Forgive me if there's already been a thread on this, but what is Veeky Forums's opinion on Bright...

The setting is pretty novel, for the audience it is aimed at. Someone is already in the midst of screaming BUT SHADOWRUN as they break their keyboard with the force of their enraged typing, but Shadowrun is almost 30 years old, at least 15 years out of relevance, and most people never knew it existed at all. To everyone outside of Veeky Forums, Bright's setting is unique.

And that setting isn't handled badly by the movie. Its full of realistically unfair contradictions (orcs get shit on for working for the Dark Lord despite the army that beat him being led by an orc, Elves get away scott free despite the Dark Lord and his inner circle being Elves) and any a little bit of rumination reveals how much thought they put into things.

For example, orc fashion. We see a lot of them wearing sports apparel, and at first its easy to go 'because gang-bangers'. But what do we know about orcs? They cling very heavily to tribalism (such as clan law and a strong oral tradition) and as mentioned in the review of the situation about how Jakoby must have been lying about the guy he chased down? The NFL is full of orcs, because orcs are stocky and strong. Look again at what the orcs on the street are wearing, its mostly football jerseys with orcish names.

None of this is spelled out to the viewer, but its clearly not coincidence either.

It's offensive to everyone, but not to the level where it makes any substantial point or triggers any outcry. It's "Uncle-at-Thanksgiving" level of attempted preaching.

An inoffensive 5/10 (6/10 for me personally) film that I enjoyed watching even if it had some weak dialogue and pacing. It was predictable but fun, exactly what I expected. It's become so polarizing because critics reacted almost violently to it for a number of reasons that I'll let sharper minds try and pick through, and so people have lionized it, especially because they see the critics as a band of self-fellating film students that did a regrettable job (accurate) of qualifying why they hated it in the first place. Good movie? No. Worst movie of the year? Not even fucking close. A fun evening with friends? I'd say so.

Not everything fits into the list of checkboxes you want it to be. The minority stereotype that Bright's orcs most closely align with isn't even black people, but Mexican street gangs. But that's not one of your check boxes, so you get upset.

Not everything has to be about timely political commentary. Sometimes, to build a convincing world you have to give a setting its own social tensions that are not an ideological soapbox for an IRL issue.

Like, Jakoby letting the kid go being the right call. Jakoby knew it wasn't the right guy and he had lost the real perp. A cop got just got shot. And the LADP was shown to be full of openly prejudiced officers. What outcome was there, really, for that kid beyond taking the fall for a crime he didn't commit?

If you are getting upset that Bright is doing social issue grandstanding badly, maybe you should consider that was never their intention in the first place?

We get it, you really like this movie.
What I don't get is why you really like this movie.

Is Bright your first foray into modern fantasy settings? What's unfortunate is that you're talking about "intended audience" when what you really should be saying is that it's a dumbed down look at constructing a modern fantasy setting with a pretty weak central premise. It's just a weak attempt at slapping "orc" onto "minority", but all while having to tiptoe around the concept out of fear of going too far and upsetting people past a certain point.

It's an idea that loses steam even before you finish saying it out loud, but it got the Netflix green light because they also green lit an Eggplant Emoji movie.

>he doesn't get the post postmodern writing zeitgeist

It's not the 90s anymore

No user, every time dissension arises in a setting, it has to be a shitty allegory for a real world issue. That's how you write an interesting and immersive fantasy world.

Realtalk, I also saw influences from classic punk culture in there, and even some Irish influences. It didn't really seem to me like the orcs were supposed to directly reference any one group, but rather act as a stand-in for the poor in general. I thought a lot of the film was meant to more generally reflect class conflict.

That and the bit with elves. It might not be the smartest plan when you are trying to have the orcs stand in for minorities to have an actual race that control the world and caused trouble 2000 years ago. It's a little on the pointy nose for many conspiracy people.

>Not everything has to be about timely political commentary. Sometimes, to build a convincing world you have to give a setting its own social tensions that are not an ideological soapbox for an IRL issue.

Hence people talking about it being tonedeaf. It's like if Avatar was written without any real intention of it being Dances with Wolves IN SPACE. The writer was kinda blind to what they were actually writing.

