superhero movies

poster

There is a Superman comic that wonders, “What if Superman was a communist.” Instead of landing in a cornfield in Kansas and being adopted by the wholesome Kent family baby Superman instead lands in Russia. In this version, Superman is still essentially a good man, a superhero of sorts, but his ideology is warped by 1980s Russian politics.

Brightburn keeps the idyllic Kansas setting but imagines “What if Superman was evil.” Technically it isn’t Superman, or even Clark Kent, he’s called Brandon here and he’s played by Jackson A. Dunn, but he is an alien baby that lands on a farm in Kansas and is raised by a wholesome couple. Superman’s origin story is so ingrained into our cultural membranes that those images immediately bring him to mind.

The film skips any scenes on the kid’s alien planet. It flashes pretty quickly through the growing-up stage. The couple, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) have been able to conceive a child on their own so they are thrilled when a baby lands in their lap (even if he does crash in a spaceship). A quick montage brings us to him turning 13 and hitting puberty.

He’s an awkward kid, but smart. He thoroughly answers the teacher’s questions and is mocked by some bullies. But a pretty girl turns to him and says that smart people rule the world.

The spaceship, locked inside the barn, calls to him. It tells him he can rule this world. His powers come slowly. When that pretty girl later calls him a pervert (because she caught him spying on her in her bedroom) he breaks her hand.

Then he starts killing people. His parents are slow to recognize the signs. They love him after all. But when the bodies start piling up even they have to realize their son is evil.

There are some great ideas in Brighburn. I love the premise, but it sticks very few of its landings. There is no real sense of who he is, or where he comes from. The ship communicates to him somehow and tells him he can control this planet, but why? Was he sent there for that purpose? There isn’t any real internal conflict either. Sometimes he seems like a good boy who loves his family, and then something angers him and he starts killing.

You could read this as a metaphor for puberty and well, as someone who is raising a teenage daughter right now I can tell you the moods do swing for no apparent reason, and maybe that is enough here. But it didn’t work for me.

Most of the choices the film makes are pedestrian. Even the ones that don’t do what a typical superhero film would do are easily guessed at. So many times I wished the film would do something really surprising with its premise, and it never did.

Except for the kills. Those were pretty gnarly.

It isn’t a terrible film, it just isn’t as good as it could have been. That’s disappointing.

flash gordon movie poster

After moving away for college and staying away for some twenty years, I moved back to my hometown a while back and started working in the family business with my father and brother. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with either of those things. Still aren’t if I’m being honest.

However, it has been really nice to get to know my brother better. We’ve always gotten along, but he’s four years older than me. He left home just about the time I was getting interested and by the time he moved back I was gone. So it has been wonderful forming a relationship with him as an adult.

We are both movie nerds so we spend a lot of our time talking about the various films we’ve recently watched. Since moving back he has told me many times of his undying love for Flash Gordon. This usually happens when a Queen song plays over the radio (and we tend to listen to the classic rock station so a Queen song often plays over the radio.) Queen, of course, wrote the soundtrack to the film.

Flash Gordon is one of those films that I was too young to have seen in the theaters, and have never really cared to catch at home. It bombed at the box office and the general consensus was that it was a stinker. That general consensus has stuck with me which is why I never bothered with it. But my brother’s love for it finally got me to track down a copy and I recently watched it.

I kind of loved it.

It is very silly and all kinds of cheesy, but intentionally so. His has more in common with the 1960s Batman television series than anything in the MCU. Of course, 1980 was a long way from the MCU or Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, or even Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. Christopher Reeve played Superman in 1978 but that was really the first big blockbuster superhero movie of the modern era.

At the time Comic Books were mostly kids’ stuff. Later in the 1980s, they would turn darker and grittier, but in 1980 they were still primarily for children. Flash Gordon was a newspaper comic strip that lent itself toward ridiculous situations, over-the-top villains, and general nonsense.

The movie follows in that same vein. It is bright and colorful, filled with outlandish sets, even more outlandish characters, and a plot that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than silly.

Sam J. Jones plays Flash Gordon, not a superhero but a football star. He boards his private jet and finds travel agent Dale Gordon (Melody Anderson) has snuck aboard. She’s pretty so he allows her to stay. Not long after they are in the air the plane is hit by a meteor and they crash land near mad scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov’s (Topol) laboratory.

He believes that the crazy weather they’ve been having (including massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and hurricanes) is part of an extra-terrestrial plot to destroy the Earth. He’s not wrong as it is Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow – and I really would like to hear the story of how they talked him into starring in this film) who has wreaked this havoc on the planet – he gets bored easily and likes to destroy planets just to see how they react.

Zarkov has a space jet at his disposal and the three humans take off hoping to save the day (well Zarkov hopes to save the day, he pretty much kidnaps the other two). They fly through a time warp, or a wormhole, or something or other and wind up on Ming’s planet.

There they meet some men with wings, a young Timothy Dalton in a mustache, a dude in a golden Destro-looking mask, Ming’s very attractive daughter (Ornella Muti), and an assortment of other oddballs. Flash beats off Ming’s men by basically playing football with a metal ball against them. He plays a deadly game of don’t-get-bit by a deadly scorpion thingy with Timothy Dalton. He flies some cool-looking ships, gets lost in a swamp, and has all sorts of adventures.

Again, the whole thing is ridiculously silly but a whole lot of fun. And yes, that score from Queen is pretty darn great.