Bright Review · 10:07pm Jun 4th, 2020
WARNING. The following review contains discussions of racism by a guy who freely admits he has a very sheltered view of the world so he may screw up discussing it. If he does screw up, he does not mind correction of his views but he would prefer it to be done in a calm and rational manner. If you are triggered by discussions of racism, please find another journal to read.
(Breaths in, breathes out) Remember how I said in my Descendants review that I hate when a movie with potential gets wasted? Well, that’s exactly how I feel here. Bright is probably one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but it has such a fantastic idea behind it.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Bright is a Netflix original movie written by Max Landis and directed by David Ayer. The film goes into an interesting concept: what happens when a medieval fantasy world advances to modern-day? That’s a really fun idea but sadly, the people behind this movie squander all the potential (Thank GOD Onward did this better).
But despite the fact the movie got mostly negative reviews, audience reception was much more positive. In fact, people liked the movie so much that they were convinced that the reason it got so many negative reviews was because of a conspiracy! Because that’s what ALWAYS happens when this occurs. It’s always studios paying off reviewers or reviewers conspiring to ruin a movie.
Folks, I hate to break it to you but Bright didn’t get negative reviews because of some conspiracy. It got negative reviews because it sucked. And I’m gonna tell you why it sucked right now.
Now, this is gonna be different from my usual reviews. I’m not gonna be giving a plot summary. I'm gonna be going through my different complaints point by point. And even though I’m not giving a traditional plot summary, I will be talking about the plot itself. So let’s begin.
Point 1: The plot and its problems with set-up and payoff
For a basic summary of the plot, Daryl Ward, veteran cop, is paired up with Nick Jakoby, the first orc cop in the nation. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when Nick’s incompetence results in Ward getting shot and his shooter getting away. Most of the cops in the precinct blame Jakoby for this, assuming he intentionally let the shooter go because he was an orc.
But of course, in true buddy cop movie fashion, Ward and Jakoby end up bonding when they get involved in a really dangerous case involving a young elf woman named Tikka and a magic wand in her possession. Hijinks ensue.
Okay, so the first big issue with the plot is that a lot of it is set up but the payoff is screwed up in some way. For example, remember how I said Jakoby let the guy who shot Ward get away? Well, it’s later revealed that Jakoby, when going into an alley where the shooter ran into, found another orc who’s a kid who was just tagging the wall (not the same person as the shooter). Jakoby, realizing how bad this would look if the cops saw the kid, helped him get away and lied about it.
Later, when Ward, Jakoby and Tikka are captured by some gangster orcs, the leader orders his son to shoot Jakoby...but his son refuses because he was the kid Jakoby saved….and then the leader shoots Jakoby anyway (he gets resurrected but that's a topic for later down the line)...There’s no emotional payoff or meaningful outcome for Jakoby saving the kid because he gets shot either way. This is because this scene is a remnant of an earlier draft where the kid’s decision to spare Jakoby DID get his life saved but I guess they felt it wasn’t dramatic enough, hence, Jakoby gets shot regardless.
And the movie is FILLED with moments like this. At the very beginning of the film, Ward and Jakoby drive through Elftown which is where all the elves live. Elftown is set up but Elftown never gets mentioned or seen again. It’s set up with no payoff.
Ward is also characterized as “Grim brutal cop who doesn’t play by the rules and is a loner”...except he’s got a loving wife and daughter. The only complication is that his daughter doesn’t approve of her dad being an officer. How are we supposed to take Ward being a brutal loner cop that’s better without friends when he’s got a loving family. And once again, there’s no payoff to this. Ward having a family is completely superfluous. There’s even a weird scene where Jakoby comments on how Ward’s “lacking in physical love”...even though he’s got a wife and daughter! This quip was once again a part of an earlier draft of the screenplay where Ward was estranged from his wife. Which raises the question of why it was kept in. It’s the inverse of what happened with the orc kid. They kept the payoff but removed the set up.
