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Common Man's View: 'Bright'

A Mythological Retcon 2,000 Years in the Making

By Caleb ShermanPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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I call it a common man's review because I have no experience as a critic, no mastery of language to make me a great wordsmith, and no power over my own mind to breakthrough my own opinions. These are really becoming less like reviews though, and more like rants about things within movies in general. But hey, Will Smith, amiright?

So I just recently watched Bright, and if you don't know what Bright is, I'm a little perplexed that you're reading this—but also, it's a cop movie, about cops, who are friends, sort of, in a world, where history is...slightly altered? There's not a clear line on how much of the world was altered, except the movie might be suggesting that Jesus was “The Dark Lord” and he called all of the Orcs to his side—I might be getting ahead of myself.

Okay, so start with Bright is a modern cop movie, with orcs and elves and magic. There are also fairies and dwarves, but I don't think we actually see any dwarves, we do get to see Will Smith splatter a fairy in his driveway though, good times. The plot revolves around Daryl Ward, black cop in the L.A.P.D. who recently had his chest blown open by an orc with a shotgun, and his partner Nick Jakoby, who despite having the most general human name on Earth, is not a human. Mind, it's not like fantasy names don't exist, between Tikka, Leilah and unnamed super minion one and unnamed super minion two, there were an excessive number of nonstandard names, but all the orcs have names like “Nick” or “Mikey.” Anyway, Daryl and Nick are called to the scene of a disturbance and apparently someone has been using magic there, which despite the existence of elves, dwarves and fairies is apparently not a common thing. Queue chase sequence, potential federal corruption, wicked if a little over-the-top fight scenes and a lot of feels.

That's basically the movie in a nutshell, and I don't know how to feel about it. I don't know how Will Smith feels about it either, but I think he was tricked into acting in this movie. Reader beware, there be spoilers ahead. Like right here, as I finish my previous joke, I think Will Smith wasn't given a script or a setting or anything, I think he was told “Mr. Smith, we'd like for you to star in a fantasy thriller where you are a wizard who punishes the bad guys,” and Will was all like, “Yeah, I could put some fantasy under my belt, sure,” then he got on set and had already signed a contract and couldn't back out, oh man.

Really, it's not a bad movie, I just feel like it could be better, I want explanations for some things, like why this one elf lady turned into a wall ornament but everyone else attacked with magic was charred. I wanna know why Daryl felt the need to lie to the magic FBI at the end about literally everything instead of sticking with his previous story and just being like, “Then we shot the crazy elf lady, the building started collapsing around us, and we ran without the wand—oh shoot.” Instead he's all like, “Nah, that story I told you on the phone, still hypothetical, what really happened was my friends were shot in the line of duty and there was nothing else.”

I guess it's not all that unbelievable, as long as you excuse that Jakoby literally spewed all the information about magic to the federal agent before Ward could stop him and the fact that Ward had already talked very specific hypotheticals with the agent. I mean, technically there was no evidence of the magic, excusing the fact that the federal agents had already been back to that building and saw the magically contorted wall ornament lady. That is going to bother me for the rest of my cinematic life. One day I'm gonna be walking down the street, and Will Smith is gonna be doing one of those incognito things actors do in movies where they put on shades and a cap and walk around in public, and I'm just gonna get this feeling in my gut that it's him, and I'm gonna whip around, look him dead in the face and be like, “Will, what happened that elf lady in Bright, the one that Tikka turned into a wall ornament?”

And Will's just gonna be like, “Yo man I don't know, that was tight.” Then he's gonna wander off and I'll realize that I'm delusional and might be a little racist because that was literally just a black guy, what would Will Smith be doing in Mississippi?

I think there was a message in the movie, something about pursuing your dreams and not caring about what other people think. Yeah, a good message, don't think we needed all the racist orcs to get the point across though. Maybe the message was “Racism is literally everywhere, just deal with it.” No...that's not a good message. Anyway, I enjoyed the movie enough that I won't rag on it anymore, but I was displeased enough that I probably won't watch it again unless someone comes up to me one day and is just like, “Dude, I wanna see Will Smith in a jacked up fantasy version of our world that makes no coherent sense.”

Oh! Right! How have orcs and elves and dwarves lived on Earth with humans for at least 2,000 years, but Disney's Shrek still exists? And really, the movie is presumably set in the early 21st century, at least the technology levels suggest that, so what exactly are you saying when 2,000 years ago there was a dark lord taking over the world? I mean, really, what's the message there?

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About the Creator

Caleb Sherman

Twitch.tv streamer (Amnesia Duck), retro game enthusiast (don't ask me about Ataris though), lucky husband, and author.

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