After several weeks worth of people expressing utter bafflement at the concept of a movie about cops who are also orcs, Netflix‘s $117m movie Bright landed yesterday. It was utterly savaged by critics (much to the pass-ag chagrin of director David Ayer) but I was still massively keen to see it.
Why? Well, Hollywood has become pretty averse to producing original, high-concept genre movies, preferring to focus on adaptations and reboots – films with a guaranteed audience. I wanted it to be good! I wanted movie studios everywhere to realise that you can make a batshit mashup of Lord of the Rings and Training Day and still get bums in seats. Bring us back to the coke-fuelled, fever swamp of 1980s Hollywood, which produced confirmed masterpieces RoboCop and Videodrome.
Unfortunately, Bright is not good. Is it as apocalyptically bad as some critics are saying? Probably not, but it’s certainly much more boring than a movie about orc cops should be. It also makes basically zero sense. Here are some disconnected thoughts I had while watching it, which I urge Ayer and screenwriter Max Landis to respond to immediately:
- One of the production companies which pops up before the film starts is called Trigger Warning Entertainment. For a film pitching itself as a thoughtful allegory for race relations in America, it’s a wonderful start.
- There’s a scene at the beginning of the film where Daryl Ward (Will Smith) kills an evil fairy which has been eating out of his bird-feeder or something. Before he does so, he says “Fairies’ lives don’t matter”. Obviously this is a riff on Black Lives Matter, but this film is ostensibly set in a world where BLM never actually happened because all the racism is directed at orcs instead of black people. Which means the joke wouldn’t make sense to the people he is actually making it to. Am I going insane?
- At about the halfway point, Ward also makes a Shrek joke. He compares a big mean gangster orc to Shrek, and tells him to go back to Fiona. This implies that the Shrek films exist in this universe, which is based on a millennia long conflict between humans, orcs and elves. Why would the film Shrek have ever been made in a world where fantasy creatures are real? Even screenwriter Landis could not answer this question.
- The only way this movie really tries to emphasise the much-hyped racial allegory here is through repeatedly using the phrase ‘diversity hire’ in reference to an orc cop, and through incredibly weird stereotype jokes. For example, at one point someone says that orcs make up most of the linebackers in the NFL. Ha ha, I guess?
- There’s a shot early in the film which shows a dragon flying over Los Angeles. This dragon – and indeed the general existence of enormous dragons in America – is never addressed or seen again. This seems like a more pressing issue than orc gang warfare, in my opinion.
- Joe Rogan briefly appears at the beginning of the film, doing exactly the same thing Rogan does in real life. It’s comforting to know that even in a world where orcs and elves have been real for at least thousands of years, Joe Rogan’s career seems to have been basically the same.
- There’s a part where Ward and his orc partner Jakoby face down some kind of orc gang boss, who tells him he’s from Miami, where he used to throw parties where orcs, humans and elves used to party together without a problem. There’s basically no point to this piece of dialogue, but it’s good to know that shit is still very chill over in Miami.
- This movie is basically Zootopia. Imagine Zootopia, except not good. You will be pleased to know that the film about a rabbit who is a cop is more thoughtful than the film about an orc who is a cop.
- Why/how is this movie real, and how is it so boring? Rather than watching this, I’d rather watch a blow-by-blow documentary which explore how this movie got from Max Landis’ brain to being on Netflix. How did this happen?
Oh well. Bright 2 is apparently already in development – so get ready for even more!