>What's unfortunate is that you're talking about "intended audience" when what you really should be saying is that it's a dumbed down look at constructing a modern fantasy setting with a pretty weak central premise.

Wow, way to prove my point for me.

"Hmmm... he said a thing that doesn't align with my argument. That can't be right. What he REALLY meant to say was THIS. Yes, that sounds much better." *Checks Box*

The acting was kinda crap, especially will smith and the story was ok at best. 4-5/10 maybe? They really shot themselves in the foot going with the grand epic plot rather than just exploring the world/what an orc cop would need to deal with.

If you're hoping to say "It's stupid because it's intended for a stupid audience", that's just a lame excuse that doesn't change that it's stupid.

Yeah. Almost like the writers took a premise and tried to build it out realistically, taking inspiration from multiple sources to inform that worldbuilding, rather than slapping a thin veneer over a specific minority and calling it a day.

Its a shame that, even on Veeky Forums of all places, some people can't grok that. I'd expect some college kid looking to use his Literary Criticism degree to miss the point like that, but I expected better from my fellow GMs.

autism

Bright is novel if you haven't heard of Shadowrun or the myriad of "modern fantasy" novels that exist. It's better than Shadowrun in that it doesn't have all the decking crap, which is stylistically bound to the 80s envisioning of the future. Any attempts to course-correct the cheesiness of decking would end up getting you in similar trouble as the modern Terminator movies.

It's also better than most novels on the subject because it isn't a romance shitfest, like Twilight. There would probably be a lot of traction from like an investigator show/movie, like if they had been investigating some monsters or weird cult, but that's covered by other contemporary shows.

In any case I think the movie gets too much shit just for being hamfisted about the race politics and how it relates to the real-world. A lot of people just want to turn a blind eye to the fact that traditional fantasy races and tropes already correlate to real-world peoples. Bright was just tactless about it, which is fine because its a cop shoot 'em up and not a story with moral authority.

>myriad of "modern fantasy" novels that exist
What novels are those?

Sure, not everything has to intend fully consistent or thought out political commentary, but, as you point out, the film gives viewers parallels to reality - Mexican street gangs, etc. - that are part of how it tells us about what its world is like. Movies uses tropes and stereotypes and politically/socially significant visual language as shorthand because that's how most story telling works. And cop-on-minority violence is such a hot topic atm that expecting people not to look for the consistent social commentary in it when we are getting recognisable costumes, whatever, drawn from real-world racial groups is pretty naive. People don't owe the movie that because the film didn't work hard enough to ensure it gave consistent rules on how one should interpret its universe.

>tried to build it out realistically

I wonder what planet you live on if you really think any of the setting was "realistic" as opposed to "embarrassingly contrived."

the general consensus seems to be meh

I liked the way it was directed and a lot of the little background things were cool, but the story was too boring to keep me engaged

Well you seem to live on the planet of Uranus for how asspained you are

Yo bro, did you write the movie? Weird thing to get this defensive about.

>I don't know anything about modern fantasy, the post

Wonderful. That helps explain why you liked this movie and thought it was original and intelligent.

That was 100% their intention. Will Smith talked about it at its premier, the director talked about it in the press coming up to its release. The movie was supposed to be an allegory of race relations and did a bad job of it. I mean if you want to defend that it did a GOOD job of discussing race in modern America fine, but you're going to have to sell me on it.

Here's a crazy idea, maybe the movie actually had real world minorities in it, and all it was trying to do was accurately portray a really shitty situation where the real world had even more divisive racial lines in it?

Personally I'm glad Bright gave zero fucks about people who get their panties in a twist over racial bullshit. Better to be tactless and tone deaf than a milquetoast pussyfooter.

Uhhh well I don't know the titles and authors off the top of my head because I am terrible with names. There's a relatively well-known author who writes a series called Monster Hunter or something like that, as well as a couple of series about paranormal investigators. There's Twilight infamously which has vampires, werewolves, etc. I think there are a series of books about some vampire chick cop, or she's like a human with a vampire and like shapeshifting cheetah boyfriend? I don't remember. It's like a modern day Anne Rice type thing but skewed towards a wider range of fantasy elements.

