Netflix’s cops-and-orcs movie Bright gets the Honest Trailers treatment, including some pitches for possible sequels. Though Bright fell flat with critics, the movie proved a hit with Netflix subscribers who streamed it 11 million times in its first weekend. Netflix has now committed to at least one sequel, with stars Will Smith and Joel Edgerton returning.
Set in an alternate reality L.A. where humans live alongside fantasy beings, Bright stars Smith as a cop partnered with an orc (Edgerton). Together they stumble upon a magic wand and the bad elves who want to possess it and control the world. In addition to fantasy-infused cop movie action, Bright also attempted social commentary via its racialized fantasy species. But many found the movie’s racial allegory clumsy at best, and insulting at worst.
In their new Honest Trailer for Bright, the Screen Junkies gang take aim at the movie’s clunky attempts at exploring relevant themes through its silly story about humans living alongside orcs, elves, fairies, and other magical creatures. But that’s just the beginning of their take down. See the clip above.
All Honest Trailers are of course brutal, but this one seems particularly savage. In addition to blasting Bright for tone-deaf racial allegory, the trailer takes aim at Netflix and their recent history of bad feature film offerings. It calls the service, “Your first choice for prestige television, and last choice for movies.” The clip then makes fun of folks who defended Bright by claiming it would have made $100 million its opening weekend had it gone to theaters. As the clip points out, actually paying to see a movie is not the same as “something autoplaying after you pass out during Mindhunter.” The trailer then sets its sights on Smith, noting how often he has already played the exact character he plays in Bright. Turns out, he’s played that character a lot.
The trailer then gets down to possibly the biggest issue with Bright: its lack of imaginative world building. Could the premise of Bright have yielded a legitimately interesting fantasy? We’ll never know argues the Honest Trailer, because David Ayer’s film is content to simply mash fantasy characters into what is otherwise a run-of-the-mill gritty cop movie without truly exploring the implications all this would have on our world. Though the movie claims orcs, elves and these other races have existed on Earth for centuries, history appears to have played out exactly as it would have without them. And present culture doesn’t seem to have been impacted very much either. Beyond the sight of centaur cops patrolling the streets.
The Honest Trailer then wraps up with some pitches for those Bright sequels Netflix has coming down the pipeline. The best one? Bright 4 with Larry David as a frost giant. “This could be my Star Wars,” the clip quips, in a final dig at Bright screenwriter Max Landis.
More: Bright Reveals The True Goal of Netflix Originals
Source: Screen Junkies
