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Bright: Netflix exclusive Will Smith urban fantasy movie

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I wonder if in universe the nazis allied with elves, thus creating the "aryan" myth. Elves pretty much hit all the aryan checkmarks.

WWII apparently was a thing and I wonder which races sided with the Allies or the Axis.
 
Sabertooth said:
I wonder if in universe the nazis allied with elves, thus creating the "aryan" myth. Elves pretty much hit all the aryan checkmarks.

WWII apparently was a thing and I wonder which races sided with the Allies or the Axis.
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I don't think Nazis would accept any of them, seeing them as the definition of sub-human
 
The more I think about that video the more I'm convinced that they just fucked the math up and didn't realize that 2000 BC was 4,000 years ago not 2,000 years ago.
 
Cambion said:
I don't think Nazis would accept any of them, seeing them as the definition of sub-human
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Elves are pretty much perfect in all aspects. I think the Nazis would see them as aryans.

Besides would you waste such potential super soldiers?
 
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Sabertooth said:
Elves are pretty much perfect in all aspects. I think the Nazis would see them as aryans.

Besides would you waste such potential super soldiers?
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Would Nazis find them useful, yes, but they'd still see them as sub-human and Elves don't strike me as the type to put up with second class treatment for long
 
Sabertooth said:
I wonder if in universe the nazis allied with elves, thus creating the "aryan" myth. Elves pretty much hit all the aryan checkmarks.

WWII apparently was a thing and I wonder which races sided with the Allies or the Axis.
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Nah "obviously" the Orks sided with the Axis to help stop the "Jewish Elven world conspiracy" :rolleyes:
 
The video still makes me scratch my head.

So the world has had magic for thousands of years. Other races exist in the world for thousands of years. A battle against a Dark Lord occurred... But the broad strokes of history still happened, up to an including the founding of the US and Mexico, the slave trade, the fact that Mexicans/Latinos emigrate to the US, "white" is still equated with power in the US, World War II still happened...

It just feels weird for modernity to have played out the same with such a different starting point.
 
Red_Five said:
So the world has had magic for thousands of years. Other races exist in the world for thousands of years. A battle against a Dark Lord occurred... But the broad strokes of history still happened, up to an including the founding of the US and Mexico, the slave trade, the fact that Mexicans/Latinos emigrate to the US, "white" is still equated with power in the US, World War II still happened...
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The whole "we still talk about what happen 2000 year" would make more sense if they made it more clearly a fantasy setting that evolve to modernity rather than just "our earth + magic" where you have those thousands years wars and just nothing of note going for centuries
 
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Redem said:
The whole "we still talk about what happen 2000 year" would make more sense if they made it more clearly a fantasy setting that evolve to modernity rather than just "our earth + magic" where you have those thousands years wars and just nothing of note going for centuries
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Well in places like Yugoslavia you can get situations where Village A hates Village B next door because 800 years earlier they let the Ottomans through or someshit. Grudges can last a looong time if they are mutual and self-reinforcing. The USA tends to struggle with this concept because we're literally younger than some of these grudges, and conveniently genocided the original occupants of our lands so there's no one left to throw a hissy fit about us having taken the Alsace Lorraine or whatever. Of course these kind of ethno-geographic grudges are a very different kind of thing from something like American race issues.
 
The ham-handed handling of racism in this movie makes me think of Zootopia as a contrast. That film used the fantastic setting to thoroughly mix up the racial implications and social roles between groups of characters, so that it could experiment with the results without any of it directly corresponding to any real-world group.
 
Roadie said:
The ham-handed handling of racism in this movie makes me think of Zootopia as a contrast. That film used the fantastic setting to thoroughly mix up the racial implications and social roles between groups of characters, so that it could experiment with the results without any of it directly corresponding to any real-world group.
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The genius thing about Zootopia is that rather than just be a cloying retread of the 60s through talking animal lens or something, its very much about stereotypes and bigotry in the 21st century not past battles. Hence the protagonist triumphs against the bigotry she faced only to commit an unthinking act of bigotry against the deuteragonist. Because things are intersectional, you can be both target and perpetrator of bigotry at the same time, the same traits and stereotypes can put you on a pedestal in one situation and demonize you in the next, because stereotypes can have some truth to them but not be the whole story or the universal reality.
 