The main plot itself has a massive plot hole in it. It’s established early on that only people known as “Brights” can use magic wands (hence, the title of the film) and that anyone else who tries gets blown up.
So why the heck is everyone after this magic wand!? I mean, the main villain makes sense because she’s a Bright but there are others like some corrupt cops and gangsters led by a guy named Poison who want it too. It’s firmly established that there’s no way to know for sure if you're a Bright unless you touch a wand...and if you’re not one, you’ll die. Call me crazy but I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t wanna take a gamble like that. I know I don’t. And yet EVERYONE wants this thing despite the fact they should know there’s a good chance they’ll get killed doing it. It reaches truly ridiculous levels when a gang of orcs kidnap Ward, Jakoby and Tikka to get the wand even though it’s heavily implied orcs can’t be Brights!
“But Tom. In a video, it’s revealed that Birak the orc hero of the Bright Universe was a Bright himself, meaning orcs can be Brights.”
That doesn't change the fact that the movie never mentions the fact orcs can be Brights nor does it change the fact that most people will still die if they touch the wand.
While it hasn’t been confirmed, I speculate all this is yet another relic of an earlier draft where non-Brights COULD use magic wands; they just didn’t have full control over them.
Tikka is another big source of problems. Ostensibly, the plot is about Ward and Jakoby trying to protect her but the movie doesn’t do anything to endear us to her. She spends most of the movie not talking and acting like a confused, sheltered child until Jakoby gets killed at which point she uses the wand to resurrect him. And it’s only 20 minutes before the movie is over when she FINALLY talks to Ward and Jakkoby in English and explains herself. Apparently, she used to be part of a cult that was trying to resurrect the Dark Lord (more on him later) but she left because…actually, the movie never explains WHY she left in full besides “dark lord evil”.
Earlier, when Jakoby and Ward first find Tikka, she’s firmly established as a Bright when we see she killed some assassins then she accidentally uses the wand to blow up a car in plain view of Jakoby and Ward and during a chase scene, she uses it to stop the car she Jakoby and Ward are in...and then the movie and characters completely forget about those scenes so that when she uses the wand to save Jakoby, her being a Bright can be played off as a huge twist. Probably yet another artifact of an earlier draft of the script.
And speaking of which, in earlier drafts of the script, Tikka was originally supposed to be an actual child, not childlike (which better explains why Ward and Jakoby were keeping her around, they needed to protect a child) but was aged up to about 25 supposedly because there’s a scene where Ward and Jakoby hide in a strip club and taking a child into one of those would have been…uncomfortable. But that raises the question of why said scene was even IN a strip club. All that happens in said scene is a shootout with some thugs which could have easily taken place in a restaurant or something. Why was the strip club scene so necessary, it required aging Tikka up and making the script make less sense?!
A good chunk of the middle half of the movie is Jakoby, Ward and Tikka on the run. But NOTHING in the plot advances until the point where Jakoby gets shot. There’re no attempts to characterize Tikka, there’s no finding out the villains’ motives, or anything like that, it’s just a bunch of fight scenes and Ward and Jakoby kinda sorting bonding. The only thing of significance that happens during the middle chunk is Rodriguez, one of the few “good” people in the movie, getting killed by the bad guys when Ward and Jakoby go to him for help. Incidentally, that scene is one of the dumbest parts of the movie.
You see, earlier, some corrupt cops wanted to kill Jakoby because racist and keep the wand for themselves so Ward killed them in self-defense after they tried to kill the both of them. Later, when Ward and Jakoby go to Rodriguez for help, he lets them call the Magic Task Force so they can give them the wand. Despite the Magic Task Force specifically stating they won’t charge Ward and Jakoby for the deaths of the earlier cops because it was self-defense, Rodriguez STILL thinks they should cuff Jakoby because they’ll shoot Jakoby on sight otherwise…even though, like I said, the Feds said they wouldn’t charge them for killing those cops…what is the logic here? Also, this scene involves the bad guys cutting the phone lines...even though the characters were using cell phones!
