Hopefully the long weekend gave you and your family plenty of time to relax and consume hours of Netflix, in between celebrating your respective holiday traditions. If you happened to watch Netflix’s Bright, you might want to not read this post as to avoid the spoilers ahead. You also might have had the same musings Chance the Rapper did, some of which he tweeted Tuesday evening to discuss with his fellow viewers. Musings like, “Wondering how you guys are feeling about the lynched ork in #Brightmovie.” Says Chance about the film, “I found the way they tried to illustrate americas racism through the mythical creatures to be a little shallow.” In another tweet Chance expounds on the idea, explaining, “I always feel a lil cheated when I see allegorical racism in movies cause that racism usually stems from human emotion or tolerance but not by law or systems the way it is in real life.”
Of course, Chance isn’t the only person still mulling over the streaming network’s original action film, which follows two LAPD officers through a fantastical L.A. populated with fairies, orcs, and sundry other mythical beings, with which the movie attempts to create a parallel to real-life racism. As Vulture’s own Emily Yoshida wrote in her review, “Dungeons and Dragons–style fantasy, with its species-specific stats and attributes, is a pretty suspect well to draw from if you’re trying to pull off some kind of modern-day race relations metaphor.” When asked by one of his followers if Bright could potentially be enjoyed merely as a fantasy-action flick without parsing out the specific meaning of its content, Chance concludes that it’s hard to “look at it that way,” especially when star Will Smith declares during an early scene, “Fairy lives don’t matter.”