The point is there are lots of books and even more games and TV shows out there doing this. Bright is just the most blatant thing to come out in the sense that it just hits you with YO TOLKIEN 2017 BUCKO like a brick. Subtlety is completely lacking.

this

>Better to be tactless and tone deaf than a milquetoast pussyfooter.
This desu

Yeah but how many of those have the supernatural blatantly open and treated as completely normal? Twilight doesn't, that's for sure.

>Personally I'm glad Bright gave zero fucks about people who get their panties in a twist over racial bullshit. Better to be tactless and tone deaf than a milquetoast pussyfooter.

I'd prefer it be good. It really wasn't a good showing for Netflix first big budget movie.

When you think about it, how do you even define proper use of force for law enforcement in a setting with fantasy races?

Like, Jaboky gets hit by a car. Multiple times. Its most just annoying. What can you use to subdue an orc that ISN'T overwhelming force?

Lets look beyond orcs, even. There is no way that the same arrest techniques or tools you use on dwarves are going to work on centaurs. A taser that would knock down a centaur would probably fucking kill a dwarf or a goblin. And what are you going to do? Handcuff that centaur and put them in the back of your sedan?

Trying to enforce the law on a culture of mixed fantasy races with any kind of effectiveness almost requires you to operate on the assumption that you have to be prepared for the toughest call-in, and hope that the threat of that force is enough to keep everyone else in line.

I liked it because it was free and had some cool effects and action. The people killed by magic in the SoL safehouse looked great. I don't think it was particularly original, or particularly intelligent. You're just tilting at windmills,

FAGGOT

It was also a buddy cop movie in a world of boring capeshit, with some genuinely inventive fights like with the car inside the gas station

>Movie is ultimately about how you shouldn't judge anyone based on race.
>It did a bad job of tackling race relations
The absolute state of politics today.

Personally I thought it was fine. Good, even. It had flaws, sure. Awkward socialization, dropped plot lines (the wire), and held back too much for the sequel, and Tikka. Also could have spelled out the magic situation a bit better. Most people think that there's only Brights and Wands, and they're entirely blameless.

This. Of course Police are going to be brutal on Orcs, an Ork can life a 2 ton vehicle. They're stronger and more durable than humans. A cop is in reasonable fear for his life with an unarmed orc who is being belligerant. By our contemporary rules of engagement, that's enough to fucking merc them with your side arm over if things go sideways. Most trials around police shootings revolve around whether or not the cop was in danger and if the force was necessary to protect the cops life and that of others, and with literal superhumans using immediate lethal force becomes all the more reasonable.

>Movie is ultimately about how you shouldn't judge anyone based on race.

Except elves. Fuck those elves.

it's probably the worst performance of his career if we're being honest.

Oh I'm not sure I couldn't really say. In Bright I think they are trying to straddle the line between it being openly understood and secret, but just did a poor job. The magic and wands are supposed to be like a myth or subdued by the feds, like aliens and their tech might be in something like X-Files. The various races being around is supposed to be openly known but not considered weird, the same way that we don't consider various races of humans or animals weird. The movie needed more backstory and more ironing out of these kinds of details.

Sure, but again, the movie isn't mostly about centaurs or other races that people have trouble finding a human ethnic equivalent for. You're being very generous to the movie by trying to see everything through its world, but that simply isn't how 99% of people watch 99% of films. If you want to argue that people have an obligation to do so before criticizing it, I gotta disagree. I'm not worried about hurting Will Smith's feelings and part of the reason I suspect people like this modern fantasy stuff is precisely because its social structures and whatever are more immediately relateable than misc medievalism or scifi. I don't think anyone owes that story any complicated defense based in logically extending the logistics of its world out into areas the filmmakers didn't care enough about to put in the movie.

It was tonedeaf by pussyfooting. It was a superficial allegory, which tried to slap real world headlines onto a setting that didn't follow the rules of the real world, creating a
mindless movie for no one, since it's politics are just so out of place and idiotic despite them being central to the films concept.

