Neither a spectacular disaster nor any kind of a good time, Green Lantern is an ugly film that reeks of compromise and committee thinking. I have rarely seen a safer picture. Confronted by galaxy-spanning adventure and homebound secret-identity capering – opportunities for raw weirdness and sneaky fun of the highest order – the makers of this film have made a product that never lifts itself up, never whispers a word into our ear about what makes Green Lantern a cool idea. It makes me wonder if anyone involved was ever “wowed” by the work they were doing. Green Lantern seems instead to be an amalgam of the surest choices made under constrained circumstances, to meet presumed requirements. It gets the job done, after a fashion; there’s a Green Lantern movie now. But boy, that doesn’t seem to be much to get excited about any more.
The story, for those unfamiliar, finds Hal Jordan blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Green Lantern. It would have taken someone with a real set of balls to give us anything other than Origin Story, Version XVIII, for this project, but those balls are not swinging on this one. If you’ve seen any film between Spider-Man and Iron Man, you will spend most of Green Lantern twenty minutes ahead of the characters. I’d also argue that in Green Lantern‘s case, the de rigueur insistence upon telling us how Hal got his magic glowing ring is actually working against the film’s ability to find a general audience: telling us how strange all this is will only make people notice it faster. He’s a superhero with a ring who can make energy projections with his mind. Jeez, skip the essay and just have Green Lantern fight something, will ya?
Green Lantern is directed by Martin Campbell, a workman director who delivers a superhero film utterly devoid of flavour. Flavour is substantially important in these cases: think of the chilly thunder of Batman Begins, or the pop-rocks fizz of Thor. On paper, there may be no such thing as a really good superhero story, but the entries that have risen above the others are the ones given particular dimension, and whimsy of spirit, by their directors. Campbell is not batting in that echelon, nor, I think, even claiming to be able to. He was hired to do a job, and does it as he’s done the ones before. He leaves opportunity after opportunity on the table as he busies himself with delivering the labourious machinations of his overstuffed plot.
The best example occurs early in the film. Hal Jordan, fresh out of failure school, pops by his brother’s house for a bit of family downtime. After a ham-handed chat with his cherubic nephew, Hal wanders out into the street and is immediately snatched up by a glowing orb of green energy, which drags him to his green-ringed destiny. The emphasis here is on the word immediately. Whatever emotional breath we might have drawn in Hal’s vulnerable state, spent with the people who know him best, is never given the chance to exhale. The plot grabs him – again, literally – so quickly that the entire sequence with the family might just as well never have happened.
Hal finds himself on the planet Oa in a neon-green CGI space-suit. Here, at least, is a beautiful idea, beautifully executed. Green Lantern’s costume, an extension of his ring’s ability to construct objects and weapons, pulses and breathes with the power of will that Hal, like all of the Green Lanterns, is channelling. The effect varies wildly in execution, but nonetheless, there’s a quantifiable “gee whiz, cool!” factor to the look and feel of the Corps that really kicks into high gear in the film’s final act, when Green Lantern finally gets to start fighting some super-baddies. For about ten or fifteen minutes, you can smell what a Green Lantern movie should have been like.
But getting there is hard. The film is over-laden with plotlines, even at a scant running time of an hour and forty-five minutes. The chief offender is creepy doctor Hector Hammond and his transformation into a supervillain; the whole throughline is unnecessary and does not serve the story in any useful way. Peter Sarsgaard, nominally a fairly inconsequential actor, brings surprising investment to the role, but Green Lantern has already settled on the giant glowing ball of space-snot called Parallax as its principal villain and plot driver. The berserk and increasingly diabolical Hammond, for any richness that Sarsgaard brings, is just a needless distraction.
As Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds sends his punches flying as hard as he can, albeit under extremely limited performance opportunities. I appreciate the fact that he came to play, and that he gives his scenes more than what’s on the page, which is more than can be said for a lot of the cast and crew. Blake Lively, too, is a surprisingly likable Carol Ferris – or maybe it’s just that she’s so skull-scaldingly hot. If the filmmakers want my moviebucks for any proposed sequel, they need to think seriously about advancing Carol to the Star Sapphire portion of her career.
