The movie had everything. Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan was a great choice. The mythology of the Green Lantern Corps is intact. And even the much-criticized digital costumes don’t look so bad after a while. And even with all of this, Green Lantern is still bad.
It’s not incredibly suck-ass bad, but there is a point where you’re just sitting in your seat, being fed a lot of eye candy, but no story to wash it down with. There’s enough good stuff visually in Green Lantern to keep the movie watchable, and some stuff that’s really enjoyable, but the film screws up where it makes the most difference – in the drama and the characters. The problem for the most part is in a not-well-thought script, and a director who doesn’t know the story.
One of the biggest problems with Green Lantern is that it’s not particularly engaging. The Green Lantern universe, the Guardians, Oa, the green energy of willpower, the yellow energy of fear, the Corps, hundreds of alien species, blah, blah, and blah is explained – but that’s it. There’s no real character development or anything in the movie. We’re told in the opening that the Guardians are ancient, powerful immortals… and that’s it. There’s nothing else to them really. We see the Corps in big crowd shots, and we’re told what the Corps is and what they can do, but we only get to see them doing anything once in the whole movie – and in that scene, a ton of them are killed off by the evil Parallax, which sort of destroys everything we were told.
When you’re told that the Green Lantern Corps is a powerful peacekeeping force… Well, it doesn’t help us to just show them getting their asses kicked.
Hal Jordan is another character that wasn’t developed properly. And he’s the MAIN freaking character! At the beginning, he’s shown as a hotshot pilot who is willing to destroy his own plane to win. That’s cool because it lets us know something about Hal’s character; he’s courageous as hell, but he’s a maverick, and a loose cannon. It even shows Hal’s weakness — a memory of his father’s death (who was a pilot as well). But the writers apparently decided that it was too time-consuming to build on this. They did the same crap with Thor.
Now, for reasons that make no sense at all, Hal quits the Green Lantern Corps as soon as he is inducted, and returns to Earth where he gets a whole series of pep talks about how important he is and how important courage, not the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome it, is. And instead of having Hal Jordan be forced to take action and overcome his own fears and learn a lesson, the script has Carol Ferris (Blake Lively) sit him down and just tell him this.
Apparently, the lesson here is that if the sex is good enough, women can give men the confidence needed to save the world. Okay… That’s not entirely untrue, now that we think about it.
This is too bad because the film has a great cast. Reynolds works as Hal Jordan, because he seems to have a similar (cocky, faithless, a proper level of self-confidence) attitude, and it would have been nice to have a script that actually let him do stuff. Blake Lively is fine as Carol Ferris, although she only exists to berate Hal Jordan and then give him pep talks. Mark Strong is awesome as Sinestro, but he’s mostly relegated to talking. Thankfully his talking, in a series of speeches, is excellent. We do get to see a little of what Sinestro can do during Hal Jordan’s training, but seeing him beat the crap out of a guy who just got his ring doesn’t say much for Sinestro’s status as a warrior.
It should be noted Hal’s training lasted all of about eleven minutes. Now, if that’s all the training that we got… Well, you should thank your deity of choice that none of us ever got chosen as a Lantern. Just saying.
As far as the villains go, Peter Sarsgaard was great as Hector Hammond, a lame scientist who gets infected with a piece of Parallax and becomes the Elephant Man with psychic powers. We will say that almost every one of his scenes was fantastic. The film needed more moments like that. Parallax is a stupid-looking cloud with a giant head in the middle of it. Wow, way to go character designers.
Look, we could sit here all afternoon and bash the movie, but we won’t. It didn’t have enough good points to make us watch it more than once, but it wasn’t so bad that we regret paying to see it. But if you haven’t seen it yet, just wait for the video release.
