James Gunn's First Superman Movie Is An Underrated Sci-Fi Thriller

Last summer, James Gunn brought the Superman we know and love back to the big screen. After a decade’s worth of dour, dreary Superman movies about a mopey Man of Steel, Gunn and a perfectly cast David Corenswet turned Supes back into a big, lovable Boy Scout; the living embodiment of all that’s good, whose only internal conflict is that he can’t be in more than one place at once, so he can’t save everyone who needs to be saved — Gunn illustrated that beautifully in Superman’s final battle.

Although it stumbled a little this year with the critical and commercial disappointment of Supergirl, Superman got Gunn’s DCU off to an exciting start. The universe arrived fully formed, jam-packed with superheroes, supervillains, aliens, monsters, and MacGuffins. The movie is filled with scene-stealing supporting players, from Mister Terrific to Guy Gardner to an inexplicably irresistible Jimmy Olsen.

But Gunn never takes the focus away from Superman himself. The movie is a character study above all, using a typical week in Superman’s life to show us what kind of person he is. It really feels like a comic book come to life, like you picked up a random issue off the shelf and started flicking through it to see what Superman got up to that week. More recently, Spider-Man: Brand New Day captured that feeling with aplomb.

Superman marked a triumphant beginning for Gunn’s DCU, but it wasn’t technically his first Superman movie. Six years earlier, Gunn produced a horror reimagining of the Superman story called Brightburn. At the time, Gunn couldn’t have imagined that he’d be handed the keys to the DC kingdom and given the freedom to make real Superman movies, so he made a horror version. Brightburn was a modest box office success, considering its low budget, but it remains an underappreciated gem.

Brightburn Retold Superman's Story As A Horror Movie

Everyone knows Superman’s origin story: his home planet of Krypton was destroyed, his parents sent him to Earth in an escape pod, he was adopted by a lovely couple in Kansas named the Kents, he grew up with superhuman powers thanks to the Earth’s yellow sun, and his parents raised him to use those powers for good, so he became the world’s omnipotent protector. Brightburn told a much less optimistic version of that story. What if Kal-El didn’t turn out so good? What if he was a bad kid, with violent tendencies and a deep well of rage?

We’ve seen plenty of these “evil Superman” stories recently, from The Boys to Invincible — heck, the Justice League movie made Superman himself evil — but Brightburn put a unique spin on it. Homelander and Omni-Man are both fully grown men, but Brandon Breyer from Brightburn is just 12 years old. At age 12, Brandon’s dormant alien powers start to emerge, and instead of using those powers to help people, like Clark Kent does, he decides to punish everyone he feels has wronged him: the girl he likes who rejected him; the uncle who chastised his bad behavior.

Brightburn is a haunting mix of Superman and the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” in which six-year-old Anthony Fremont uses his godlike powers to keep the town of Peaksville, Ohio, living in fear, answering to his every sadistic whim. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with the perfect modern myth when they created Superman; they turned Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch into a relatable human being: a good, honest, incorruptible force of justice that we can all look up to.

Humanity needs Superman as a symbol; he represents all the things we need more of in the world. But there’s a sinister flipside to that what-if scenario. The Superman story assumes Clark grows up to be unwaveringly good, but Brightburn asks: what if he didn’t?

Brightburn

5/10

Release Date May 24, 2019

Runtime 90 Minutes

Director David Yarovesky

Writers Mark Gunn, Brian Gunn