But hold up a second, on that last point. The people behind Green Lantern seem so certain that this is the first strike in a long and successful franchise that they even have the Star Sapphire logo emblazoned on Carol’s fighter helmet. There are call-outs to the future throughout the movie, and whole scenes and plot points that exist for no reason other than that they pay off a larger Green Lantern movie to be made later. The people who made this film should consider – as should all filmmakers, everywhere, on every project – what it would be like if they were not guaranteed a raft of sequels just for having shown up with a comic book movie? What is it about this story that makes it worth telling? If the film weren’t franchise-baiting, how would it have treated Hector Hammond, or Carol, or the quantifiably unsupportable “stinger” featuring Sinestro going yellow, mid-way through the end credits?
If you only had this Green Lantern story to tell, right now, how would you tell it? These questions would have yielded a better movie.
I enjoyed Green Lantern, and I disagree that this is a safe picture.
The critics and general public failed to recognize Speed Racer as a live-action cartoon, and they have failed again. If you took Green Lantern’s story exactly as is and 2d animated it and released it among the other Green Lantern DVDs that have come out, I don’t think the fans would have said a word against it. People expect the cheese and ridiculousness that can come when you put a comic book franchise into a medium that is also flat. There’s a comfort in the familiar there.
But when you get to something like the Fantastic Four films and now Green Lantern, and Thor (I’ll get to that one) there’s a new problem. Now you’ve got space travel, space aliens, capes, metal masks, gods, and monsters. The Fantastic Four films were live action cartoons and borderline if not outright childrens films, and I appreciated what they were doing there, but I just didn’t think they did it well. They didn’t have a good director, they didn’t follow through with the effects or set pieces (I think in Fantastic Four the biggest set piece working as a team was stopping carnage that the Thing himself created) and in the sequel they even shied away from something even more over the top (Galactus as a cloud instead of a world eating monster).
Green Lantern for me does what Fantastic Four wanted. It’s a live action cartoon in full force, which is why an asshat like Reynolds fits right in, and why Peter Sarsgaard rocks in this thing. It’s why the character designs stayed pretty much true to their source, why the uniforms are polished up and not worried about dignity. In no way shape or form does Green Lantern ever go out of its way to make you think it’s cool. In fact it’s frequently self-deprecating, maybe too much so if anything. But maybe that’s lack of faith in the audience to get what it’s doing.
The story sticks closely to the superhero archetype which after Thor seems like a good idea, and knows the basics of what it needs to get done: Have a character with actual talent and flaws it has to balance out/weild rather than betray for success, and actual stakes. In this sense yes Green Lantern is safe.
What isn’t safe is asking the public to stay along as the Green Lanterns use of his weapon gets goofier and goofier. Clouding a helicopter in a race car that drives around a green track to safety? Sudden over the top tanks, flamethrowers, giant fists and the like? All ridiculous, cartoony, goofy, hilarious. This film knows the Green Lantern’s power is pretty silly and runs with it rather than tries to dress it up in something modern, cool, dark. A serious comic book movie would cook up big green swords with intricate semitar blades, or sharp claws.
Tonally Green Lantern combines the Superman films, Rodriguez’s sense of action in Spy Kids, Last Starfighter, and the A-Team. And thank christ the camera is mostly steady. No dark twisted dutch angles, no sweeping circular camera movements… for all these big weird green weapons it doesn’t look like a fucking video game like Thor does.
So I’ll divert from there back to attacking Thor. I wish Thor was like this. I thought it might have been. Thor doesn’t know what it wants. It wants to be goofy and cheeky, but it also wants to fit into the grander picture Marvel has for itself, which is exactly what is wrong with this Avengers campaign. They’re twisting different sized feet into the same shoe.. Tony Stark’s shoe.
Green Lantern has the audacity to have an interstellar eternal force powered by the evil of yellow to attach earth only to be outsmarted by a pseudo Top Gun inspired dickhead, and Thor… saves half a dozen people in a small town from a robot it can beat in 10 seconds because it kissed Natalie Portman.
Thor relies and fails on its need to have you believe Thor and Portman could fall in love. Green Lantern knows its female lead is kind of impossibly hot for her place, and doesn’t insist on otherwise or rely on it. Thor’s Loki has to be goofy enough to fit in the over-the-top Asgard as well as inevitably be suitable as a villain in the Avengers film. Green Lantern’s Sarsgaard is wonderfully mutated in the campy way that would fit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman Returns, or admittedly, Batman Forever, however I don’t really mind that one.
