Ryan McNeil
After reading scores of Green Lantern comic books in recent years, the character had started to pose a challenge to Superman for the title of “Hatter’s Favorite Hero”. Not that you’d guess that after watching this movie.
Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot. He’s the ace of Ferris Aircraft – a military contractor whose vice-president is Carol (Blake Lively), a woman who shares a history with Hal. Just in case you forget about that, the film will remind you about a dozen times. One night, Hal is drawn to a strange phenomenon. A spacecraft has crashed on the coastline, and some sort of glowing green power has pulled Hal to it against his will.
With his dying breath, the alien inside tells Hal that the ring – the source of the green glowing power – has chosen him because he is capable of great willpower. He is to take the ring, speak the oath, and become Earth’s protector as The Green Lantern. For the how’s and why’s of his newfound power, Hal is yanked into outer space to a distant planet called Oa. There he is taught how to wield the ring’s power and learns of the dangers facing earth. Too bad nobody thinks he’s up to the task.
Meanwhile back on earth, the dead alien is handed over to a scientist named Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) to examine. In doing so, he comes into contact with the force that killed it – a source of great fear called The Paralax. It affects him in the strangest ways – giving him telepathic and telekinetic powers. Like Hal Jordan, he seems overwhelmed by his newfound power, but unlike hal he does not seem to have the inner fortitude to get a handle on it. Doesn’t help that his power is pure evil either.
Thus it is up to newly minted Green Lantern Hal Jordan to save earth from the terrible power of Hector Hammond, minion of The Paralax.
As a fan of the comics, I was rather hopeful coming into this film. I’ve been drawn to the core of the story and know what the narrative can offer at its best – and cousin, this ain’t it. The movie stumbles over the character’s origins – which is not to say that I’m sick of origin stories. I actually think that where comic book films went wrong for so many years was skirting past where a hero came from, or misfiring on telling that tale.
No, where GREEN LANTERN goes wrong is in trying to show us too much of Hal Jordan’s back story. Hal being gunshy because he witnessed his father’s death really isn’t important in this chapter, nor is his relationship with his nephew. At this stage you can pay them lip-service, and hold back on a bit of personal past until the sequel. The whole notion of who The Green Corps are and what they can do is resource enough. Don’t make audiences wait to see that because you want to establish that Hal and carol have a past for the third time in the film.
Think it’s any co-incidence that the film seems to find a higher gear when Hal goes to Oa? What about the tease of possibilities when he comes back to Earth and negates certain catastrophe by building a virtual stunt car track. These are the chapters that audiences want to listen to – the hero learning what’s possible as we do and using it to save the day. Making audiences endure chapter after chapter of prologue, and then putting the brakes on the narrative to pause for character exposition is counter-productive.
What’s worse, is that with this type of property, a lot was riding on the look of it and the level of the effects. We have become an audience that prefers our heroes to be grounded in the world we exist in – and believing in an intergalactic cop with jewelry that unleashes nuclear willpower was going to be a stretch for starters. Make that look fake even for a second, and it was game over. To that end, the film brought the goods. Everything in space, everything on Oa, every imagining unleashed from the ring and even Hal’s suit looked pretty darned good. I guess Warner and DC decided to give the effects team the biggest budget possible…even if it meant stealing a few bucks from the writing department.
The pity of it all is that this could spell the end for Green lantern on the big screen, which I do believe is a shame. He is a key member of the DC universe – meaning any larger projects like what Marvel is doing with The Avengers is on thin ice. But more than that, he’s a pretty darned cool concept for a hero. He has weaknesses (which weren’t really explored). He’s a god but still human (somewhere in between batman and Superman). Best of all – his power is only bound by the limits of his imagination. Seems like great potential for a film franchise, but now we might never know.
Like the power of the ring itself, GREEN LANTERN was a story that held great possibility. As a fan of the property, I latched on to good things within the film, but not nearly enough of them. It could have played on all sorts of emotional touchstones like overcoming fear, the hazards of giving over to an immoral tactic, and infectious power of determination. Sadly, for this first iteration, they paid those themes only lip service, and got too enamoured with letting pretty A-listers canoodle in scene after scene.
Note to Warner: I can see Ryan Reynolds canoodle in a dozen different romantic comedies – that wasn’t what I was hoping to get here.