Having never seen it before, and with its home video release yesterday, we bought Green Lantern and watched it for the first time.
I'm now wondering why the hell that seemed, at one point today, like a good idea.
I like Green Lantern. I like the mythology, I like the concept, and I even like Ryan Reynolds. But the entire thing was a hot mess, a gigantic, $200 million wasted opportunity.
It probably hurts any DC production that I hold the quality of new works up to the sterling example set by Bruce Timm and co. in their '90s animated works. But I'll touch briefly on the ways I feel the film failed and failed hard:
1. You're making a movie about Green Lantern...and you set 75% of it on Earth.
2. You have a vast, incredible, cosmic entity as your primary villain (which, first of all, Parallax right off the bat? Save something for the sequel, guys), and then shunt him off to the side for an uninteresting, cliched, poorly-written 'evil mirror Hal' analogue.
3. The Green Lantern Corps? Let's not concern ourselves with them...five minutes of introduction and training should be more than enough. What we need are more dull scenes set on Earth!
4. Oh, and characterizations for any of the Corps members? Not in the budget.
5. Good writing? You no can haz. Crappy narration and a lack of interesting story, that's what we have for you!
5b. The one good line in the film, at which both Phe and I justifiably laughed hard, was "I've seen you naked! You think I won’t recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones?"
6. Watch Green Lantern: First Flight. THAT'S how you do a Green Lantern movie. He's off Earth in five minutes and the rest of it is spent in sexy space combat with space cops and space villains and space...space. IT'S GREEN FREAKING LANTERN. If I want Earth-based stories, this is not where I'm looking. I don't care about Carol Ferris, I don't care about not-Seth Rogan as the best friend guy, I want some freaking space opera.
7. What wasted opportunity. Again, look at First Flight. That's a perfect example of how to use Hal, how to build relationships between him and the rest of the Corps members, how to give them actual uses and functions and interesting personalities. Their take on Sinestro was perfect. Here, Sinestro did nothing but glower at Hal for a couple of minutes and then casually finagle a yellow ring. Character? Pshaw, I saw!
8. Talk about your lack of climaxes. No one in the Corps, the professionals who've been doing this for years, though about routing Parallax close a sun? But Hal can! For, uh, some reason.
Missed, bungled, malformed, a wasted opportunity at every single turn. The whole thing. The *one* good thing, the *one* thing that showed cleverness and ingenuity, were the action sequences in which Lantern powers were used. In those brief instances, the film sparked to life a bit. Outside of that...nothin'.
Honestly, the best thing on the "Green Lantern" disc is the 7-minute preview of the new CGI 'Green Lantern: The Animated Series' coming to Cartoon Network. Don't know that I would have paid $25 for it, but it's definitely the only thing on the disc for which I would, in hindsight, actually pay money.
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