'Brightburn' Explores the Idea of a Preadolescent Clark Kent Turning Evil

Brightburn is what you get when you combine Superman’s origin story, Chronicle, and The Omen.

It’s set in a small town in Kansas named Smallville Brightburn, and it involves a couple having difficulties in conceiving a child named Jonathan and Martha Kent Kyle and Tori Breyer (David Denman and Elizabeth Banks).  One night, an alien spaceship crashes near their farm home.  They check it out, and they discover that it’s holding a baby.  They decide to keep him and raise him as their own son, naming him “Brandon.”  In the next ten years, life for the Breyer family has been bliss.  Then, 10-year-old Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) discovers that he has superpowers.

So, yeah, it’s just like how Clark Kent’s childhood had turned out.  But it takes a dark turn when, instead of starting his path toward becoming Superman, Brandon gradually develops into the Antichrist.

With a premise like that, excitement or at least curiosity is naturally generated for the movie right off the bat.  But it’s not all hype.  In bringing this particular vision about, the pacing, direction, cinematography, and acting prove to be quite solid.  If nothing else, Brightburn’s a genuinely well-crafted superhero horror movie.

For what it is – an Elseworld story where a preadolescent Clark Kent, with all his recently developed Kryptonian powers, becomes a sociopathic serial killer – Brightburn is probably impeccable.  Now, it does have shortcomings, but they don’t come from failing to nail what it was going for.  This movie ends up being exactly how you would expect something with such premise end up.

On the other hand, this also means that there’s no room for meaningful surprises.  It doesn’t have the twists-and-turns required to become greater than an “an Elseworld story where a preadolescent Clark Kent, with all his recently developed Kryptonian powers, becomes a sociopathic serial killer.”  Sure, this at least results to over-the-top violence and kills that can only be uniquely caused by Superman’s repertoire of powers – and indeed they’re pretty cool – but such displays have already been seen multiple times before in other, better stories featuring evil or anti-heroic Superman analogues (a very recent example being The Boys’ Homelander).

But, in the end, Brightburn doesn’t really need to be too original and subversive to be effectively fun and appealing.  It simply needed to succeed on becoming what it had set out to be with the kind of premise it has.  And that it definitely did.