Screen to Scream: Brightburn and Irredeemable

Fans of Spider-Man may remember the advice his Uncle Ben gave the hero that shaped his crime-fighting career: With great power comes great responsibility. However, that philosophy often runs headlong into the old adage “Power corrupts . . . .” From our current political climate to the headlines plastered with authority figures falling from grace, we are all too familiar with the effects of power without responsibility. It’s then surprising that the genre superhero horror Brightburn or a similar idea took this long to see daylight. Many films like Hellboy and Swamp Thing have combined superheroics with the supernatural, but the film does explore a very frightening idea inherent in people with amazing powers who are suddenly tired of us.

Elseworld stories, featuring alternate takes on DC superheroes, has explored what would happen to Superman if he were raised somewhere else (communist Russia, for example). Brightburn, though, gets everything about the Superman mythos (the crash landing in Kansas, the discovery by parents willing to raise the discovered child as their own) and takes it to a much darker place. In the beginning of the movie, Brandon Breyer, the strange visitor from another planet, seems like a sweet-if-awkward boy turning 12. Not only is he going through puberty, but the ship that delivered him here, the ship he previously knew nothing about, is speaking to him in an alien language, basically telling him to conquer our world. Soon, what could once be attributed to teenage hormones devolves into full-blown sociopathic behavior as Brandon realizes there is nothing anyone could do to stop him from living out his brutal, blood-soaked fantasies. It’s a frightening idea, a Superman becoming not just evil, but one willing to use his abilities on the all-too-fragile human anatomy, but Brightburn is not the only story, or even the best one, that explores this idea.

Irredeemable features Superman-gone-bad the Plutonian and puts him in a world that has superheroes, but those heroes the Plutonian once fought alongside are still powerless to stop him. The Plutonian is also just as violent as Brandon, immolating people down to their skeletons with his heat vision, but he has also committed the wholesale destruction of cities and even nations, simply to lash out at a world that he believes has fundamentally wronged him. While it seems that Brightburn’s evil hero needed an alien spaceship to convince him to fully embrace his inner Armageddon bringer, Waid’s depiction of Plutonian is more nuanced, showing a hero who began his life in and out of foster homes, his foster parents rejecting him because they feared his abilities. Finally gaining the acceptance he long sought as a superhero, when people began to doubt him after a catastrophic mistake, he fully rejects them as he feels that he has been rejected, ultimately deciding to be the villain of a world that refuses to see him as a hero. Filling this world full of fully realized heroes and characters that would fit in either Marvel or DC’s superhero worlds, Waid presents a character study in the Plutonian of one both blessed and burdened by power, a true alien who can’t, despite his immense power, find what he really wants: to belong.