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| “ | I want to do good, Mom. I do. | „ |
| ~ Brightburn. |
| “ | Take the world! | „ |
| ~ Brightburn figuring out what the alien spaceship was saying to him in his native extraterrestrial dialect - his most famous quote. |
Brandon Breyer, otherwise better known as Brightburn, is the titular main protagonist of the 2019 superhero horror film Brightburn.
He is, in a reversal of the typical Superman story, an extraterrestrial who is sent to Earth with the sinister intentions of taking it over for his race that sent him for this mission. Brandon ends up crash landing in the titular town of Brightburn, Kansas, where he is adopted by a couple who were unable to have children.
He was portrayed by Jackson A. Dunn, who also portrayed 12-year old Scott Lang/Ant-Man in Avengers: Endgame.
Biography[]
The alien baby that would become Brightburn arrived on Earth within a meteor that crash-landed near the home of a couple named Tori and Kyle Breyer in 2006. As the farm couple cannot conceive a child, they adopted the child as one of their own and named him Brandon, oblivious to the alien's dark nature. They also salvaged the remains of the meteor around that time, which turned out to be an alien ship.
As Brandon got older, he started to develop his abilities such as realizing he had superhuman strength. After attempting to return to the ship he arrived in, Brandon's mannerisms start to darken, making his adoptive parents conclude that something was wrong with him.
Tori later find drawings that depict disturbing imagery. As he got older, Brandon developed a crush on one of his classmates named Caitlyn and he goes to her house and stalks her. Upon discovering that their chickens had been massacred and implicating Brandon as being responsible for it, Brandon began to be ostracized by his fellow classmates for being a creepy stalker. In a trust exercise, Caitlyn initially refuses to catch Brandon on the grounds of seeing him as a disturbed pervert.
This culminates in him breaking her hand and he is then suspended for two days. Once more, Brandon tries to return to his spaceship and repeats the words "take the world" in his extraterrestrial language. It's implied that Brandon was sent by an imperialistic and evil alien race that destroys planets and eradicates peaceful races.
Brandon goes to see Caitlyn again only to realize that he was denied the opportunity by her mother. Angered, Brandon murders her mother at a diner. After her attempts at counseling her nephew failed, Merilee threatens to call the police to handle the situation only to be on the receiving end of these threats by Brandon. Her husband Noah later tries to inform his parents only to be gruesomely murdered in his car by the alien boy.
Realizing what he had done, Kyle takes his adoptive son into the woods and shoots him in the back of the head while he is distracted and as an attempt to get rid of him. Unfortunately, Brandon is revealed to be immune to bullets, and he kills his adoptive father with his laser vision. Tori finds multiple drawings of the murders Brandon had committed and calls the police. When the police arrive, they are brutally murdered by the villain.
Tori manages to get to the spaceship, and she takes part of it to act as a shiv rationalizing that it must be her son's weakness. Embracing her son, Brandon picks up on what she attempted to do with a scrap of metal, and he takes her high into the Earth's atmosphere and drops her to her death. He also causes a plane wreck as a means of covering up his crimes. There were no survivors.
This concludes with Brandon going on a murderous campaign and slaughtering numerous people worldwide and leveling cities. He was last seen alongside his dead parents looking innocent.
Soon afterwards, Brandon begins his worldwide rampage, which got the attention of the public and the media, which gave him the nickname "Brightburn", after he was last seen in Brightburn, Kansas. Brandon, now named Brightburn, was seen causing massive destruction in certain places, as well as leaving behind a strange symbol on a field at a farm in Grand Island, Nebraska. The incidents that Brightburn had caused also got the attention of Big T, a local conspiracy theorist, who came to believe that all super-powered beings are a threat. On his latest Youtube video on his channel, he tells everyone who are watching that those beings, including Brightburn, the superhero The Crimson Bolt, and those who are half-monster, are all out there waiting to "Eat our f*cking breakfast!"(meaning; to kill all humans). Big T then urges all of humanity to take action against them.
Because of Brightburn's actions, this might have presumably caused everyone, including every government in every country, to begin hunting down and exterminate any being who are born with superpowers and who are of monster activity.