So all in all, for this long rant, I’m buying what Green Lantern is selling, I wish more comic book movies would have the balls to revisit and apply their camp nature when its with a property that warrants it as Green Lantern does.
Aside for Dave from Filmrot:
I promised him a definition of guilty pleasure. I generally reject the term because I don’t feel guilt about anything I like. I love the Room. I’m not watching it on its own terms, but I think it’s entertaining because the people in it are entertaining, and there is just ENOUGH craft in the film to weave together something you can actually watch for 2 hours.
But more clearly I think of music when I think of guilty pleasures. I dig Lady Gaga, Spice Girls, Aqua and some other weird bubblegum music. I also dig a lot of power metal. I am fully aware that Stratovarius sing about eagles flying free and have album covers with a dolphin diving through an infinity symbol. They may not know that’s cheesy, but I think it fits the music they are making, the music gets me pumped, entertained, and the marriage of that imagery lyrics and music is appropriate. I don’t think their song “Eagleheart” would be improved by having some deep truthful lyrics about life. So those cheesy power metal bands are something I would never consider a guilty pleasure.
The only reason they are ever “guilty” is because other people have decided they’re not cool or something to be ashamed of. And I say, let’s hunt and kill those people.
All this said, this isn’t like.. one of the best comic book movies. Or even something that may make even my top 20. But its’ definitely already underrated, and it’s definitely already become one of those movies that some fanboys who haven’t seen it have declared is unacceptable to like.
Sorry, I thought the chief criticism here was that it was predictable and boring. That seems to me to be unacceptable in any medium, cartoon or otherwise.
I will divert to the old “its not what its about, its how its about it” line. The framework is typical action/comic fare, but how it goes about it works for me and was anything but boring.
Goon, I appreciate the thoughts but can’t agree with the analysis. First of all it’s an if/then argument – Green Lantern isn’t a cartoon, it’s a live action movie, and must be treated as such.
Further, I find the film utterly devoid of charm or interest, both of which I found in Thor in spades. We don’t have to agree on that point, but I’ll stand by my judgment.
Perhaps I erred in choosing the word “cool” to describe what Green Lantern needs to be, but the film needs to be thrilling, as do all adventure stories by dint of their genre. Green Lantern never thrilled me. Even the musical score is a glib pastiche of what superhero scores are supposed to sound like, rather than any of the kind of invention that has defined the genre. Thumbs down.
“Green Lantern isn’t a cartoon, it’s a live action movie, and must be treated as such.”
I just can’t agree with this line whatsoever. Speed Racer, Spy Kids, Sky High, and plenty of other PG/PG-13 movies I feel have done a good job being live action cartoons, and I apprecaite what they’re doing. I think Green Lantern just has this yoke of expecations to be more than a cartoon because 30somethings and older have this attachment to it, if nobody had heard of Green Lantern before and this thing just came out of the blue, I think a lot more people would have been on board or seen it immediately as more-or-less a childrens film rather than something else that they wish it was instead because of either nostalgia or attachment.
I hope one day if they keep moving down the line of lower tier superheroes they make a Flash or Booster Gold movie and its even more cartoony than this.
Maybe I’m not understanding your meaning then. I like Speed Racer and Spy Kids quite a lot, but I don’t watch them and think in my head “this is actually a cartoon even though it’s live action, and therefore the rules are different.” I just watch them as they are, and enjoy them as they are.
My meaning is that every movie for me is it’s own world, and things that are silly and unacceptable in one movie in another might be fine for me, because its relative to the world that movie creates. I don’t think this is as good as Speed Racer whatsoever, but I think they are similar in that a lot of the really goofy stuff that would be eye rollingly awful in another film is here, met with a smile.
Which is why I guess I attack Thor’s goofiness more, because I don’t think it successfully ever created its own world, it’s stuck between whatever Branagh wants to carve for itself, and what it thrust upon him by the overarching Avengers tie-ins. I feel this Avengers thing is fucking over too many movies and I remain cynical about Captain America because of the ongoing track record.
