Bright (2017)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2017
	Director: David Ayer (Sabotage, Fury, Suicide Squad)
	Actors:  Will Smith (After Earth Men in Black 1-3), Joel Edgerton (The Thing, The Great Gatsby), Noomi Rapace (What happened to Monday?)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, Fantasy
	Conditions of visioning: 02.01.2018, VOD, 40" TV screen
Synopsis: In a Fantasy uchronic world, Orcs and Human and Elves and many other species live together, although with prejudice against some. Detective Daryl Ward (Smith) is assigned an Orc partner (Edgerton) for the first time in History, while magical events seem to re-surface.
Review: By quickly looking at the Netflix preview I though that movie was a remake of the 1988 Alien Nation featuring a Human / Alien cop duo. Will Smith's partner is in fact an Orc from Earth but the similarity is still there. This Fantasy Universe reminds in fact also of the TV-series The Shannara Chronicles, and one cannot say that it is not well constructed: hints on the background story between the different species are slowly distilled but are never the center of the story which helps making that World believable. If you pay attention you will find many details that also help with the credibility to the Universe, like a Centaurus cop shown for a second on screen. Leaving this Universe construction aside, I found that everything else in the movie is bad starting with the dialogs. They are so empty that to try and give them strength they have been filled with F**k and S**t words to the extreme, maybe 200 of the first and 50 of the second in the whole movie. Poor dialogs lead to poor performance by the actors supposed to deliver them. This performance is poorly filmed and edited: how many times do they end up in an enclosed space (room, car...) and discuss their friendship?? This is for me the third strike against David Ayer after Sabotage and Suicide Squad (Fury is long forgotten). And when the Action tries to get more scale, it is polluted by a poor soundtrack. The story is also extremely disappointing, starting some sub-plots that are then not followed, following a McGuffin that leads to nothing, and letting us hope for a grand finale that doesn't come. Instead, I got the bad feeling that the movie calls for a sequel, as so much energy and money has been wasted in building that Universe. Apparently the poor critics haven't discouraged Netflix from producing such sequel. This reminds me of a comment a friend of mine made about Tesla or Google's difficulties in mass-producing automobiles while other companies have been perfecting their craft in making them for 100 years. Is Netflix really able to compete with Hollywood in the field of movie-making? It certainly is for smaller productions (I remember Spectral) or series with a specific audience (Stranger Things) but is it for large audience blockbusters?
Rating: 2 /10