Personality[]
When he was a child, Brandon, despite being socially awkward, was a prodigious, quiet and nice boy. However, when he discovered his super abilities, his personality took a dramatic turn. He began to develop slowly a god complex, thinking himself superior to human beings. He also shows delusional tendencies, claiming he wants to do good, thinking that humans are evil by nature despite him commiting evil actions by choice, showcasing his hypocrisy. Brandon developed a crush on a classmate named Caitlyn but the fact he stalked her, so far he entered her room during the night, shows it is just perversion. Brandon is also extremely vengeful, shown when he broke Caitlyn's arm when she refused to help him in school because she knew he stalked her or murdered her mother for not wanting Brandon to have contact with Caitlyn. In the end, Brandon has become a sociopathic madman, lacking empathy, faking emotions when it suits him and with an absence of remorse, as well as developing a misanthropic nature.
Despite all of this, it is implied that Brandon' descent into villainy was partially influenced by his alien genetics. Also, the moment when he discovered the alien's ship, he walked to the farm like a somnambule and screamed in a loud voice with his eyes closed that he must take over this world, which strongly implies he was brainwashed by the ship (or by the extension, his species). However, it is debatable if he was completely brainwashed or if he was just influenced by the message and decided willingly to become evil. It is also possible that he truly cared about his parents, hiding his true nature in their presence and acting normally with them and attacked them only because they tried to kill him in the first place (though even this is debatable considering he killed them without hesitation or remorse), albeit because at this point, they know Brandon was too dangerous to be left alive.
Powers and Abilities[]
Brandon is an incredibly powerful alien entity (who goes by Brightburn), with a multitude of potent, unstoppable and extremely lethal superhuman/supernatural powers and abilities:
Powers[]
- Superhuman Durability: Brandon is immune to most physical harm, with the only thing that can harm him being the alien metal his ship made of. He discovered this by sticking his hand into the rotating blade of a lawnmower, crushing the blade in the process. When his father attempted to shoot him, the bullet only just bounced off his skin. His adoptive father was also unable to move him in the slightest when he was angry, and Brandon's body is also capable of supporting the weight of a 4x4 he was lifting. According to his adoptive father, Brandon has never fallen ill or been injured in his lifetime. This would mean his immune system is extremely advanced than those of the human race, rendering him immune to almost all forms of harm on Earth.
- Acceleration Immunity: Brandon is immune to the many effects of rapid acceleration, including air resistance, the inability to breathe, dynamic shock resulting from contact with objects at high speed, and so on. On several occasions when the police arrived at his adopted home, Brandon rapidly accelerated in the direction of the officers, without suffering any of the aforementioned side effects.
- Aerial Adaptation: Brandon is able to survive and adapt to extremely high or low atmospheric pressure (without becoming disoriented or deprived of his normal breathing capacity), as well as high wind friction; this is accompanied by an innate immunity to vertigo and/or fear of heights. Because at the end of the film, when his adoptive mother tried to kill him, Brandon flew to 10,000 feet without any problems; later, as a matter of fact, just afterwards, a plane seems to have crashed into the Breyer farm, implying that Brandon shot down this plane by flying into it at 20,000 feet.
- Superhuman Strength: Brandon possesses immense superhuman strength, being able to lift objects as heavy and large as a pick-up truck and crush stone and metal almost instantly with his hands. Combined with his immense speed, Brandon can move so quickly that impacting a human results in them being utterly obliterated. Later, during the closing credits, Brandon is seen single-handedly demolishing a gigantic building.
- Superhuman Speed: Brandon can move at superhuman speeds, making him lethal and practically unstoppable. His mobility is enough for him to move behind someone from several feet away in mere seconds without making a sound and almost seem to be in multiple places at once.
- Superhuman Agility: Brandon possesses abnormal amounts of agility, allowing him to move with inhuman precision wether on the ground or in flight. He notably was able to effortlessly cling to a corner of a ceiling while hiding from his uncle.
- Superhuman Mind: Brandon's mind is good and powerful enough to keep up with his own high-speed movements and strength.
- Superhuman Intelligence: Brandon possesses superhuman intelligence, being one of the top 1% academic performers in the country, with science and mathematics being his main areas of knowledge and expertise. As well as moving methodically to avoid detection and act with complete impunity in his city and on campus.
- Flight/Levitation: Brandon can levitate himself and fly through the air at superhuman speeds, being able to murder people violently whilst he is flying. He is also strong enough in flying to effortlessly fly far into the sky, well beyond the clouds.
