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Bright was an excellent, if imperfect, film, that delivered on basically every expectation an audience member could have.

Crucially, Bright manages to be intriguing, both narratively and visually, with solid acting and excellent action sequences, balanced with suspense and intrigue. These are the things that make an action movie/cop drama function correctly, but there's a broader story to be told about Bright.

In the sea of sameness that is contemporary blockbuster Hollywood production, Bright, as well as Netflix and an established A-lister with only something to lose after flops like After Earth, took a serious risk in creating such a novel project. It does work as a good film, but we only know that in hindsight. At the time of its creation, this took serious ambition from everyone involved. We (mostly) all groaned at Ghostbusters 2016 and other remakes and reboots in recent memory, but studios don't want to bankroll a huge project unless it's an established franchise with a high probability of making its money back. Hollywood is, in other words, anti-risk, and Bright is basically composed entirely of risk. Even if you didn't like Bright, we need to be providing encouragement to filmmakers and studios to give projects like this a shot in the future, otherwise we might be watching yet more remakes.

The risks pay off. I've touched on the overarching things that make it a good movie, but more specifically, Bright manages to speak in a unique way about racial and religious divides in the United States and virtually everywhere else in the world, and while it's tackling the issue head-on, it's also doing it subtly. By this I mean that, although I tried to figure out what the writers intended the orcs and elves to represent, in terms of existing races or religions, I failed--they have aspects of existing ethnic and religious minorities, of course, but you cannot sincerely say the orcs or elves are stand-ins for real groups of people.

By disconnecting its moral payload from real-world politics, it allows viewers to examine issues in a relatively novel way, specifically by removing any preconceived notions about groups of people. I don't mind politics in my films, but I hate when a movie is trying to force feed me an ideology. Bright, as silly as this may sound, while explicitly confronting these issues, never feels particularly preachy. In a sense, Bright is succeeding at discussing humanity in the way that Star Trek has by using aliens. Simultaneously, I don't suspect that anyone will be offended by the message.

Despite that fairly positive opinion of the film's overarching moral narrative, it cannot be described as particularly humanistic. What we see in Bright is not that all "races" (species?) are actually good people, deep down, but they're basically all terrible, except for our protagonists, and to a degree, even one of them. The human cops are terrible, the elves are terrible, the orcs are terrible, the human civilians are terrible. It's very egalitarian in its cynicism towards all conscious life on earth, both real and fictional.

Stepping off the soap box for the moment, what could it do better? Well, in my opinion, it could use more breaks in some of its extended action sequences. Action sequences can go for a long, long time in this movie with only a minute or two between them.

I'd like to see more of Tikka and have her developed more. We never really get to know her, and she almost feels like Bright borrowed Leeloo from The Fifth Element. I'm not saying that they did, but in order to make her a unique character, they need to give her more dialogue and explain her motives better. This will probably be tackled in the sequel.

While I actually liked the set/location of the movie, with the except of a few very cool areas, it tends to all look rather similar, basically a plain and surprisingly realistic depiction of urban decay. In one way, this works to the film's advantage, because this isn't a "fantasy" world where orcs and elves are considered to be interesting to the people that live in it. This is all very mundane to them, and keeping the setting grounded in reality makes sense. However, it can all run together for the viewer, so we could use a little diversity in the location.

Overall, particularly since you've probably already paid to see Bright via your Netflix account, I would highly recommend for fans of cop dramas and action movies to see it. Fans of fantasy might stay on the fence, however--it's not really made for Lord of the Rings fans, for instance. I'm not advising those audiences not to watch it, I'm just saying that if you go into it looking for a magical adventure, you may come out disappointed. This is, more or less, a straightforward cop drama in an alternate reality, albeit with a heavy dose of religious symbolism thrown in near the end to make the scale more epic.

So Bright works on a couple of levels: as a basic movie that audiences in general will find interesting, entertaining and well-made, and as a beacon of hope for big-budget movie production going forward, that perhaps filmmakers are not totally lacking in creativity and guts, or at least, not yet.