Bright

Earlier this week, the wife & I watched Bright, on Netflix, which we’d been awaiting since seeing trailers months ago. Initial reviews panned the movie, with some saying that it was the worst movie of 2017. They were wrong – we enjoyed it very much. Its reminiscent of the venerable sci-fantasy RPG Shadowrun. Reviewers, who seem to have no other frame of reference, keep comparing it to Lord of the Rings, but that’s not really a comparison I would make. LotR was very much classic high-fantasy. Bright, on the other hand, is a police drama/urban fantasy mashup. If it were more cyberpunk it could very well be a Shadowrun movie in much the same way that the Underworld series of movies homage aspects of White Wolf’s World of Darkness games.

The movie teams together two police officers – a black male, played by Will Smith and an orc male played by Joel Edgerton – in an equal-opportunity act to show that the authorities in Los Angeles aren’t as prejudiced against orcs as everyone knows them to be, and indeed, like how everyone else in LA, and maybe the world, are. This leads to a complaint that mainstream reviewers keep making that states that the fantasy races in Bright are metaphors for actual human races, and that their interactions are analogies for race relations. I know that in modern game design, its considered bad form to do this, but I don’t personally have a problem with it as a reference point.