Film Review: Green Lantern

Tomorrow is the big day: DC Entertainment’s much-hyped blockbuster film comes out, much to the timid cheers of fans all across the country who have been waiting for DC to expand their film library. We’ve seen 6 Batman films and 5 Superman films, but for the first time DC is giving a legit a tremendous effort into a superhero some people may not be familiar with: Green Lantern.

Of course, I’m a fan who has been reading Green Lantern for some time now.

So, with the knowledge of the Corps imbedded into my memory, take a look after the cut for some thoughts on the film for it’s release tomorrow. For your convenience, the review is spoiler-free in terms of the plot.

A few months ago, I took my girlfriend to see the film Thor. She’s not a big comic book person herself, mainly putting up with my hobby because she’s a decent enough human being. I’ve found she’ll even occasionally dip her toe into the insane pool that is the world of comics if I give a good enough argument. So we saw the movie and both enjoyed it quite a bit, and what I found is that after seeing the movie she showed a much stronger interest in the character and his history than she had before when I previously had recommended Thor to her based on her love of mythology. What Thor showed was that, through a successful film, a new audience can be reached – the audience Marvel wanted to reach – and the door to comic books can be opened. (I myself was so excited by the film I went out and bought a $125 omnibus of Walt Simonson material that I can’t wait to fully read and share.)

Unfortunately, I can not in any way say that the experience is repeated with the viewing of Green Lantern we attended. Not only was her lack of interest apparent during the film, but I personally left the film so incredibly disappointed that I could barely muster up the excitement to go home and read my comics.

Green Lantern, at it’s core, is an origin story. This is both the origin of the Green Lantern Corps to the unfamiliar as well as the rise, fall, and triumph of Hal Jordan, the “greatest Green Lantern.” A hotshot pilot who lives in the shadow of his father’s death, Jordan is inducted into the Corps after the greatest evil the universe has ever known is unleashed, leaving a vicious trail of fear as it consumes planets on it’s trek to destroy the beings that imprisoned it in the first place. Now, against all odds and sensibility, it’s up to this one man – this singular human – to triumph over his greatest fears and get the courage to defeat Parallax and save Earth.

From this description, the film sounds like it could be fairly interesting even if you’re not a comic book fan. I suppose on some levels, it is; it’s always entertaining to see variations on the famous “Heroes Journey”. The problem here is that as much as this film wants to show us this new variation of the tale, it becomes so mixed up in the chaotic mess that is itself that you’re left watching the “Implausible Journey” in this chaotic form of science fiction, as opposed to that of a hero’s.

The film’s greatest failure is a simple one: there is just no reason to care about Hal Jordan other than the fact that he is Hal Jordan. The film assumes that because he is the central character and you might have a tertiary knowledge of him that you will care if he fails or succeeds, but while Hal is certainly not portrayed as some kind of irredeemable character or someone fairly unlikable, he is instead displayed as some kind of luck magnet that great things just happen to. For all intents and purposes, Hal’s time with the Corps is very minimalized only to the basic elements, if only to show that there actually is more than one Green Lantern. Given that whenever Hal spends onscreen time with another Lantern member (and believe me, that’s about 20% of the movie – if even that) the point of the scene is to prove how inadequate and inept he is, it’s honestly a shock that Hal is able to “win” at the end as opposed to the gradual development of “zero” to “hero”. So when Hal becomes the eventual victor you know he will become (because of course the good guys win), there’s no real reason to cheer; he just won because that’s what he’s supposed to do, not because he earned it. It’s just so… convenient.

There is one bit in the film that’s particularly relevant to this notion. The film tells you that there has only been one person able to defeat Parallax before, and that was Abin Sur. It also informs you that the only reason he was able to do this was due to years of training and being the best the Lantern Corps had to offer. The film in no short terms lets you know that he is the only one capable of this feat, and a full squad of Lanterns can not do this task, squad leader Sinestro included. So since this isn’t Star Wars and you’re not being thrown a lot of hoopla about destiny, fate, or magic, how are we supposed to believe that a man who flunks his training and “quits” being a Lantern can do what only Abin Sur could? I’m not mincing words with hyperbole either: Hal flat out says after his training montage that he quits, because he can’t be Abin Sur. So sure, he’s his successor; sure, the ring “sees something in him.” But the film goes out of it’s way to show that Jordan is a quitter not that worthy of the ring more than it shows that he is, and his eventual triumph is left hallow because of how implausible it is that a man failing to make a simple construct an hour earlier into the film can suddenly overcome every obstacle. The movie does a good job of setting up some elements to pay off later, with Kilowog’s training all being foreshadow for what is to come, but Jordan fails all of that rather spectacularly due to his impetuance. Why is the real thing – the more difficult thing – that much easier to overcome?