What I don't understand is why the Magic Feds didn't bust the shit out of Ward. It's obvious they all know he's a Bright but it's never explained what actually happens TO Brights. They can use Magic Wands which is a big deal, but that appears to be the only real difference. Despite that they treat him like he's a dangerous creature that literally needs to be chained.

You're the one that's slapping real world headlines on the movie, buddy.

>"movie for no one"
Except for all the people that just wanted to watch a fantasy action movie with Will Smith.

You mean the Director right out saying that's what he was doing?

You personally must have a special case of tone-deafness if you're trying to deny something that's not only pretty blatant, but openly admitted.

>movie with Will Smith.

It's not 1997. People aren't exactly lining up to see his next blockbuster. Hell, he's doing Netflix movies.

Well first I'd like a source for what the director said that you're referencing, because it could easily be something else entirely than "Yeah we really wanted to make this movie because of all the police-on-black violence that's been in the news lately," which is what you're acting like, and second, the intent of the director doesn't inform how I see the movie. I don't see orcs as black people. I see the actual black people in the movie as black people. Orcs are orcs.

The gulf between critic and audience review scores says otherwise. It doesn't make it a better movie, but to say it was for "no one" is patently ridiculous.

You act like Netflix originals aren't well-received and don't routinely have big name actors involved. Go back to /tv/.

I was curious whether we actually had Netflix shills constantly making these threads here.
Interesting way of confirming that.

Same problem with suicide squad. Not every movie needs world-ending stakes to be compelling.

How much is Fandango paying you? I'm pretty disappointed in how much I'm getting from Netflix, honestly. You'd think it'd be more.

I dunno, it was a very different performance but I thought seven pounds was worse. He's a dreadful actor in that.

Yeah. It was Suicide Squad...just have them doing a morally questionable black ops mission against another country. Something you can get the exposition over for in like 3 minutes flat and from there let the characters show themselves.

>orcs are orcs
>the curtains are just blue
The Orcs were an allegory for the poor more so than specifically black people, but come the fuck on. You have to be burying your head in the sand to ignore the overt commentary on police brutality and racism.

It wasn't really commentary to me, they were just parts of the movie. The movie is fantasy races in the real world. There's racism and police brutality in the real world. These were givens to me. I'm not burying my head in the sand, I'm just not upset that the movie accurately carried out its premise.

I want to see Hollow Knight bug people or lizardman knights. They can just be quirky people who live in compounds, like mormons or the amish. I would also like to see the Olympics in Bright, with 100 metre dash type stuff being mixed with horse races for Centaurs.

It would also be really cool to see a giant kill a grown man with one punch.

I feel like this sums up all my issues with bright; it had a lot of great ideas but went nowhere with them

Bro it was a commentary. I don't know how to explain this without explaining the whole movie and telling you to rewatch it more carefully. A movie doesn't focus on racism, police brutality, and classism just because the real world contains those things. The real world contains lots of things, a specific work will selectively show you certain things it thinks are important.

Like, you take all that shit out and you're left with what? Jakoby gaining an identity within a society that denied him one and Ward regaining his belief in his capacity to do good? Both of those story arcs only exist within the framework of the sociopolitical commentary the movie offers at large. It's an integral part of the message the movie tries to make, which is sociopolitical in nature. There aren't "just parts of a movie."

>The movie is fantasy races in the real world.

No, it's very, very far from that. It's a world set up to present a paper-thin allegory, and when it was done with the pitch that got it green lit to begin with, all you had left was a pretty dull fantasy world to follow buddy-cops around in it.

Sorry, I just don't see it that way. I don't associate orcs with real world minorities or elves with the real world 1%, or jews, or whatever. They're just orcs and elves to me, but in our modern world. Say I'm burying my head in the sand, tone deaf, whatever. The movie literally just does not strike me that way.

incoherent and schizophrenic but also fun to watch. Story is garbage, acting is solid, editing makes me feel sorry for whoever had to cut it down as it felt like someone said "get it under two hours, but no cutting any action scenes"

The use of graffiti to flesh out the world in an urban cop movie was pretty good. It doesn't pack a lot of exposition but sets the general tone.

