Green Lantern – Movie Review

The Review: Green Lantern isn’t really a property that opens itself up to particularly provocative themes or questions, or at least, most people don’t tend to view it as such.  As a space opera with a whole universe for its setting, its spirit is almost purely adventurous.  Even when its ideas reach dizzying heights of creativity, they rarely attain a level of sophistication or intellectual thought as many other comic book mythoi have done.

With that in mind, the film adaptation achieves great success in the action department.  Warner Bros. has invested a lot of money into the imagery of the movie, and it shows.  The effects are wildly dazzling and, rest assured, do credit to the most imaginative, potent weapon in the universe.  Every fight scene runs at a high pace, occasionally moving a little too fast, cutting the sequence short before the tension reaches a satisfying climax.

You’ll also find it fairly easy to get caught up in the film’s events, as you rarely dwell in any one scene for very long.  The stream of back-and-forth cutting between what’s happening with Hal Jordan and what’s happening elsewhere (Sinestro and the Guardians’ concern over Parallax, Hector Hammond’s encounter with Abin Sur’s dead body and his subsequent transforming infection), keep you mostly intent and engaged.

But the film immediately does itself a disservice by trying to include both a more accessible, ground-based villain in Hector and the world-endangering, more conceptual Parallax.  As a result, you’re forced to constantly switch your attention from one to the other, never sticking with either long enough to really feel their threat to the characters.

It’s hard to tell which villain would’ve made the better focus.  Hector has the most relevance to Hal’s personal conflicts, but his connections to Hal and Carol get revealed rather late in the film, and never get explored beyond a predictable, futile love triangle among the three.  On the other hand, Parallax has the most potential to give Hal a reason to work with the Corps and a truly epic first mission, which also get grievously truncated.  In movie time, Hal spends all of ten minutes training with Tomar-Re, Kilowog, and Sinestro, scenes which sold so well in spite of their briefness that they should have been expanded and made more integral to the story at large.

Instead, the film unwisely grounds Hal by concentrating almost obsessively on his inner fears, a theme emphasized ad infinitum until you feel almost insulted by the underestimation of your intelligence.  Certainly there’s a lot of drama to be had in his childhood trauma watching his father perish in a piloting accident, or his commitment-phobia with old friend Carol.  But the script never seems to take the time to explore these issues with any serious thought.

In fact, just like Hal, the movie winds up like a kid trapped in a sexy, grown-up body.  Its endless talk of fear, courage, humanity, etc. feels almost preachy, a sci-fi parable for boys and girls too distracted by the special effects to notice.  The movie also tries desperately to appeal to the young, hip masses that make up the most profitable of the movie-going audience.  Why else would they cast Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively in the primo roles (aside from their undeniable likableness)?  Ryan spends nearly as much time in various degrees of the buff as he does clothed—and that CGI costume barely counts as clothing.

Conclusion: As an action-adventure sci-fi film, it’s very enjoyable and definitely deserves a viewing.  But substantially, it’s the fluff of comics, only even less so as it’s almost schizophrenic in its attempt to cover all grounds at once without once taking time to be sincerely thoughtful.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – Love the blatant product placements.  You could literally take fifteen seconds unedited from the film and use it as a commercial for LG phones.

– Kilowog sounds so much like Barry White, I would pay almost as much money to see a reel of him singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe”.

– Did we ever even learn Hal’s best friend’s name?  He appears for at most five minutes in the movie–most thankless role ever.