When we look at the larger cast, things only become more messy. While I say there is no real reason to care about Hal Jordan, there is certainly less reason to care about any other character. We’ve certainly heard boasts of the inclusion of Kilowog, Tomar-Re, and Sinestro, but these three characters in particular are barely a blip on the radar for the film. They show up to tell Hal that he’s no good or that he needs to be better, and then they leave until the end of the movie when they’re needed to pat him on the back. While I can look at the screen and recognize who they are supposed to be or smile when Kilowog says “poozer,” there’s no discernible reason to care about them in the film because they’re nothing but tools, or – at worst – road bumps on the journey Hal takes. It’s not about the Corps here; this is the Hal Jordan show through and through, and just like in every road movie you’ve ever seen our hero gets to meet some colorful characters along the way to his final destination. That’s it. And that’s awful.

Hector Hammond might also be the single worst developed villain of all time in a comic book-based feature. In the book (I’ll cite Geoff Johns’ Secret Origin here), Hammond is a rich and somewhat suave character whose turn into the villainous Hammond is unfortunate and based on his intense jealousy of cool-kid Hal, who has all the flash and debonaire that Hammond lacks. In the film, however, Hammond is introduced a good portion after the film has started in a terribly edited sequence in which he, for no immediately apparent reason, is called by Amanda Waller to look at the body of a recently discovered alien after Jordan gets the ring. Hammond is now a nebbish individual, who is compared so frequently to Hal Jordan just because. It is hinted that they had a relationship at one point, but outside of battles of Hammond vs. Green Lantern, Jordan has but one brief Hammond encounter. The film tries to play up the parallel nature of the characters as one rises to heroism and one falls to villainy – even to the point that they blatantly say this in a scene – but it’s simply to the effect that “Hammond is just so evil, look at him!” We have no real reason to care that Hammond becomes evil because we never knew that Hammond had the capacity to be good; he just shows up when it’s time to show “dark side.” He’s in the film to be a foil, but he is never elaborated upon beyond that.

Then there is Parallax, the film’s “Big Bad.” In the comic, Parallax is an evil bug-like entity that is the literal embodiment of fear able to possess people in order to help it on it’s quest to terrorize the galaxy. Parallax in the context of the film has a much different origin, but is essentially a gelatinous octopus-like cloud with an over-sized head. It is definitely less scary than an evil giant space bug. It kind of boggles the mind as to why a giant cosmic entity needs to be reduced to a cloud (as I’m sure many have pointed out, a similar thing happened to Galactus in the Fantastic Four film) in order to make it more feasible to put on film, and to no shorter extent feels like a downgrade. While I suppose I’ll admit that if a giant head came up to me and started screaming at me and bearing it’s teeth, I’d get a little bit nervous, but while watching it in the movie you can’t help but note it looks absolutely ridiculous every single time it appears on screen. Within the context of the film Parallax’s existence makes sense (as opposed to his comic origin), but it never reaches the highs in the spreading of fear that his counterpart does and, given how easily it seems Jordan defeated him, it kind of boggles the mind that other Lanterns couldn’t.

Another thing that’s rather unfortunate is that the film spends too much time developing the potential of a sequel that it spends essentially no time actually focusing on the current story. It’s all set-up, hoping the viewer will come back for the pay-off in a year or three. Obviously the idea here is that, true to form of the comics, certain events take place that allow Hal to go be a space cop and come up against very specific villains of various colors and sizes. There is plenty of premonition here as well, including some not-so-subtle teases as to what the second film (if it ever gets made) will be about. However, in doing so the film has failed to establish itself beyond just an origin in the way other films have (like Batman Begins, for example, which is an origin film but also a crime/thriller/revenge-flick). I don’t think it’s necessarily a spoiler that a character named Sinestro will eventually become a villain, but outside of showing how that’s a possibility here the film does not give you any reason to want to come back for a second round due to how underdeveloped his role is. The relationship between Hal and Sinestro is simply, a) “Hey. I don’t like you.” followed by b) “Hey. Good job, pal.” There is no dynamic element, no real struggle or mentor/trainee relationship between the two. Sinestro is just an angry Corps leader who scoffs, which is such an incredible waste both to the character and Mark Strong (who can put on quite a performance when allowed to).

