The original idea for this picture was to include Flash Magnus, one of the six Pillars of Harmony. However I’m an idiot, and misread Flash Sentry instead. The result has a much more different tone, since this is meant to set up Gallus and Flash Magnus as the young newbie and the weathered veteran trope, which “Bright” brandishes around with its two protagonists. But as the picture is right now it’s closer to a newbie and a guy that just got demoted because he was caught with the Captain’s sister. They should’ve gone with that one instead, at least it would’ve made the dynamic between the two characters a bit more palatable.
 
I have a lot of problems with “Bright”, and if I were to list them out the review would end up becoming an essay, and if you want an essay on this movie that touches most of my issues I’d recommend you to check out Lindsey Ellis’ video on the subject. No, I’m going to laser focus on the main and biggest issue I have with this movie, and that is how generic and boring it is. “Bright” doesn’t do anything interesting or new or even fun with its setting. Society set two thousand years into a fantasy land, where many fantasy races live in a society divided like ours, and we see this from the perspective of two cops, one is a human and the other is an orc. This is something we’ve seen in movies like “Alien Nation”, it’s not really new, but the key here is how far back this setting goes. It’s not something that happened within our decade, or our century, it’s literally millennia old. But the movie does nothing with this. We spend next to now time with any of these cultures or fantasy races, instead we learn that orcs are ghetto? (I think?) And that the LA Police isn’t great (thank you “Bright”, I wouldn’t have known otherwise).
 
It feels like they took a script that was just about cops in LA and did “find and replace” on some names and words, and slapped some fantasy elements that everybody knows about. As it is the movie is fine, if you really turn your brain off, and I mean turn it off completely, like don’t even think about anything the characters say or do as motivations change from scene to scene, like it’s a two hour long adaptation of a TV show nobody has seen before. Speaking of which, this was released on Netflix of all places. They already had a script. Why not giving this to someone else, disregard needing star power to sell your movie, and stretch it over an eight episode limited series? People will binge it and you’ll get much more needed time to develop motivations, do some world-building that goes beyond referencing The Alamo, and perhaps you could’ve ended with something memorable.
 
As it is “Bright” is a forgettable waste of time, being held together by spit and references to things that shouldn’t be should this society have existed for millennia. I’d forgive it if it was a “so bad it’s good” movie, or “so dumb is good” movie (like your Battleships, and your Transformers, and your Jem and the Holograms) but it commits the biggest sin of all. Being both bad, and boring.