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Sequel in the works
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    • I'm not sure if this is official, but I'll throw it here anyway. Although we already knew that there will be a sequel.

    edit: found the official video . And yes they already directly refer to Shadowrun at the end of the trailer
    Also a slightly different interpretation of the film that I found in on SB from AkumaOuja.
    I would make the hesitant suggestion that the fantasy races aren't supposed to be direct racial analogues, on the basis that the majority of them we see combine stereotypes in various ways from multiple racial groups as well as having semi-unique spins on various other stereotypes. And the movie makes a very pointed effort to inform us that "traditional" human racial stereotypes exist, what with literally opening with an African-American group heckling/encouraging [not the best with social situations myself, not a party guy] Will Smith's character combined with a line relating to the effect that they're dragging property values down/making it difficult to sell his house.

    Orc gang culture is stratified in a way more closely resembling certain cartel branches, with "ghetto"-esque lower numbers aping inner city African-americans, while their higher up combines traits of more tradition focused Native American organizations [rare as those tend to be] with the overtones of both Italian Mafia and Yakuza. Throw in a shade of "White Guilt" as justification via the "2000 years ago your ancestors did X", Death Metal taking the place of ethnic music of all kinds, and you get a hodgepodge that doesn't really work as a straight analogue. You can take it as a straight African-American analogue but I feel like that's dishonest to an extent as well as missing the point. I'd comment on the elves more but it's tricky since we see so little of them beyond the immediate stereotypes, unlike the orcs, who we see both the stereotypes and the reality to compare and contrast.

    It seems to me to be inaccurate to reduce it to a "African-American racism is wrong" issue when it seems to be a relatively well thought out, thought mildly clumsy, attempt at illustrating that racism in general is morally wrong, while not letting it drag down and drown out the rest of the movie. I'd go so far as to suggest that the casting of an African-American man to fill a role traditionally filled by a white character [the racist partner] helps to do that by providing a contrast to help give a quick smack to the old "racial hivemind" undertones that sometimes slip through while also helping to illustrate that the orcs aren't supposed to be African-American, they're orcs. With their own nuances and the like. They operate on different rules and social norms and while some are similar in a way it's like Knights and Samurai, sometimes cultures develop in parallel. In the setting of Bright, you wouldn't walk into an Orc neighborhood and treat their subculture like you would the subculture in an African American one, or an Asian-American one, or an Elven one, or an Irish Burrough, or a Centaur whatever. They're their own distinct entities.

    I rather like it. It adds a surrealist touch that helps distance things just enough to help people project their own experiences and relate regardless of their race and help them to hopefully think things over somewhat without alienating them by being too heavily grounded in reality and catching itself on personal hangups regarding the issue, while not making you choke on it. A good movie works on multiple levels, and I think Bright does that. It works as a buddy cop flick, a gentle thought provoker on the topic of racism, a solid action flick, and an alright fantasy movie.

    Please don't lynch me.
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    I will note that this is not my opinion, and I do not fully agree with this opinion
     
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    • "Throw in a shade of "White Guilt" as justification via the "2000 years ago your ancestors did X""

    lolokay.jpg
     
    all fictions said:
    "Throw in a shade of "White Guilt" as justification via the "2000 years ago your ancestors did X""

    lolokay.jpg
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    Not the best term for describing the concept of "The guilt of ancestors" I agree. I honestly do not know the right term. Historical guilt ?

    Especially this term is in quotes, which for me points to either an ironic or indirect use. Not that it makes it much better, but still.
     
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    Ivar said:
    Not the best term for describing the concept of "The guilt of ancestors" I agree. I honestly do not know the right term. Historical guilt ?

    Especially this term is in quotes, which for me points to either an ironic or indirect use. Not that it makes it much better, but still.
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    Collective guilt.

    No, what gets me is that they use "white guilt" even though this movie has Orcs as a despised minority due to this collective guilt, so the analogy falls apart right away when you realize that white people are neither a minority, nor restricted from jobs due to discrimination (where is the historical first white officer?), and definitely not living in ghettos.

    On Discord, the analogy I made was with the treatment of Jews on account of being "Christ-killers", which fit the "2,000 years ago" thing and the fact that the savior figure was himself of the ethnicity persecuted. Comparing it with white guilt is simply ridiculous.
     