So yes, Sinestro will be the villain of your next film, but only because his name is Sinestro and he looks angry. Him terrorizing Korugar into obedience and his status as a fantastic member of the Corps are nonexistent and irrelevant; Sinestro will be bad because we need someone to be bad.

The reason the film ultimately fails is that the people behind it are far too trusting of the audience. A film lives and dies by it’s capacity to make an audience care about the events taking place during the span of the story. The only way to do so is to give moments of character development between the various important members of the cast. Even for this film’s biggest star, we’re only given heavy handed and often times cringe worthy bits of dialogue in order to try and convey the importance of Hal’s growth into a hero. Since the big deal of the film is “will” versus “fear”, most of the spoken word of the film is geared to really drive this point home with constant uses of the words “will” and “fear”. While I believe the average non-comic reading viewer won’t leave the film caring much about Hal Jordan, I will say this: the film will teach you that he has great courage, and that he can overcome great fear. The reason you will learn this is because that bit of dialogue is repeated so frequently throughout the film you could probably set your watch to it. Various phrases become mantras for characters to spout off in key sequences to remind Hal, “hey, you’ve gotta go be a space cop for a little while!” The audience gets it, but the film doesn’t recognize this and decides that a mention of fear is necessary for the film to have every fifteen minutes or so to the point it feels like the script is talking down the viewer. But I guess if you forget what Hal has the capacity to overcome, you might forget why you’ve come to the movie.

The cast, for the most part, does the best with what they’re given. For all intents and purposes Ryan Reynolds is Hal Jordan here. He takes the character elements that exist for the film counterpart of the comic and plays them up; the fear and doubt are visible, and Reynolds displays enough of that cocky flyboy attitude to still ring true to the books. He even throws in some of his standard Reynolds charm to help make his portrayal more affable, and it works for the most part. While there are certainly a fair deal of differences in the interpretation, and Reynolds’ Jordan is definitively weaker (emotion-wise) than the comic, you can chalk that up to how most comic characters go through vast changes when coming to the big screen. Mark Strong plays a wonderful albeit brief Sinestro, embodying the character in full make-up and delivering his lines powerfully (the film really could’ve been 2 hours of Mark Strong giving speeches and I would’ve been ok with that). Tomar-Re and Kilowog are voiced appropriately by Geoffrey Rush and Michael Clarke Duncan respectively, with Tomar-Re playing out better than Kilowog, and the Green Lantern Corps as it is in the film is an all around good looking bunch.

Outside of the Corps, the cast begins to falter. Peter Sarsgaard certainly plays up the nebbish and outcast Hector Hammond, but it’s a great disservice to the character’s comic book counterpart. It’s also done in such a way that you can’t even remotely feel bad for the character when he turns, and you are simply left beholden of his great evil. It’s nothing like, say, Willem Defoe’s Norman Osborn, who starts the film as a father figure and grows incredibly dark rather quickly to the brink of very visible madness (despite what you might think of the Spider-Man films); Sarsgaard just screams and cries a lot. Blake Lively leads the “human” cast in a rather uninspired form, with her Carol Ferris lacking the firey passion of her comic book counterpart and acting more as sleek and professional eye candy/motivator for Reynolds than a character of her own. Following her, performances by Tim Robbins and Angela Bassett leave much to be desired, with Bassett especially lacking in the presence established by the powerful and intimidating Amanda Waller.

