It’s hard to come up with a sufficient way to express feelings about Green Lantern as a fan, because it doesn’t bear enough resemblance to the vast, gorgeously intricate space opera of a comic book title which spawned it. And it’s difficult to analyse it as a film in and of itself, given that the story has been watered down and sutured together from safe, consumable film tropes, so as not to alienate people who AREN’T fans, and aren’t familiar with the backstory. As such, Green Lantern pleases neither; film-goers will feel, rightly, that they’re being talked down to, and devotees of the Corps will be saddened that only about one fifth of the film is done the way they’d want it.
Green Lantern, as a series, focuses on the brash, arrogant Hal Jordan, a test pilot with father issues. When Abin Sur, an esteemed member of the Green Lantern Corps (a group of multi-racial intergalactic police, who harness willpower via power rings) perishes on earth, his ring seeks out a replacement. It finds Hal. To call the Green Lantern universe epic would be doing it a grave disservice; Green Lantern is, quite simply, the biggest comic milieu you can dip your feet into. The story arcs range from trite (though less so in recent years), to staggeringly well executed, and the cast of characters within the Lantern universe, whether they be Lanterns or the ordinary people that surround these superbeings, is breathtaking in it’s scope and grandeur.
The DC universe, it must be said, has some killer heroes, and when Christopher Nolan worked legitimate cinematic magic and rebooted the Batman franchise, Lantern looked hopeful. And it’s not a total loss; the cast work a treat, with Ryan Reynolds (mostly) doing justice to Hal Jordan. Blake Lively, of Gossip Girl fame, does a pretty solid job playing Carol Ferris, the daughter of Hal’s boss; she functions literally fifty percent better when she’s pissed at Hal, though. When the romance kicks in, she goes from gorgeous and convincing, to gorgeous and watery. Mark Strong is fantastic as Jordan’s mentor Sinestro, Tomar-Re is voiced by the unwaveringly reliable Geoffrey Rush, and Peter Sarsgaard breathes enough hateful, feeble life into Hector Hammond to make this bloated villain work.
The film suffers, however, on almost every other front; the script is unbelievably contrived and riddled with blatant creative compromises and missteps. The soundtrack is invasive almost to the point of breaking the fourth wall; when Hal sleeps in (because that’s what horny flyboys do, evidently) and rushes semi-clothed out of bed leaving a fling there alone, he runs to his car, and some generic frat boy rock starts up. This, apparently, is done to emphasise that he lives a ‘wild lifestyle’ and that he ‘rocks’. It also indicates that the executives in charge of the film think ‘kids like rock music’, failing to realise this makes them ‘mindless condescending pricks’.
In structure, it’s a lot like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer; good guys fumble around, bad guys get powerful, bad guy becomes planet-sized CGI monstrosity and almost gobbles planet, good guys triumph. It’s actually a quite remarkable representation of ones lunch trying to leave your body and engulf your lap as this film progresses, then slowly receding when the actors (who, as previously mentioned, do fine jobs in spite of what they’re working with) manage to haul the film back into shape before the credits roll. The real problem stems, however, from the mish-mash of events which make up the film. Parallax took decades to surface properly in the comic series, and when he did, it was inside Hal Jordan himself; here, Parallax is a generic bad guy/smoke monster from Lost, and, predictably, he’s dispatched by the end of the movie. It’s like the film was written by someone who’d skimmed the Wikipedia entry on Green Lantern; sure, it looks sort of like Green Lantern. And everything which takes place on OA, the planet where the Corps is based, works beautifully. But these sequences, when stitched together, comprise about a half hour of footage. The rest of the time, it’s all pouting, punching, explosions and waves of regret. The cast, and the corps, deserved better.
- Two stars
Source: The Vine
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