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    all fictions said:
    Collective guilt.

    No, what gets me is that they use "white guilt" even though this movie has Orcs as a despised minority due to this collective guilt, so hlthe analogy falls apart right away when you realize that white people are neither a minority, nor restricted from jobs due to discrimination (where is the historical first white officer?), and definitely not living in ghettos.

    On Discord, the analogy I made was with the treatment of Jews on account of being "Christ-killers", which fit the "2,000 years ago" thing and the fact that the savior figure was himself of the ethnicity persecuted. Comparing it with white guilt is simply ridiculous.
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    As I said, I think that this term here (and in general) is invalid and undermines the message. I just can not edit other people's posts to separate the blunt parts from the rest of the message. I will however say that your comparison with Jews makes more sense.
     
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    Languages
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    • all fictions said:
    Article:
    The language of the elves, which would come to be called Övüsi, was insular and had resisted "contamination"—from the point of view of the elves—from other languages on Earth. The Elvish language is written in its own unique script. On the other hand, the orcish language, later called Bodzvokhan, would have a lot of borrowings from Russian due to the orcs' [fabricated] history. Most came originally from the Pripet Marshes, before coming to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a while, the orcs' language was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, before they emigrated and reclaimed their own much older script.

    Some notes about the languages and bits of worldbuilding. Notably, we now know why there were battles between orcs and humand in Russia, which was only obliquely referenced in the movie by one of the cops.
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    So Elves are French.

    Must be why they go evil so often.


    Aaaaaaaaanyways, I watched this movie last night. It was technically a movie. A movie that should have got whoever wrote it shot.

    Repeatedly.

    Honestly, where the fuck do I start with this pile of shit? Is it with the characters, where we get Will Smith: All Asshole All The Time, Cringe Comedy Writing On Two Feet, or Milla Jovovich Played This Character Better Over A Decade Ago, And Still Had More Dialogue?

    Is it with the writing, which includes endless scenes about how everybody hates black people orcs, and you should know that they do, and we're going to keep telling you all about how much they hate them, are we getting through to you here? maybe we should drive it in a little further; and such brilliant scenes as the debriefing, which would have actually made a decent joke if it was like 25% as long; or the fact that the half of the dialogue which wasn't exposition was shit action movie cliches?

    Maybe it's the fact that if they'd cut about 20 minutes out of the movie (between the endless scenes in the station, hamhandedly expositing at the screen, and some very mediocre gags) and got somebody in to redo literally all the writing that involved characters talking to each other, the movie might actually have been decent. Fuck's sake, I actually liked the fact that they didn't have to go out of their way to explain every little thing about magic or the setting, because once you got past all the exposition that was already there (looking at you, cliche interrogation scene) most things were readily inferrable.

    Either way, the movie we have was a massive fucking waste of my time and their money.
     
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    Salty said:
    (looking at you, cliche interrogation scene)
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    I like the part where the magfeds get that smelly hobo to vomit out forced exposition about the rules behind wand-touching and Brights, only to have the later scene of Will Smith worriedly telling all the corrupt cops not to fucking touch the wand convey that a thousand times more organically.
     
    ZerbanDaGreat said:
    I like the part where the magfeds get that smelly hobo to vomit out forced exposition about the rules behind wand-touching and Brights, only to have the later scene of Will Smith worriedly telling all the corrupt cops not to fucking touch the wand convey that a thousand times more organically.
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    That's one of the things I think the film did right. The corrupt cop scene was so bad that anyone with enough intelligence to understand the implications was probably going to turn off the film in disgust at that point. Therefore you have to make sure to spell it out in the godawful interrogation scene as well! :D

    Seriously, somebody stop that director. Crime against art indeed.
     
    Mutton said:
    That's one of the things I think the film did right. The corrupt cop scene was so bad that anyone with enough intelligence to understand the implications was probably going to turn off the film in disgust at that point. Therefore you have to make sure to spell it out in the godawful interrogation scene as well! :D

    Seriously, somebody stop that director. Crime against art indeed.
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    David Ayer has now officially proven that he cannot be trusted with movies, with all indications to the contrary having been fortunate accidents on his part.
     
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