Director: Martin Campbell
Writer(s):
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim
Michael Goldenberg
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim
Cast:
Ryan Reynolds – Hal Jordan
Blake Lively – Carol Ferris
Peter Sarsgaard – Dr. Hector Hammond
Mark Strong – Thaal Sinestro
Angela Bassett – Dr. Amanda Waller
Preamble: One of DC’s more interesting characters, a superhero who can manifest his will as real world objects using a special ring, comes to the big screen with Ryan Reynolds starring.
Plot: an alien high council learns to harness willpower, the greatest power in the universe, and uses it to build not only a home planet (Oa) but a guild of intergalactic policemen. But one of the council’s own is driven mad by his attempt to harness the power of fear, and banished to a lost planet. When he escapes the prison the others have built to contain him there, he begins tearing a path through the galaxy. Eventually this path leads him to Earth, where a newly anointed Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) must quickly learn the ropes if he hopes to save his planet.
The Meat: This sounds like a pretty good setup for a cosmic superhero story, allowing for big action and alien interaction as Green Lantern learns about the other members of The Corps. Somewhere amidst the six screenwriters, and who knows how many rewrites, the screenplay loses all emotional impact. And the blame can’t solely be placed on the CG, which is good but overbearing in many places.
Ryan Reynolds is competent but forgettable as Hal Jordan, a hero who supposedly is given this honor because of his fearlessness, but who turns out to be a whiny sissy for much of the movie. Whereas ‘Iron Man’ embraced Tony Stark’s arrogance and showed his weaknesses without apologizing for who he was, apparently Warner Brothers thought it would be a good idea to turn ‘Green Lantern’ into a Lifetime movie for men – complete with under-cooked daddy issues. To top it off, any momentum in the action is routinely broken up by a serene romance between Reynolds and Blake Lively’s Carol Ferris that feels more like a brother/sister bond than anything remotely sexual. That lack of sexual tension is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the movie – nothing goes very far in either direction, and what we end up with is a middling snoozefest.
Take the secondary villain, Peter Sarsgaard’s Dr. Hank Hammond, who is powered by a small infection from Parallax’s power of fear. He becomes telepathic and telekinetic(and insane). But everything he does is confined to small gatherings on Earth (a dinner party, a laboratory). Remember the scale of the story’s setup, and the potential for a cosmic police chase? Completely ruined now. Instead of epic outer-space battles, we’re left with a movie focusing on Hammond’s problems with his father and Hal’s self-doubts and budding romance with Ferris. Meanwhile Parallax barrels through the galaxy murdering millions of alien life-forms offscreen. We only see Parallax truly in action when he rips the souls out of a few individuals, and by then it always feels like an afterthought.
No matter how much happens at once on screen, the amazing thing is that Green Lantern is never entertaining. Not once did the large group of people involved in its making decide what this movie was going to be about. Character arcs are meaningless, the alien designs don’t work, the humor is saccharine, and the threat never feels real or, more importantly, epic. There also is almost no time spent with Hal learning to use his powers, so the idea that he’s ready to confront Parallax is ludicrous. There’s nothing engaging here. If they do make a sequel, let’s hope there are more set pieces and the filmmakers have the self-restraint to use makeup for some of the aliens. That way maybe it won’t feel like a series of nicely rendered video game cut scenes. On the good side, the CG is well done in many places, and the movie does end in less than two hours which was a huge relief.
The Movie: 4/10