The climax is where all these problems come together. Tikka is apparently dying from…I don’t know actually, the film doesn’t explain (it’s implied that using the wand did it but that doesn’t make any sense because other wand users can use wands as much as they want) so Ward and Jakoby take her to a magical pool to heal her when the main villain (forgive me, I can’t be asked to remember her name) shows up in the middle of the healing process and she talks to Tikka...revealing they’re sisters. There’s absolutely no weight behind this reveal because we were never given a reason to care about Tikka or her potential family. And there’s no emotional payoff to it because the villain dies 5 minutes later, so nothing is done with it or will be done with it in any potential sequels.
What’s weird is that the sister revelation is treated very matter-of-factly and Ward and Jakoby don’t have any reaction to it. The other weird thing about this scene is that it’s said earlier that the main villain sent assassins to kill Tikka...but then right at this scene, she’s acting like she only now discovered her sister is turning traitor because of Ward and Jakoby’s influence. More relics of an earlier draft?
The climax is also frustrating because it’s one of those climaxes where all the characters take time to talk about stuff instead of, I don’t know...FIGHTING! Oh and Ward is revealed to be a Bright when he grabs the wand but the villain doesn’t do anything to either get her wand back or stop him, even though even if he wasn’t a Bright, the explosion would still hurt her.
So yeah, the plot is a mess. And it’s not the only problem with this film. Now we go into...
Point 2: The lazy worldbuilding
What’s easily one of the most talked about and confusing elements of Bright is its worldbuilding. Despite the premise of a world where medieval fantasy elements existing in modern day being fascinating...it doesn’t look like much has changed despite these elements.
The orcs, elves, dwarves, centaurs and others have clearly been around for over 2000 years and yet Los Angeles, aside from the extra inhabitants, is the same as it’s always been. And according to ambient dialogue, stuff like Shrek, the NFL, the Alamo, and the Crips are still around despite the fact that the world would have undoubtedly been changed with these elements. This can work for stories like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter because their worlds are hidden from the public eye. This is different though. This is an alternate reality story akin to Watchmen...and nothing is done with it.
The only real “addition” to the history of this world is something that happened 2000 years ago involving a person known as “The Dark Lord”, an elf who apparently took over the world with an army of elves and orcs. A lone farmer orc named Birak united the nine races and overthrew him. What impact would such a major war have on human history? Apparently aside from justifying the dislike of orcs, nothing (I’ll cover that later).
One of the weirdest parts of the movie happens at the beginning. Ward is killing a fairy (In this universe, Fairies seem to be pests akin to raccoons or something, which is stupid given how most depictions have them be sapient but whatever) and he claims it’s okay because “fairy lives don’t matter today”...Wait...so does that mean the Black Lives Matter movement is happening in this universe? Does historical racism coexist with fantasy racism? And if racism towards African Americans exists, that would mean stuff like the Jim Crow laws, the Civil War, and the Atlantic slave trade happened…. And if the Jim Crow laws existed, that means the civil rights movement existed! So how can we live in a world where segregation was done away with...but it’s still generally acceptable to hate orcs (I’ll get into the stupidity of the racism angle when we cover that topic)!?
The Shrek thing is probably the thing most people find head-scratching and for good reason. So if the Shrek franchise exists, then that means Jeffery Katzenberg exists and if he exists to make Shrek, that means he was kicked out of Disney, which means Disney exists and if Disney exists, that means they had to have made the fairy tail movies that made them successful because the entire reason Shrek was a success was because it was parodying those types of stories.
How the hell did Disney make movies based on fairy tales and Shrek make a successful movie based on parodying fairy tail tropes if those tropes exist in the world of Bright? Are they historical dramas? Well, it can’t be because those movies operate on entirely different magic systems!
