Small Details You Missed In Brightburn

The marketing for Brightburn has largely revolved around two attributes: the involvement of James Gunn (who is actually not the director of the film, but rather serves as producer, while his cousins Mark and Brian wrote the script for David Yarovesky to direct) and the underlying high concept of the film. As the now meme-famous Letterboxd description puts it, Brightburn answers the question "What if Superman was an evil little boy?"

"Non-copyright-infringing Superman goes evil" stories are a dime a dozen in comics, but they usually wait until he's actually grown up and acting as Superman. Brightburn, however, focuses on a young version of not-quite-Superman as he goes about his murderous business. With nearly 100 years of Superman stories and decades of stories starring Superman archetypes, there's plenty of room for Brightburn to pay homage to other works. In that respect, at least, it didn't disappoint. From the requisite Superman references to nods to other Gunn properties, here are some small details from Brightburn that you might have missed. Spoilers ahead.

If there's a single visual most associated with Superman, it would almost undoubtedly be the cover to Action Comics #1: the first appearance of the Man of Steel. It's an indelible part of Superman's origin story and a powerfully striking visual all on its own. Before the superhero genre was crystallized as a concept, here was a man in a garish red and blue suit lifting a car over his head as terrified onlookers fled away from him. Superman, of course, would generally receive a much less terrified reaction from onlookers in the next nigh-century of his adventures.

Still, it's somewhat understandable that so many writers over the years have imagined a world in which that initial response of pure fear directed at a being capable of such destruction was the norm instead of a cool cover. Brightburn pays homage to the visual in a surprisingly subtle way. After his uncle Noah (Matt Jones) finds out about his violent tendencies, Brandon begins tormenting his family member as Noah drives away in his truck. After showing up again in his creepy mask after the truck breaks down, his uncle starts screaming as Brandon lifts the car up into the air off-camera. The filmmakers don't make it overly explicit, but it's undeniably a reference to Action Comics #1 — although in the source material, Superman didn't then smash the steering wheel into the driver's face until he was a bloody mess.

There's one more major iconic moment from Superman history that Brightburn subverts: Superman saving a plane. It's an endlessly repeated moment for the Man of Steel that appears again and again in nearly every visual adaptation he's had to date. There's good reason for that; it shows exactly the scale of problems that Superman is willing and able to handle. He can assist with a burning building, but there's firefighters for that. He can stop a criminal, but so can most other vigilantes. A crashing plane hurtling towards the ground, however? That's a job for Superman.

Brightburn prefers to turn this well-thought symbolism on its head in a cruel way. The end of the film sees Brandon drop his adopted mother to the ground from a high altitude. Freed from the last remnants of his humanity, he turns to see an airplane hurtling through the air towards him. The scene cuts to a demolished airplane that's destroyed the rest of the Breyer household, leaving Brandon the only obvious survivor. While Superman's act of saving a plane showcases that even in the most terrifying situation imaginable, a hero might arrive, Brightburn leaves us with nothing but wreckage and a destroyed family.

Even if you caught all the above references, you still might have missed some of the small details relating directly to the film. For starters, did you notice Brandon's wardrobe changing? Early on, his spaceship pulses with red light which seems to activate his more homicidal urges. After that moment, his wardrobe gains more splashes of red the more evil he becomes.

What starts with a red hood on a grey sweatshirt eventually leads to an almost entirely red soccer shirt. He quite literally goes from wearing shades of grey as someone who can still be redeemed to matching the blood he spills in the color he wears.  It's arguably most obvious in the scene when he attacks Erica (Becky Wahlstrom) in the diner. He sends a shard of glass into one of her eyes, and when she pulls it out, she can only see through a red tint. Brandon stays on the red side of her vision for nearly the entire scene, showcasing his thirst for blood.

While we're on the subject of Brandon's more disgusting urges, Erica's suffering doesn't end with the attack in the diner. As the audience, and Brandon's mother Tori (Elizabeth Banks), find out later in the film, the police can't find Erica's body for a reason. Brandon takes her back to the barn in order to perform a grotesque dissection, presumably to figure out what makes people work.

Her organs have been removed, and she's been nailed to the wall like a pinned butterfly or dissection specimen. It's actually a moment in the film that's set up fairly early on in a subtle way. On Brandon's dresser, he has an anatomical frog statue that's been partially opened up. Its presence in his room, alongside more mundane toys and clothes, implies that the alien sociopath has been thinking about what's inside people and animals for a lot longer than the movie explicitly suggests.

Rooker's cameo isn't the only connective tissue that Brightburn has to other James Gunn movies. During the Big T's video sermon, he brings up other monsters and urban legends that might be "working with" Brightburn to destroy America, including an aquatic creature, a woman who binds men with ropes, and others. Among the other creatures, one of the pictures show Rainn Wilson's Crimson Avenger superhero identity from Gunn's earlier film, Super. In addition, the diner that Brandon attacks midway through Brightburn is called Darbo's. In Super, the Crimson Avenger's real name is Frank Darbo, and he works as a short-order cook.

Brightburn could function as a pseudo-sequel to Super then, with Frank having gotten his life together enough to have franchised a restaurant with his name on it. Whether that means we're in for some sort of "secret sequel" along the lines of M. Night Shyamalan's Glass, only time, and Brightburn's box office, will tell.