And so we have the first failed comic-book movie of the season. I really wanted to like Green Lantern, but it’s such a glossy mess — a sprawling, CGI-riddled live-action cartoon that’s plenty colorful but lacks any depth or substance and takes way too many lazy narrative shortcuts.
I can’t tell you how many times during this movie I thought to myself “they’re doing it wrong.”
The expository voice-over that explains the universe as split into 3,600 sectors, each with its own intergalactic policeman/woman/alien/something that all form the Green Lantern Corps? Why bring out the Corps so soon or even at all? Couldn’t we just learn about those emerald space cops along with our cocky test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) AFTER he gets the power ring from that dying purple Green Lantern who looks like a pruned Kelsey Grammer? (Yes, I know that’s actually Abin Sur, played by Temuera Morrison aka Jango Fett from “Attack of the Clones,” but who knew?) It’d be nice to feel like we’re actually going on this interstellar journey WITH Hal, thereby becoming more invested in both his character and the wonderment that comes with his discovery.
And for an inaugural villain, why START such a franchise with such a mighty, almost biblical villain like Parallax, a ginormous yellowish cloud that’s the embodiment of fear itself and devours lives on a planetary scale? Isn’t that kind of a tall order for a Green Lantern who’s not only the first human in this intergalactic Corps but also the least experienced?
And why throw in such a weak-sauce villain as Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), a nerdish introvert recruited to perform an autopsy on Abin Sur’s body, only to get infected with some Parallax stuff from the corpse and turn into a mind-reading telekinetic whose head mushrooms to the size of a fleshy, balding beach ball? Isn’t that just too ridiculous, even for a comic-book movie?
Had I done this flick (and the very thought of that is sign enough this is a bad movie) I’d have gone the more traditional origin route and dedicate the early part of the film to Hal as a kid. That way you build up to a pivotal turning point in the hero’s life — in this case when young Hal witnesses his self-described fearless pilot dad die in a plane crash and then grows up to overcompensate against fear with reckless, even self-destructive behavior because, either way, he ends up like the old man he admires. At the very least it would better explain why Abin’s mighty ring “chooses” Hal in the first place. But instead we just get a clumsy flashback.
All these and other narrative missteps just leave more room to showcase such spectacularly underwhelming special effects with the Green Lantern Corps. Therefore Reynolds has to play a 2-D man-child in a 3-D spectacle that’s much more interested in flavorless eye-candy (read: merchandising) than any credible hero’s journey as we’ve seen in Batman Begins, Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie and even the summer’s best comic-book movie (at least so far) Thor. Which really makes me wonder if Lantern director Martin Campbell, a guy responsible for such an icy cool James Bond flick like Casino Royale, slept-walked through this whole enterprise.
I really don’t blame Reynolds or any of the other actors for such a poor outing. (Mark Strong as the hard-edged Sinestro especially does as fine a job as he can with such lackluster material.) No, the film’s failure lies squarely with its screenplay-by-committee. The screenplay or at least story should have included DC Entertainment’s chief creative officer Geoff Johns in the mix. (He’s just a co-producer.) Johns has written scads of quality Green Lantern comics (including a solid origin story just several years ago) as well as chipped in for the recent Green Lantern: Emerald Knights direct-to-video animated movie, not to mention a few live-action superhero narratives for Smallville. That Johns did not have more (any?) or a narrative voice in this is a downright travesty.
Of course, you have to wonder if the powers that be behind this film really care about the source material at all when they apparently don’t even acknowledge in the credits such Green Lantern creators as Martin Nodell and Bill Finger, who crafted the Golden Age version from the 1940s, or John Broome and Gil Kane, who created the modern Silver Age version favored for the film.
So, no, Green Lantern isn’t DC’s big-screen answer to Marvel Studios’ much-better Iron Man. Rather, Green Lantern is just like one of Reynolds’ power-ring constructs — nowhere near as imaginative as it could be and mostly fleeting if not outright forgettable.
2 out of 5 power rings