Green Lantern

After so many recent, great popcorn comic films (Thor, Captain America, Kick Ass) I guess it had to happen that one of these big event movies would be a disappointment. Green Lantern has the makings of a fun adventure, and there are one or two zing moments, but overall it's a tonal mishmash that just doesn't work. It also suffers from that old chestnut of a problem that often plagues comic book movies: too many villains, characters and subplots. When will these Hollywood chumps learn to ignore the fans and just make a solid movie with a solid plot?

A brief outline of the story for any noobs... Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot who wants to be like his dad (a test pilot killed in a freak accident when Hal was young). Hal is fearless, but this also gets him into trouble when he destroys a new fighter jet in some simulated war games and embarrasses the American government. Enter the Green Lantern Corps - an intergalactic police force that uses a mystical green power fuelled by willpower. When a Green Lantern named Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) is fatally wounded he flies his ship to Earth to seek out a replacement, and finds Hal. Hal is inducted into the Green Lantern Corps and finds himself learning how to use his new powers whilst defending the Earth against an all-powerful entity named Parallax (Clancy Brown), an alien-infected mad scientist named Hector (Peter Sarsgaard), and a rival faction of the Corps seeking to use a dangerous yellow power source fuelled by fear.

It sounds like a mess, doesn't it? It is. Ryan Reynolds does his best to bring a light, angst-free touch to a fun story, but he isn't given a whole lot of room to breathe. They really should've started the film with Hal rather than all the space-myth stuff. By starting in space with all the big concepts it's like the film is showing its hand too early, and it also misses a trick in setting Hal up as the audience's identification figure. On top of all this the film also tries to explore the impact of father-child relationships through the three main human characters (Hal, Hector, and the love interest Carol) but it doesn't actually say anything of interest about this theme because there's so much else going on.

So what did I like? I liked the way it occasionally subverted the rules of the superhero genre... Hal thinks no one will recognise him when he dons the Green Lantern's eyemask, and I had to laugh when Carol sees right through it straight away. I also loved Peter Sarsgaard's performance as Hector, he's such a brilliant and underrated actor, and it was a shame that he couldn't be the sole villain in the film.

With its three villains Green Lantern just tries to do too much. It's stuff like this and Iron Man 2 that bums me out on superhero movies... the directors and writers are so caught up in ticking off all the boxes for the fans that they fail to tell a decent story. Green Lantern just needed to be a bit more focused. It also doesn't help that the film is kind of silly too... it tries to have this big, serious, dramatic end-of-the-world plot but the nature of Green Lantern's power means that Hal creates glowing green items from his imagination, and it's inherently goofy - like giant glowing green cars and stupid stuff like that. The ring itself and the power of 'will' is also fairly dated as far as ideas go... I mean, it's not something a modern writer would ever expect to get away with in a modern film, you just know it's something that was thought up in the '40s. Maybe what I'm trying to say is; was it really neccessary for this film adaptation to have even been made in the first place? It just seems nuts to try and sell this idea to modern audiences, and I suspect this is a big part of why the film ultimately failed both critically and commercially.

DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Based on the characters created by John Broome and Gil Kane.
KEY ACTORS: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett, Temeura Morrison, Taika Waititi, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Clancy Brown

RELATED TEXTS
- Green Lantern, a DC comics title that has been running since 1940, and was 'rebooted' with Hal Jordan as the protagonist in the '60s.
- DC comics haven't been as successful as Marvel in the film stakes lately, but they do still retain the two big superstars of the comic world - Superman and Batman. The last Superman film was Superman Returns, and Batman was recently rebooted with great success in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Both are due to hit the screen again in a big way with The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel.
- The other most recent DC films were Watchmen and Jonah Hex.
- Ryan Reynolds previously dabbled with playing comic book characters in Blade Trinity and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.