And speaking of magic systems, that brings us to the magic system in Bright. Which is probably the worst magic system I’ve ever seen. So apparently the only way to find out you’re a Bright is to basically take a one in a million chance and grab a magic wand which could kill you...okay, how the hell is anyone supposed to learn magic in this universe if they can’t tell if they’re a Bright or not unless they do something that could kill them? Who is gonna willingly take a chance that they could die to learn if they could use magic? I’m pretty sure Harry Potter wouldn’t wanna be a wizard if it meant potentially dying! I mean, I’m sure there would be some suicidal idiots who would but I wouldn’t, and I’m sure other people wouldn’t either! I mean, I’d be fine with the whole “grabbing a magic wand could kill you” aspect if there was a way to tell if you’re a Bright or not without grabbing one. That would make sense. But as it stands, it just feels like a dumb idea to try to add more tension in the climax.
And why the hell is magic limited so much in this universe? Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if magic and technology were integrated together in this universe? Like, you still have things like wizards schools and stuff but you also have modern appliances. How would modern technology differ if we had magic to help us out (As much as I like Onward, this was something I feel they should have done in that film)? But no, have magic be extremely limited...that works too, I guess…
Also, a lot of the terms in this movie are so…lazy! Dark Lord? How uninspired can you get? It almost makes me wonder if it was a placeholder name that no one bothered to change before filming.
The point I’m trying to make here is that there is no imagination put into the history of this world past the central idea of “Medieval Fantasy in the modern day”. Like I said if Orcs, Elves, Dwarves and magic have been around for over 2000 years then it would have led to a radically different history than just….our modern day just with orcs, and elves.
There’s only like one good world-building idea here. That orcs are a regular part of the NFL. That’s actually a really clever idea. Because, given orcs’ physiques, it makes sense that, out of all sports they’d play, football would be it and they wouldn’t be as good at something like basketball.
But even that raises questions. Namely, if Orcs being a part of the NFL is no big deal and treated as a natural thing in this world then that means the practice has been going on for a while...but Jakoby is the first Orc cop in the entire nation which makes you wonder if Orcs have been able to break into sports for a while why it took so long for an Orc cop to be a thing. Yet again we have a case where an earlier draft explains this. Where Jakoby was just the first cop in the LA precinct NOT the nation.
Which leads us nicely into…
Point 3: The racism is stupid
Speaking as someone who tends to stay away from news unless it affects him and is tolerant of all races...even I can tell this movie’s so unrealistic with its racism.
So apparently, the reasons why orcs are discriminated against is because, when the Dark Lord rose to power, orcs sided with him. Apparently, everyone conveniently forgets it was an orc who ended up stopping the Dark Lord. You’d think more people would remember this given that the memory of the war is apparently so ingrained in public knowledge 2000 years later but no! No one seems to care that it was an orc who ultimately stopped the Dark Lord or that the Dark Lord was an elf and he had elf followers. I’m pretty sure this was supposed to be a commentary on how the elves who are portrayed as the upper class in society bury the truth or some shit but it never comes across as that.
“Actually, it’s supposed to be an analog for how some people hate Jews because they believe they’re responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, bearer of mankind's sins, even though Jesus was a Jew himself.”
Okay, fine then, but even in that scenario, I expect SOME people to bring up Birak in reverence of how he saved everyone. The only person who ever does that is Jakoby, an orc himself. None of the other humans seem to care much about Birak. They don’t bring him up in passing, they don’t say, “Orcs are bad but Birak was awesome” or something along those lines. Nobody seems to care about Birak...except for the orcs themselves and it gives the impression that nobody really cares.
The thing that’s stupid is that this war against the Dark Lord happened 2000 years ago. Why the hell does everyone care about a war that their great-great-grandparents wouldn’t have fought in? There’s even one scene where a corrupt cop tells Ward “Once with the Dark Lord, always with the Dark Lord”. That’s like everyone still hating Britain because of the Revolutionary War. Or people still having a grudge against Germany, Italy or Japan because they formed the Axis powers. You wanna know why people don’t give them crap these days? Because it was decades ago and no one cares anymore because we’ve moved past it! What exactly is happening in the Bright universe that keeps the orc dislike alive? To Ward’s credit, he does lampshade how dumb it is to judge the orcs over something that happened 2000 years ago but the movie doesn’t do anything with this.
