benefits as there undoubtedly are to being almost instantly linked to a vast proportion of the global population (or at very least those who don't have their Internet privileges restricted to State approved fluff-sites for their glorious leader) there are inescapable downfalls. As much as free speech is a terribly important thing, anyone who gives David Avocado Wolfe any sort of platform ought to be taken out back and savaged by actual wolves. My point, for there is one, is that in terms of movies it has become simultaneously a piece of delicious, forbidden cake to access films (good thing) and become a critic (maybe not such a good thing).
I'm aware of the irony, settle down.
I suppose what I really mean is that with the free flow of information and opinion, there has also appeared a huge gulf between professional critic and audience. Rotten Tomatoes for example collates audience opinion and compares it to amalgamated critic scores and even though it's scientifically a fairly ropey way to rate a movie, everyone seems to think it's gospel. I feel like the times it gets it right are probably by luck than judgement.
Exhibit A: Netflix original, Will Smith vehicle, Lord of the Rings meets End of Watch rigmarole Bright.
Bright did not fare particularly well critically. It got a bit of love, but also got a bit of a kicking in places. The Internet lit up however with regular people singing it's praises, calling for a sequel and liberally rounding on critics who dared to not enjoy it. I think the most common sentiment I saw was expressing disbelief at how much hate the movie was getting, but there's a fairly simple answer to that. It was... not very good.
There are a number of problems with Bright, but possibly not the ones you might expect. The central concept is fairly interesting, in that all these fantasy creatures just exist alongside humans with no sort of explanation or back story as to why. We don't really need to know for the plot to unfold, but I feel like we might need something to round out the thinly veiled and monstrously clumsy racism metaphor that runs through everything that anyone does or says in the movie. The first orc Police Officer is clumsy, crap at his job, gets his partner shot, is accused of corruption, the whole works. Why not ditch the charade and just make a movie about racist cops? Possibly because people would think it was a Netflix documentary and bang goes half your audience. I can't say for sure and I can't speak for anyone else but I only had a pop at it because of the fantasy element. Still, even beyond that metaphor, Bright is ironically, pretty dull.
Will Smith is Will Smith once more, except his defining character trait is that he swears a lot. I don't recall hearing him swear on camera before (maybe Suicide Squad? Happily that evening is now nothing more than just a haze) and I seem to remember him refusing to use profanity on his albums because God wouldn't buy a copy or something. Other than that he's just a cop archetype who phones in his performance right up until his big plot twist reveal at the end which had all the surprise of being snuck up on by a sloth on horse tranquillisers. The clearly "anti-mythical beast and magical folk" cop turns out to be a magic user himself and he never even knew? He then proceeds to save the day with magic, you say? Well blind me. Didn't he kind of already do this bit in I, Robot?
Same goes for Joel 'unrecognisable' Edgerton. Stereotypical bungling rookie and against racial type good guy Orc. Everyone goes to great pains to let us know he's an outcast from both worlds, but just like Will Smith his character arc is so predictable that finding out bears shit in the woods would be a sudden shock by comparison. He gets a plot twist as well, but twist is a very misleading word in this context. Inevitability would be far more accurate as the unblooded joke-orc saves the partner who hates him in front of the local orc gang who just happen to be knocking around doing gang stuff at the time and earns their respect. Way to go fella.
Villain wise, it's a cavalcade of also-rans. Noomi Rapace's Elf witch and her rent-a-henchman cronies are invincible to all but our plucky heroes it would seem, but are roughly as gripping as a freshly oiled squid climbing a Teflon coated bar of soap. There are some dirty cops who all end up getting fairly unceremoniously dispatched, some gangsters who end up getting their comeuppance somewhat less ceremoniously, some Internal Affairs guys who randomly pop up looking like greasy 70s porn stars before their sub plot disappears into the ether like cake into a fat kid, and the shifty FBI guys who are kind of set up as bad guys, but turn out to be pretty much pointless. Sauron, these guys are not.
Nothing at all surprised me about Bright, other than how little they capitalised on some obvious opportunities to stand out. There's that moment with the Orc gang where they could have done something interesting and even shocking and offed one of the main characters, but they just played it out with the safe option. In fact everything about Bright seems like it's been designed to be safe enough to get greenlit by Netflix and into production.
It's kind of a shame really, because there's all sorts of potential in the characters and the universe they populate. There's a wealth of all kinds of beasties they could explore if they wanted to but ultimately I didn't really care enough to want a sequel. It feels like the sub text took too much of a centre stage and although it's really important to talk about institutionalised racism, maybe a fantasy action flick isn't your best medium for serious debate. Certainly if you're going to lay it on this thick, burying it under a ton of prosthetic grade latex and Tolkein-esque tropes is probably going not going to help your cause. And if we're being totally honest, this is effectively just Alien Nation with more teeth and less James Caan which is undoubtedly a bad thing. In fact quite a lot of the concepts here are heavily recycled from other places; I wouldn't go as far as to say plagiarised necessarily, but definitely falling on the side of borrowed.
It's easier to see why critics didn't like it, but I am struggling to fathom how people thought it was a great movie. I'd never lump myself into the category of movie critic, I'm just an opinionated git with a penchant for ranting. I did quite like the Fogbreath football jerseys though, so at least I left with something.
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