The last high selling point of the film is its grandiose use of visual effects and computer-generated imagery. The CGI for the film is both a positive and a negative, truth be told. On the one hand, many of the film’s CGI elements are really quite impressive. Oa is visually diverse and intense, and when you get to actually see Parallax for what he is – a giant mass of souls he has consumed, collected and fighting to survive within his blobby-self – it’s actually fairly intriguing how much work was put in to making this come to life. However, at the same time the CGI takes away from the film a great deal as it relies very heavily on green screen, which in turn takes the viewer out of the film. So much of the film just looks unreal to the point that it takes you out of the experience of watching the movie, and it becomes less about “Wow, this is huge,” and becomes more of “Wow, Ryan Reynolds looks absolutely ridiculous mixed in with the rest of this cast right now.” While I hate to be the only one on the planet clamoring for a return to real sets and puppets/mechanical creature features (think Yoda in the original trilogy), it would be nice to see a film that tricks the eye to the point that it’s not so obvious where the line is drawn.

Furthermore, the idea to make the Green Lantern suits CGI end up being a detriment on screen. While the suit in film looks better than it does in still imagery, and the familiar comic suit pattern can be seen, the suits also look ingrained into the character’s body to a ridiculous extent. The character’s wear v-necked collars, yet those collars somehow never move from being positively glued to the character’s throat in a tremendously awkward way. While the idea here is to use the costume to show the willpower of Character X on display, it also stands to reason that a more realistic suit could’ve been designed for the less action involved scenes so that more focus could be given to the plot and wandering eyes like mine don’t end up focusing on the odd minutiae quirks of why it looks like Reynolds’ or Strong’s suit is choking them (if I had a collar on that tight, it’d probably be a turtleneck and it would probably be inducing my gag reflex).

I suppose the most telling element of the film is simply the audience. I saw it in Boston, MA, on the same night that the Bruins were playing for the Stanley Cup (Go Bruins!). Given how much of a sports town Boston is, it’s notable to say that if people attending an advance screening of a comic book film most seem unfamiliar with on a night when the town’s hockey team is battling for the Stanley Cup, the expectations must be pretty high (we’re talking people wearing Bruins’ jerseys leading “Let’s go, Bru-ins!” chants before the film starts, who are choosing to watch this over the game). Yet throughout the film, one audience member decided he needed to shout slurs at the screen, another shouted something about how Reynolds should’ve stuck to Deadpool, several people around me (including self-pronounced comic fans) were yawning throughout, and the two people in front of me just didn’t seem to understand what was going on at all. While DC assuredly wants to make a movie the fans will see, I think it says something that not only was I (the fan) disappointed, but the rest of the audience – those who are potential comic book buyers based on their enjoyment of the film – seem bored, most leaving before the mid-credits tease for a sequel (and those still on their way out when it started choosing to just keep walking out). Things are boding well here.

While this entire review has been to the tune of “this movie is awful,” I did not hate the movie. I’m incredibly disappointed in it in the same way a parent is disappointed when a child comes home with a D+ on their report card, but I didn’t downright hate it. I would recommend seeing it in theaters even, if only for the visual effects of the film. The movie isn’t so bad it’s not entertaining at all, but there are still several exciting moments in the movie that are assuredly made better by watching on the big screen. The 3D for the film is also not the worst 3D I’ve ever seen, and I’m an adamant anti-3D ranter. And hey, if you happen to already be a fan of the Green Lantern Corps, you’ll notice quite a few familiar faces (including one two-second cameo of a currently dead Lantern that made me sit up with a big smile on my face). There are things to enjoy; they just happen to be deeply buried in a million things to dislike. For every good element of the film, there is more than enough bad in it to remind you that this is not the film you wanted it to be, and it might be time for DC to just admit they’re only really trying with the Batman movies.

To cut an incredibly long story short, the best I can come up with for a summation is this: this film is Green Lantern, but it is not Green Lantern Corps. If you attend the movie, you will get a flawed story of Hal Jordan, the first human to be inducted into an intergalactic brotherhood of space cops. However, beyond that, you’re not going to get much else. This is the Ryan Reynolds show through and through, with other characters and actors existing mostly as set pieces in the same way that an office might have an interesting painting hanging on the wall. If you’re the world’s biggest Ryan Reynolds fan, you’re in for an avid treat. If, however, you were hoping for a film that both speaks true to it’s origins as a comic book as well as manages to co-exist prosperously in a new medium, you’re better of either seeing Thor (again) or getting a time machine for the eventual sequel (which will hopefully – hopefully – understand what the first film did wrong and try a bit harder).

Final Verdict: 2.0 – Watch on Netflix InstaWatch some rainy day in a year or so*

*I am aware in the review I said to go see it in theaters, but … well, I’m sure you get it