But the big problem with racism isn’t the set-up, it's the way the characters act toward it. Pretty much every person in this film acts like this is set in a Jim Crow laws era, when it was okay to be bigoted and racist in public. Everyone shows disdain for Jakoby in this world, even his fellow orcs for “joining the humans” even though the humans hate Jakoby. I find it super hard to believe that the world would be this bigoted in the modern day. I know racism is still a problem in the modern day but the way Bright handles it is so blatant and so unsubtle, it feels like this is a world where the civil rights movement didn’t happen except it HAD to have happened for reasons I outlined earlier.
Also, the orcs are blatantly “coded” African Americans with the way they’re characterized as gangsters and stuff. There’s even a scene where we see some cops beat down on an orc which is obviously invoking the controversy of real-life police beatings of African Americans. The first major problem with this is that, in the movie itself, it says the reason orcs get so much bigotry towards them is because of the war where they sided with the Dark Lord when African Americans don’t have anything comparable to that in our history. They didn’t do anything to warrant this, that's the entire reason racism is so horrible. Because the people who suffer from it didn’t do anything wrong besides being born with a different skin color!.
Even Chance the Rapper pointed out how stupid this was. Quote “[So Apparently] the characters in Bright live in a timeline where racism is gone...because we all hate orc now”.
I really don’t understand why Bright is treating racism like it’s so uncomplicated and binary instead of the complex issue it is in real life. For Pete’s sake, Zootopia handled this SO much better and it was a movie made for kids!
The second big problem with this is Ward is African American himself and he’s just as casually racist as every other person in this movie towards orcs (although at the very least, he tries to keep his daughter from having the same attitude)...well, until the climax but even then he admits he still doesn’t “like” Jakoby. Part of me is honestly convinced that Ward being African American was a deliberate decision by the filmmakers so the film wouldn’t look racist. After all, if a black man is shown as equal to whites and is just a racist as they can be, how could the film be racist towards black people?
Seriously, given how much controversy there is on police brutality toward African Americans, Ward's borderline racist attitude towards Jakoby and his complete dismissal towards orcs who are clearly meant to be a metaphor for African Americans feels completely insensitive and misguided.
Now I’ve heard some people argue that Ward being African American was to show off how different racial perceptions are in the new timeline. He’s not African American, he’s human and the movie is trying to show how stupid racism really is. In a world where physical distinctions between races exist, humans would unite simply because of physical differences and skin color would mean just that: skin color.
I would be fine in buying that if it wasn’t for A) The fact that skin color racism is a lot deeper than “just skin color” and has a really complicated history B) the aforementioned “Fairy Lives Don’t Matter” bit that implies the Black Lives Matter movement is in effect and C) the fact the character Rodriguez says “Hey, don’t look at me, man, Mexicans still get shit for the Alamo”.
...No. No, they don't. People can be racist towards Mexicans for all sorts of ignorant reasons but it’s not because of the Alamo! Like I said earlier, no one is blaming Mexicans for the Alamo these days because it was years ago and we’ve moved past it!
And that one line implies that skin color racism exists in this universe too. And if skin racism exists, that further points to the civil rights movement happening (no, I’m not getting over that) so pardon me for asking this again but if the civil rights movement happened, which was all about stopping racism towards people of color...how can people still be openly bigoted towards orcs and get away with it!?
But here’s one of the bigger issues I have and this is something I haven’t seen any other critic comment on.
We’re never given a reason to think the racism in this film is wrong.
Every single orc in this movie aside from Jakoby is an asshole. Or a gangster. And the one orc who had a normal job as a bus driver turned to crime implying that this is inherent for orcs. We do see some normal orcs at a kitchen at one point but they’re assholes to Jakoby for joining the police.