At this point I think the Incredible Hulk reboot looks a lot better because it got in before the tie-ins started getting more force-fed, clumsy, and ugly.
“I feel this Avengers thing is over too many movies and I remain cynical about Captain America because of the ongoing track record.”
This was a point I was (clumsily) trying to make within the Substream’s Comic Book Debate. Does this help make a viable lasting (emphasis on lasting) genre more than half the films are some sort of wide franchise?
I’m kind of on Goon’s side with this; at least I found Lantern to be embracing its comic-book roots and going for cheesy camp instead of any deep message or seriousness. Bill Watterson once said, “You can dress it up with all the glamor and violence you want and call it a ‘graphic novel,’ but comic books are still really, really stupid,” and while Lantern isn’t that harsh toward its subject, I think it acknowledges the sillyness of its source material, and that, to me, was its greatest strength.
I didn’t have a problem with the plot-lines, which is your standard origin-story boiler-plate, and I didn’t think it was boring or any more predictable than this summer’s other super-hero movies–you know the hero’s going to get powers, have a love interest, and will fight a baddie (usually of comparable powers). And, actually, I thought the tone it took was surprising. Unlike the Marvel movies, which treat their heroes with utter reverence and try to impart some half-assed social commentary (really, does anyone take the whole X-Men as a metaphor for civil/gay rights seriously?), Lantern doesn’t pretend it’s anything more than bright colors, bizarre aliens, and hot humans. It intentionally aimed low and somehow still went over the heads of its viewers.
“You can dress it up with all the glamor and violence you want and call it a ‘graphic novel,’ but comic books are still really, really stupid,”
Congrats Nat, you’ve made Gamble really really mad by pissing in his cornflakes this morning!
“It intentionally aimed low and somehow still went over the heads of its viewers.”
I think some people walked away from Lantern feeling like their intelligence was insulted by something working at a near kiddie level, when I think it approached the material this way for it’s own reasons, the greatest being that Green Lantern… doesn’t warrant a very serious and epic treatment.
But if you tell this to a 30something year old with a Green Lantern t-shirt, and I’m not sure a lot of them can handle it. If you approach this material as if the story is inherently stupid, some fans think you’re calling THEM stupid too, when they are not at all mutually exclusive.
I think the real nitpicks of this film for me are a lot of the things that happen out of the blue. Jordan leaves his home BAM swept away by this orb of green light. it’s like they accidentally cut 45 seconds of some shot following the orb from far away hunting down the would-be-hero. It’s awkward.
I mean when I think of Green Lantern… the oath ALONE basically dictates the right tone to take. Can you imagine a dead serious film where the lead character reads that thing out loud? And its not like Wolverines yellow tights, that oath is not something any adaptation could shy away from. It was better to embrace the camp.
@Kurt If Gamble wants to takes arms against the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, it’s his battle to lose. I don’t quite share Watterson’s pessimism, but when you’re talking comic books, the occasional reality check is definitely in order. (And if he wants to take me to task for that, remember that I have the Almirall clan at my command.)
BTW screenwriter Todd Alcott has some good thoughts on Lantern as well here.
Watterson is also a coke whore and addicted to transvestite hookers woth questionable oral hygiene.
“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.”
-Bill Watterson
@ Kurt Congrats Nat, you’ve made Gamble really really mad by pissing in his cornflakes this morning!
Mmmm…so Gamble actually eats! And there I was thinking Gamble was a sub-human, who lived off inflicting cruel, mis-spelt horrid comments on others.
“Matt Gamble can gargle my balls.”
–Bill Watterson
So the content of Green Lantern – for example, the oath – is so inherently goofy that even if a scene presents it straight, the scene must by definition actually be intended as cartoonish?
Gargling Bill Watterson’s balls is a punishment?
Only if they’re Calvinballs.
“So the content of Green Lantern – for example, the oath – is so inherently goofy that even if a scene presents it straight, the scene must by definition actually be intended as cartoonish?”
The oath is so goofy the only way to present it is within a goofy context, both within the scene and preferably also in the larger context in the film. Which I think this film does. In the movie it sets you up for the oath with the other stuff he says being even goofier, to surround it with goofy jokes so you can take the oath just. serious. enough.
OK, thanks – can’t go along with you on that one but at least I see where you’re coming from now.