YMMV / Brightburn

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Brandon (1) an innocent kid being controlled by external forces, (2) a fallible kid being corrupted by absolute power, or (3) a creature programmed to be a villainous conqueror? Or worse yet, (4), a combination of all three interpretations?
  1. Nothing Brandon is shown doing before he starts getting mind-controlled by his spacecraft suggests that he's anything but an innocent kid, so all of the villainous things he does could be the result of mind-control. He's just a puppet of his alien origins.
  2. Brandon is shown enjoying his newfound powers, and his mother coddles and excuses his behavior. Any kid could be tempted to take advantage. While the alien ship clearly influences him, since we see him decoding its imperative message to "take the world," its influence might simply have unlocked his powers and provided a small push. The murderous megalomania that follows could be his own fault. Further, the message "take the world" might be interpreted in less hostile ways than Brandon does, so his visions of piles of corpses and the planet exploding might be his own original ideas.
  3. Some of Brandon's creepier pastimes, like collecting pictures of gore and drawing himself as a super-powered villain, might have started before the spaceship started talking to him, and were only discovered afterwards. This would suggest that Brandon is in some way genetically predisposed to be the evil brood parasite that he ultimately becomes. The mind-control of his spacecraft might simply have activated an underlying and unavoidable part of himself.
  • As for Brandon and the pod: Was Brandon destroying the pod solely to dispose of evidence/the one thing that can hurt him, or was it a desperate last-ditch attempt to stop the pod from corrupting him?
  • Was the killing of Brandon's mother his own twisted way of sparing her from witnessing her son's reign of terror in the film's epilogue?
  • Also for Brandon and the pod: Was it intended by the aliens for Brandon to literally take over the world or literally destroy the world, or did the aliens that sent Brandon to Earth mean it in a more noble-hearted sense and Brandon simply misinterpreted the message like how he misinterpreted his dad's "birds and bees" talk?
  • An argument that Brandon is not being controlled by external forces and is using his own free will is the fact that he does not want his adoptive parents to find out what he is doing or what his new powers are, preferring to keep these things a secret from them. Also, he's clearly shocked and horrified when his dad tried to kill him, and after this he stops caring what his parents think or know and swiftly kills both of them.
• Awesome Music: As out of place as it is, you have to admit Billie Eilish's "bad guy" is a pretty catchy song.
  • The rest of the soundtrack is fairly good too, setting the suspenseful and horrific tones where appropriate, and giving the movie a definite horror feel.
• Cliché Storm: It can be very predictable for those who have been overexposed to the Beware the Superman premise- especially since "What if Superman turned evil?" has practically become a cliché in itself at this point.
• Director Displacement: Producer James Gunn's name pops up in discussions about this movie way more often than the actual director's, David Yarovesky. It helped that the film was released during the few months when Gunn had been fired from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and thus got a lot of sympathy points for how badly he'd been treated.
• Epileptic Trees: How much sentience does the spaceship have? Is it just obeying programming or can it actually think? One clue may be what happened to Erica's body. She's suspended from a wall and eviscerated, right in front of the spacecraft. Did Brandon just do that entirely on a whim? Or did the spacecraft direct him to do that because it wanted to examine a specimen of Earth's dominant life form?
• Fandom-Specific Plot: A recurring crossover plot sees Brandon fight Superman or another Superman Substitute, only to get his ass handed to him to demonstrate the difference between a kid with Superman's powers and the true Superman.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The after credits scene, featuring alignment-inverted expies of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Lex Luthor. It raises the question of what other evil versions of superheroes there are, and who could stop them.
  • Whatever happened to Caitlyn? Yarovesky has mentioned one idea for a mid-credits scene was to show Caitlyn working on a robotic replacement arm for herself.
• Funny Moments: The scene where Kyle tries to have The Talk with Brandon is some hilariously inappropriate Cringe Comedy, especially when Kyle has to explain what masturbation is.
• He Really Can Act: Brightburn has the first major film role for Jackson A. Dunn (a.k.a. Brandon), and it's genuinely impressive how well he manages to switch between being surprisingly sympathetic and absolutely terrifying.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The film is heavily inspired by the Superman franchise. It wouldn't be announced until later that producer James Gunn was in fact working on the DC Extended Universe, starting with The Suicide Squad, culminating in him being put in charge of a Continuity Reboot where he would write and direct an actual Superman film.
  • In the Japanese dub, Kyle is voiced by Takanori Hoshino, who is the official Japanese dub voice of Superman in the DC Extended Universe. In this film, he voices the father of a basically an evil Superman, and getting killed by him. In another role played by him, he is also the current voice actor for Iori Yagami, another character who is possessed by basically otherwordly forces (in this case, the god Orochi) that runs in his blood, causing him into going in a killing spree. In this film, he is the father of another person who endures the same thing that affects Iori, except replace "Orochi" with "aliens", and being killed during a killing spree.
  • Avengers: Endgame ended up showing the closest Brandon has come to being a regular superhero when his actor makes a cameo as a de-aged Scott Lang/Ant-Man during their first attempt to test out time travel through the Quantum Realm.
  • This isn't the first time that Elizabeth Banks feigns intimacy to get close to the Big Bad, close enough to stab it.
• I Am Not Shazam: Brightburn is the name of the town, not Brandon's alter ego. This is at least true until the credits, when a vlogger starts calling him just that.
• Inferred Holocaust: Given what the news footage at the end implies, Brandon might just be the apocalypse personified, especially now that his weakness is out of the way, and that he's not the only superpowered being who's wreaking havoc.
