Adopting Babies From Space Only Seems To Work Out For The Kents

“Brightburn” is a horror film that seems to have started off with the idea of distorting the backstory of Superman or something.  Mark and Brian Gunn are the writers who may have been on acid when they conceived this idea.  David Yarovesky is the director who can at least make this somewhat watchable.

A couple trying to have a baby find that something has dropped onto their farm from the sky.  Lo and behold, it’s a baby in a space pod or something.  They end up raising the child until his twelfth year and then the little kid starts to exhibit some strange behaviors and abilities.

Elizabeth Banks and David Denman play the devoted parents who have a pretty unrealistic ability to overlook the obvious.  Of course, they hide the pod from their son and keep it buried under the barn.  Jackson A. Dunn is the actor portraying the unearthly child whose entering into puberty is considerably more destructive than most.  He does the best he can with the script.

This just really seems to be a “what if Superman went bad” idea.  The kid has exactly the same abilities from being able to fly to heat vision.  Bullets apparently bounce of him.  Probably the only new thing in the kid’s bag of tricks is psychokinesis.

The parents display some really senseless reactions to some of their child’s antics.  He crushes the hand of a female classmate and is only suspended for two days.  The parents just take way too long to get extremely alarmed here.

The visual effects were good but not good enough to make me more forgiving of the weaknesses in the plot and dialogue.  The similarities to Superman’s origin were just too distracting.

Brightburn ended up being the name of the Kansas town where all of this chaos takes place.  The distortion of the Superman background is likely intentional and probably sounded like a good idea at the beginning, however I think casual movie viewers who  are merely going to find it obnoxious.

I suppose it’s an interesting idea to pitch to the studio, but there were too many plot holes and moments when the parents just looked too dense for me to buy into it when it is all said and done.