- Heat Vision: Brandon can emit powerful beams of fiery energy from his eyes, which he can burn and cut through almost anything like a blowtorch. When he uses this power, his normal blue eyes turn into a smoldering red, which he can alternatively use as a form of intimidation.
- Telekinesis: Brandon displayed the ability to move objects around him seemingly without touching them, demonstrated through tearing a metal door he cut with his heat beams into half and causing a laptop to open by itself.
- Technopathy: Brandon can influence the workings of technology at will. Other than telepathic link with his ship (through which its programming imprinted his sinister purpose on the planet) and causing electronics to malfunctions, it's unknown whether he can warp machinery around him.
Abilities[]
- Intimidation: Brandon possesses instinctual skill in intimidation, notably causing several chickens at his farm to becoming distressed at his presence. He primarily utilizes his inhuman speed to assist in terrifying his victims as he stalks them.
- Stealth: Brandon's superhuman mobility, including his ability to fly, allow him to move silently and nearly invisibly to others. He uses this advantage to both hide from and stalk others with ease.
Weaknesses[]
- Brandon's Spaceship: The alien metal on the ship he was sent to Earth on was shown at one point to be able to hurt Brandon, cutting his hand on it at one point. The metal from the ship could potentially be used to kill him, which his adoptive mother nearly succeeded in doing, proving that Brandon isn't completely invicible.
Victims[]
- Twelve Chickens - Slaughtered by Brandon Breyer.
- Gary - Killed by Brandon Breyer off-screen.
- Erica Connor - Glass shard propelled into her eye, later disemboweled off-screen.
- Noah McNichol - Dropped from the sky in his car, the impact breaking his lower jaw.
- Kyle Breyer - Heat vision shot through his brain.
- Sheriff Deever - Tackled into column.
- Deputy Aryes - Continuously thrown and beaten against the ceiling and walls.
- Tori Breyer - Dropped from the sky.
- Two-hundred and eighty-six plane occupants - Killed when Brightburn forced a plane to crash.
- Total - 286
- Possibly any occupants of an office building he destroyed.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The concepts of Brightburn was explored in a 2017 DC comic, a Halloween special that had many short horror stories in an "else world" style - one of these stories had Superman re-imagined as an evil invader (named "Bump in the Night") - the short story even ends with the young Superman destroying the Kent farm and heading off to presumably destroy the rest of humanity, a striking similarity to how Brightburn ends (just like Brightburn the evil Superman of this story is a child (at least in appearance)).
- Because of Brightburn's jarring similarities with Superman, there were those who worried whether James Gunn will be sued for copyright violation by DC. Fortunately, he reassured that he had a good relationships with DC (the company had entrusted him to direct the upcoming film The Suicide Squad at the time of the film's development and Superman's well-known background has been used in so many stories that it became a generic origin story route).
- In a first class scene, David tells how some wasps place their young in a separate hive, forcing others to feed them. This is a first hint of his true nature.
- The director took inspiration from slashers such as John Carpenter's Halloween for the spooky and iconic look of his evil superhero. He told about that: "There was one image I couldn't get out of my head of filming a superhero the way Michael Myers was filmed - that shot of him from afar watching someone from a distance in silence, without moving. Then this image of him floating out the window came to mind. I knew if this picture was scary, if you could see this character with a cloak and a mask hovering across the window and being terrified of it, this movie might work."
- Brightburn's costume had to give the impression that it was made by himself with the means at hand, such as a blanket, shoe laces and strings. The costume designer imagined a mix between a superhero and a slasher character. She tried on up to 120 masks and capes before stopping at a model inspired by a wrestling mask with lacing up the front.
- The actor who played him, Jackson A. Dunn, told about him: "At the start of the film, Brandon is completely normal. He loves his family. His inability to bond with children his age probably makes him uncomfortable, but his intelligence is such that he prefers to talk with his family and adults in general. I could experience the changes he goes throughout the film and how different he is at the beginning and the end. It's weird, because there are some things I can tap into in my real life. But then a part of him kills people".
- An alternate ending originally planned for the film was going to show Caitlyn Connor building a cybernetic arm for herself, likely with the intentions to get revenge on Brightburn for what he did to her and her mother. This likely means that if a sequel gets made, Brightburn will possibly face Caitlyn as his archenemy.
- His logo is based on the sigil of God Hand from the anime/manga series Berserk.
External Links[]
- Brandon Breyer - Brightburn Wiki