• Moral Event Horizon: The murder of Erica Connor. Unsympathetic as she might have been, she had all the reasons to be concerned for her daughter's well-being after Brandon first terrified her then broke her hands out of spite. She is murdered after Caitlyn tells Brandon that her mother warned her not to talk to him as a last-ditch effort to have him leave, since he ignored her previous complaints, which also proves she had pretty good point. What makes it even worse is that it's completely pointless: despite her death, Brandon never tries to talk to Caitlyn again in the whole movie. Likewise, causing a plane full of innocents to crash on his family's farm to hide his murders and continue his rampage worldwide is where he becomes pure evil.
• Narm:
  • Watching Brandon carefully but angrily toss the family pictures at the wall one by one is unintentionally funny and somewhat kills some of his threatening nature considering how destructive and violent he later becomes.
  • The gore in the deaths can be far too gratuitous and over the top to be taken seriously for some viewers. Even when the props are admittedly impressive, the sheer absurd gratuity of the scenes turns them from horrific to comedic.
  • Billie Eilish's Bad Guy being one of the songs in the end credits is Narm in the sense that it is so out of place and on-the-nose that it's silly.
• Narm Charm:
  • As over-the-top as the gore may be, it also tends to be one of the main things critics and viewers admit was not a letdown, with Noah's death most notably an excellently brutal demonstration of convincing gore effects.
  • It's varied but Billie Eilish's "bad guy" can be this. To explain: Timing, the instrumental of the song's darker third verse can complement and add to the creepiness of the events that just transpired. The fact that scenes in the credits are him destroying places and the eerie allusion to an entire Evil Justice League (with creepy pictures included) help with its terrifying charm.
• Signature Scene: Noah's gory jaw dropping death is by far the most famous scene in the movie, mainly due to its sheer brutality.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general critical consensus is that while it's a nice little horror story, it is unfortunately also rather forgettable and doesn't explore its concept as much as it could have.
  Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus: Although Brightburn doesn't fully deliver on the pitch-black promise of its setup, it's still enough to offer a diverting subversion of the superhero genre.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • This Beware the Superman story about a Superman Substitute child going on a nightmarish rampage due to not having any of the morality Superman had in his upbringing could very well be an adaptation of a variety of similar comic properties.
    • Superboy-Prime: The Movie.
    • An Ultraman (no, not that one) movie. The closing credits, with an apparent good Lex Luthor and mentions of evil examples of Aquaman and Wonder Woman, backs this up.
    • Megamind, offering a more serious take on how the title character's childhood led him to become a supervillain.
    • Kid Miracleman from Miracleman.
  • The premise of a superpowered outcast going on a rampage and seeming to have a loving relationship with his mother is the closest we'll probably ever get to a Chronicle sequel.
  • Brandon ultimately being driven by the instincts of his race could bring to mind what Goku could have become if he was never dropped on his head as a baby. And like Brandon, Goku would've conquered Earth using his innate unbelievably strong physical power to crush everything in his path.
  • The concept of a Beware the Superman storyline being played for horror has been done before in the DC House of Horror short story "Bump In the Night," which features an evil, demonic Kal-El similar to Brandon Breyer.
  • This is about as close to a Ten-Seconders movie as we can get.
  • The movie is about as close as you could get to a live action prequel to the Brandon Sanderson novel Steelheart.
  • To the comic book Irredeemable to an extent, featuring a Superman expy who ends up going rogue and brutally murdering innocent people due to his true alien nature clocked in with a supreme sense of selfishness and superiority over humanity and an utter intolerance of criticism, scolding, and being denied. Albeit, while Tony started off as the world's champion superhero (albeit out of the attention and adoration it earned him) as an adult, and only snapped under the pressure of his job and interpreting recent growing fear of him as an excuse to begin hurting people, Brandon never gets a chance to become a superhero, is somewhat sociopathic from the start, and ultimately his turn to evil isn't even his own choice, being brainwashed by his ship manipulating his violent alien instincts.
  • The film is also probably the closest we'll get to a live-action adaptation of Supreme Power.
• Squick:
  • The scenes with Noah's mangled, half-severed lower jaw, as brief as they may be, are disgusting beyond words. Kudos to the makeup department, but damn...
  • We also get one of the most visceral examples of an Eye Scream ever in a mainstream cinema release.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A very common complaint is that it seems the Gunns came up with the concept of Superman being evil... and then just stopped there, simply laying out the basic story virtually anyone would come up with from that idea with no further twists. Though it does deliver on a different premise: it's not only Superman's expy that's evil. The entire Justice League is also evil, with Aquaman and Wonder Woman's copies being evil in this world, too.
  • The concept of raising an innocent kid with super powers who slowly turns evil could have been a great story, exploring the temptations of absolute power and the horror of the adoptive parents who see it happening in the child they called their own. Instead, he just suddenly gets switched to "evil" by his ship and becomes a one-dimensional villain.
  • Several viewers were disappointed that more time wasn't given to Brandon before he first starts getting corrupted by the ship he came in, which would have allowed the audience to sympathize with him more before he starts to fall from grace.
• The Woobie: Caitlyn. When she shows kindness to Brandon, he becomes a Stalker with a Crush and uses his powers to watch her through her bedroom window (which rightfully terrifies her), completely crushes her hand with his super strength after she calls him a pervert during gym class, then brutally murders her mother after she told him her mother warned her to stay away from him. Brandon singlehandedly destroyed this poor girl’s life because he couldn’t handle rejection.

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