Bright (2017 US) Two cops go after bad guys in an L.A. where magic, fairies, orcs, elves, and other mythical creatures exist alongside humans. This Netflix original generated a lot of controversy. Critics HATED it but viewers loved it and Netflix greenlit Bright 2 until Will Smith slapped some dude in front of a bunch of people. Then they pulled the plug. Bright had a 100 million dollar budget so it must have been sufficiently viewed to greenlight a sequel. Here is what I think happened in the negative reviews. It does not have much of a backstory. You get bare bones history before they delve into the story. Critics are taught that movies must have sufficient exposition to be good. They use the phrase “the world needs to be flushed out so people can understand it.” I’m a grown ass woman with big girl panties and can handle uncertainty. Suits often have only a glancing understanding of the mechanics of storytelling and the “bible” of what makes a script good changes. For example; the 90’s ish was the era of the reluctant hero. Hero’s had to be convinced to be a hero. I hated that trope and my least favorite movie was Armageddon where it took half the movie to convince Bruce Willis to save the world. That fell out of favor and now you just don’t see that very often, thank god. Bright had very little exposition. You are taught in college to spend an abundance of time explaining the world. I don’t necessarily dislike exposition but some people are so conditioned to over explain a backstory that to not have that is blasphemy. So I was really happy to see a high budget film knock “the scriptwriting bible” a bit. I was cheering that on. There are so many ways to tell a story and I don’t like Hollywood being the knuckle cracking gatekeeper. OK rant over. The second reason is that some people were making the point that Bright was a knock-off of a tabletop rpg called Shadowrun. I can’t speak to the truth of that but what I will say is that it was close enough to an RPG that it’s going to get strikes just for that. Third, at the end of the day it’s a buddy cop film with a civil rights theme. We’ve seen that to the inth degree but I enjoyed it and many others did too. Find this on Netflix
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