With the orcs being portrayed this way, it just gives credence to the idea that orcs are terrible people and that Jakoby is the exception, not the rule. Sure, there’s one gang of orcs that treat Jakoby with respect but that’s after they SHOOT HIM. And they’re still gangsters by the end of the film.
It doesn’t exactly help that Jakoby, despite being shown as an honorable guy with a proper moral compass, is also shown to not be the sharpest tool in the shed and lacks a backbone.
What would have helped ALL of this is if we had more scenes of orcs and humans working together. Orcs and humans coexisting, orcs with normal jobs who are nice people. Show us that orcs come in good and bad flavors just like humans. But by only showing the BAD side of orcs, you’re giving us no reason to think that orcs don’t deserve to be segregated. Again, Zootopia handled this so much better because it showed that both sides have their share of assholes and that being a good person or bad person is not inherent to your race. But in Bright, we’re given no reason to think that, given the way most people in the film act.
The cherry on top of this confusing sundae is that, apparently, orcs have a greater sense of smell than normal humans to the point Jakoby can tell people apart by scent. Someone like this would be INVALUABLE to the police force! From a pragmatic standpoint, it makes no sense for everyone to be racist to Jakoby if he could be a valuable asset but everyone treats him like he’s a hindrance.
And the kicker is...there’s no REASON for this plot to involve racism! Yeah! Think about it! The main plot involves trying to stop a terrorist group from getting a WMD. It’s not like Zootopia where the plot involved trying to stop a conspiracy to make one side look bad. Like, if the plot had involved the elves framing orcs for the crimes they pulled, that would have been a way to work the racism into the plot organically. But it didn't. And as a result, it really does feel like the whole bit of racism was just tacked on during rewrites because it’s topical.
Point 4: Eight Deadly Words
On TV Tropes, there’s a trope called “Eight Deadly Words”. Said words are “I don’t care what happens to these people”. It’s a trope that's put in use when you just don’t care about the characters in a story for one reason or another and that’s how I feel watching this movie.
Almost every single character in this movie is an asshole or incompetent. Ward spends the whole movie as a jackass and, even by the end, still doesn’t really like Jakoby despite everything they’ve been through. We’re given no reason to care about Tikka as I’ve gone into. The main villain is the kind of villain who kills an entire family including a baby and we’re given no insight into her motivations or find out anything about her; she’s just evil for the sake of a bad guy. Almost every single cop in this film is corrupt and bigoted and proud of it. Jakoby is the closest this film comes to a likeable character but he’s so slow on the uptake and so incompetent, it’s hard to root for him.
The only decent character in this movie, Rodriguez, dies. The Magic Task Force could be decent people but we’re not given enough information about them to care because the majority of their subplot was cut.
Every single character is an asshole is what I’m saying.
Final Verdict
So really, what more can I say? It’s a terrible movie with a poorly thought-out plot, a poorly thought-out racism allegory and poorly thought-out worldbuilding. In fact, that’s probably the best way to sum up this movie: poorly thought-out.
And yet, despite ALL of this, the movie did well enough on Netflix to warrant a sequel. Said sequel is currently in development hell though but if it ever comes out, I really hope whoever helms it next learns from the mistakes of the first film.
Look, if you like this movie, fine. Like what you like. I mean, I like the Micheal Bay Transformers films and dislike Bumblebee so it’s not like I have my own skewed taste in movies but personally, for me, Bright was a total mess and deserved its negative reception.
So here is my final verdict on Bright: skip it and watch Zootopia and Onward instead. They both handle the concepts in this movie so much better.
Yeah, Bright was kind of a bad movie. So bad even Will Smith couldn't save it.
Wait, why don't you like Bumblebee?
5276834
I didn't think there was enough action in it.
5276978
Fair enough. But honestly that was kinda my problem with the Michael Bay Transformers movies: too much action, not enough story. It was fine with the first movie, but it started to get old after Dark of the Moon.
Though I will take back what I said many years ago by saying they are not the worst movies I've ever seen. I have found far, FAR worse movies since then.
I still think they're dumb action movies, but they're at least guilty pleasure worthy.