>Forgive me if there's already been a thread on this, but
But no. Filtering this now.

>interrupting a line of text
>announcing your intent like it matters
But hey, at least you remembered to sage. For whatever that's worth, since you got me to reply to you.

In america it seems that more often than not class conflict is mis-labeled as race conflict by all sides.

Americans and their race obsession.

For a fantasy movie Bright was surprisingly watchable, with a fancy setting and stuff.

I just ignored the whole racial tension subtext, instead opting to see it as an allegory to social classes: upper elves, middle humans, and working orcs.

Race is all anyone wants to talk about here. That and gender.

This.

Tons of huge plotholes, deus ex machina, and other story telling issues really made this film less then what it could have been. I'd give it a six. Some fancy camerawork and good makeup for the orcs saved it for me.

I just don't like movies that don't explore their setting more.

Hah, let's be honest here; Will Smith can't act for shit unless he's playing as Will Smith.

His point was that movies aren't made for turdbonerds. in order for it to get made it has to hit the right notes for the right people. Thus glossing over plot and setting might be the only way to get the mass appeal they're wanting. not even saying it's right, but everyone seemed to miss it.

Some of the best movies ever made were made by autists for autists. Extreme attention to detail, fleshed out world, etc etc are things that make a piece of work start to shine, and even if your average joe doesn't quite understand those concepts, he enjoys the results they bring anyways.

So if I bang a centaur is this falling under some sort of beastiality laws or what?

It's a bad movie by every metric I use to judge movies. The writing was all over the place, the acting was horrendous, the plot was a clichéd mess, but worst of all it was infuriatingly boring.

I wasn't expecting much. No more than a 6/10 action movie with fantasy elements. What I got was the same fucking buddy cop/generic action movie that's been made ever since the 80's, only some of the actors were dressed up as orcs for no fucking purpose. People say that "at least it's not the Emoji Movie," bu you know what? Fuck those people. The Emoji Movie at least never tried to trick you into thinking that it would be anything other than shit.

I liked it, but it was rushed. It would have worked much better as a TV show instead of a single movie. Hopefully we get more to expand on the fluff

>muh Shadowrun
The only thing the two have in common is "orcs are discriminated". It's more like a movie about Detroit but with magic

>To everyone outside of Veeky Forums, Bright's setting is unique.
Except the people who played the Shadowrun video games, the first of which was released for the SNES in 1993.

The film felt like plastic in the sense that everyone knew their lines, acted them out adequately, there were plenty of action scenes but no one tried to sell it to me. It just went through the motions.

It does everything 'ok' but doesn't do fantasy, buddy cop, fight scenes exceptionally well.

I didn't really care for any of the main characters. I felt that the magic FBI guys are where the real meat and potatoes is at, instead we got a pretty boring movie.

What coud have worked for the setting was a mocumentary about the first orc police officer where they explore the kind of stereotypes he has to put up with on a regular basis and how he handles interactions with other races. It could pretty much have been Cops, only instead of pulling over meth heads, they deal with drunk dwarves and domestically abusive lizardmen. Something like that.

Yep, this, this explains my feelings perfectly.

I'd assume not. Otherwise there'd be some really lonely centaurs.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar- Freud.

You're reading way too much into the whole thing user.

Freud didn't say that.

>A taser that would knock down a centaur would probably fucking kill a dwarf or a goblin

Doubt it. Dwarfs chew Horse Tranqs like Tylenol.

You're not in a prophecy, you're in a stolen Toyota Corolla.

That's actually a pretty great idea. Filing it for later use

I want by paycheck, Landis.

It's like mainstream's interpretation of Shadowrun in the present with social injustice to Orcs and making sure Will Smith has a huge role in the movie or he would leave.

Why? All the movie details so far show that a Bright is someone that can use Wands and that Wands are as rare as fuck. Take away the Wand, a Bright is no different from any person. The Magic Feds already have the rogue Wand in their possession and I presume that every other Wand is tracked and accounted for.

>Forgive me if there's already been a thread on this
Dozens.