Green Lantern

Okay, my procrastination is reaching critical mass here, I'm now writing a review for a film I saw weeks ago.  So if I get some details muddled, forgive me.

Any Old How, Green Lantern.  It's another in a long line of Summer Superhero movies, including notable releases this year such as Thor and X Men First Class.  Green Lantern is a long on storied DC Comics series beloved by fans.  And while several humans (and countless aliens) have donned the mantle of the titular character, Hal Jordan is probably the best known.  I've never personally kept up on Green Lantern lore (I'm kindof a Marvel / Manga guy) and in all honesty, I had to look up the character on the interwebs to remind myself what his powers were when I heard a movie was in the works way back when.  Still, the previews looked pretty solid and I'm a fan of Ryan Reynolds (He was the only good thing about the Wolverine movie, for example), so I determined to give it a shot, even after a few professional reviewers were less than kind to it.

The film features Hal Jordan, a Jet Fighter Test Pilot who encounters a crashed alien spaceship.  The dying pilot of the alien craft bequeaths a Green Ring and Lantern to Hal, saying that he has been chosen as his replacement.When a confused Hal puts on the ring and touches it to the lantern, he is suddenly clothed in the Garb of the Green Lantern Corps, an interstellar police organization that has agents that wield the Green Power of Courage as a weapon, manifesting green matter in the form of whatever the Lantern can imagine..  Even as Hal is adjusting to his new outfit, he is brought back to planet Oa, the headquarters of the Green Lantern Corps, where he begins training to be the Lantern assigned to Earth's galactic sector.  Meanwhile, on Earth, the dead Lantern's body is being studied by a socially inept acquaintance of Hal's who becomes infected by the force that killed the alien, a super-being known as Parallax, which once devastated the galaxy at large by spreading the Yellow power of Fear.

Green Lantern is a Film that tries to get the Batman Begins mix.  That is to say, it tries to please the hardcore fans, educate the novices, and set up a sequel that will move the series forward.  Unfortunately, it fails to hit any of these points masterfully, and in fact fails to subtly hint at anything, sequels included.

If there is one way that the problems with the film could be fixed, I would say that it is Editing.  Visually speaking, there is nothing wrong with the effects or casting, the acting is generally good, and the sound is well done.  However, the pacing of the movie is badly in need to tweaking.  The fact is that there are some scenes that hold the audiences hand too much, and there are others that force the audience to fill in imperceptible gaps.

For example, before any of what I spoke of in the plot synopsis up there occurs, we see Hal Jordan wake up late and ditch the lady in his bed, go to his nephew's birthday party, Pilot a Raptor Fighter in a dogfight with a computer controlled drone fighter, defeating the unbeatable drone fighter, freezing up when his risky maneuvers cause him to lose control of the fighter (an inexplicably long scene where he remembers his dad dying in an explosion after a failed test flight of his own), a lengthy debriefing with his superiors who berate him for his risky maneuvers and losing his jet in a test exercise, and finally a lengthy argument with the Love Interest character which establishes in great detail that they have known each other for years, had a rocky romantic past, and that her father designed the drone ship.  As well as scenes of the Alien Lantern fighting and fleeing from Parallax and a few pointless scenes that incorporate the pointlessly un-funny comic relief character interspersed throughout.  Most of these scenes needlessly hammer home points that were made either by the first line of several lines of dialogue or by simple inference. These scenes could have easily been tightened up in editing to improve the pacing and shorten the amount of time before Hal becomes a Lantern. 

On the other hand, there was a scene during the birthday party that ends with Hal carelessly launching a Hot Wheels onto a loop track and off a ramp.  It's literally a two second blip of film.  No comment on how much he loved Hot Wheels when he was a kid or even an emotional response to seeing or launching the car.  He simply presses the button and calmly leaves the shot.  At the time, I thought "What was the point of that?" and promptly forgot it ever happened.  It wasn't until I started contemplating this review that I realized that this momentary flash was meant to be the inspiration for one of the biggest action/special effects set pieces in the film, in which Hal creates a Life Size green Hot Rod and a track for it to run on out of Green energy. He created the first thing he could think of to avert disaster, but I could not for the life of me figure out why it was a car on a track.  Couldn't they have included a momentary flash of the scene from earlier that inspired it to make sure the connection struck home?  Like I said, Too Much or Too Little story telling, depending on the scene.  Why do we spend so much time examining the Alien Corpse which stops mattering moments later, but never really get a solid explanation of what's happening to Space Mumps Bad Guy's mind?

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things done right in this film as well.  Tension between Hal and Space Mumps is pretty well established, for example.  Also, there is one great scene that really stands out as an example of comics movies not being limited by the rules of comics themselves.  After a painfully unfunny scene with the so-called comic relief best friend character ends with the suggestion that Heroes "Get the Girl", Hal flies to the love interest's apartment and lands on her balcony in his Lantern suit, complete with "Identity Hiding" Eye Mask.  It has oft been pointed out how ludicrous it is to assume a secret identity can be maintained with the application of a tiny mask that covers about 10% of the face. The more egregious example is the Clark Kent Glasses worn by Stupor Man, but I could write a whole paper on why Stupor Man sucks.  When Love Interest (Seriously, does her name matter?) see's him, for a few long moments she looks at him as if she has no clue who this crazy person in a Green and Black body suit on her balcony is.  I think I may have actually said "You have got to be Shitting me." for all the theater to hear when it looked as thought the old Eye Mask gambit had struck again.  It would have been impossible to accept that she wouldn't recognize a childhood friend and love interest because he happened to be wearing a mask that Zorro would refuse to wear because it was too dainty.  But as soon as I said it, her eyes flashed wide and she shouted "Hal?!" then proceeded to berate him for scaring her.  Meanwhile, I proceeded to say "Oh thank god, she can't have been that stupid."  It is really a great example, in my book, of what fans of comics and their related media are really looking for.  Not the "It dosen't have to make sense, it's just a stupid comic" angle of Golden Age comics, or the "Gritty reality" of the Dark Age comics of the 90s, but the Silver Age feel.  Believable People with Unbelievable powers in a believable modern world.

Overall, Green Lanterns faults are mostly on the technical side, some better direction and editing would have resolved most of the nagging issues, and a slightly better script would have fixed the rest.  It's not perfect, but it far from terrible.  It's one of the few movies I've seen in 3D that didn't make me want to take the glasses off 5 minutes in, and in the end it's a fun movie.

6 Obvious Future Badguys out of 10

Seriously, the stinger at the end of the film was pointless because A) Lantern Fans knew it was coming before the first teaser trailer was over and B) His Name/motivations/etc were a dead giveaway to everyone else.