RESTON, VA, December 6, 2011 – After years—decades really—of empty gestures from Hollywood, fans of DC superhero Green Lantern (GL) were ecstatic this past summer. The long-awaited, never-before-done live action film “Green Lantern,” was about to be released. Trailers for the new film made it into a virtual reality weeks ahead of schedule. In turn, these action-packed, special effects clips built a growing crescendo of great expectations among GL’s many fans, with the promise of bringing the intriguing story of the world’s most esoteric superhero to the silver screen in a memorably spectacular way.
And the all-new “Green Lantern” was not fated to be just any superhero movie, at least for those who bought into the hype. This film chose to focus on Hal Jordan, DC’s Silver Age GL and arguably the most popular GL of all time. Rugged, heroic, and incredibly creative—heck, what better way to showcase a real, live GL in his modern screen debut than to present him in his Hal Jordan iteration? As compared to, say, later and sometimes unpleasant GLs like the crude, boorish Guy Gardner who peaked in popularity in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, as with the first Star Trek film, the director and producers of the 2011 Green Lantern film got carried away with special effects, bombast, and too many characters. It’s the kind of Big Budget Syndrome we’ve witnessed countless times before in film history, where a virtually unlimited expense account packs a film with so many goodies that the characters and narrative disappear.
Green Lantern, world's most esoteric (and powerful) superhero now on DVD and pay-per-view. Ryan Reynolds stars. (Promotional graphic.)
For those not familiar with Green Lantern, this superhero’s powers are derived from a mysterious “power battery.” The battery charges Green Lantern’s power ring, which enables its wearer to create, out of nothing, anything he can imagine, ranging, say, from a four-star French dinner for two to a complete, orbiting space station.
Have a board that needs to be sawn in two? Wish you had a power saw? Voilà! The power ring creates a power saw for you. Confronting a gigantic alien intent on the destruction of your city? No problem. Just fly through the air, courtesy of your power ring, of course, lure the monster outside of the city, conjure up a Daisy Cutter bomb and drop it on him. End of story, end of threat.
Green Lantern was always a right brain sort of hero. Rippling muscles and six pack abs can work wonders for your costume as they do for Ryan Reynolds in the film. But in the end, it’s the power of a Green Lantern’s mind that the power ring transforms into his own individualized superpower. Green Lanterns defeat criminals, villains, and homicidal space aliens by outwitting them with their minds rather than literally overpowering them. A Green Lantern’s superpowers are thus limited only by his imagination. Great concept.
Unfortunately, “Green Lantern,” circa 2011, loses all its creative juice, or much of it, in fusillades of computerized special effects and via the film’s decision to pile heroic Silver Age Hal Jordan with loads of self-doubt and angst. The original Hal, an absolutely fearless test pilot who worries for about five minutes if he’s up to the task in his Silver Age iteration, is replaced by “am-I-really-up-to-intergalactic-heroism” Hal. Why does Hollywood insist on turning so many superheroes into self-doubting wusses?
Making matters worse, the film’s Hal Jordan is condescended to by his fellow Green Lanterns after he’s whisked off to the mysterious planet Oa to undergo GL basic training. It’s the old “humans probably aren’t really up to this kind of stuff” cliché which seems to assume that most intergalactic civilizations are far smarter, more sophisticated, and more technologically advanced than homo sapiens can ever hope to be. Of course, everyone learns a lesson in GL World as only Hal Jordan, weak-kneed human, can ultimately defeat the out-of-control force known as Parallax.
The result of GL’s wimpification: an intensely spectacular film that’s fitfully entertaining, visually dazzling, but lacking in crucial character development whose worst sin, if we haven’t already emphasized it enough, is portraying Hal Jordan as a troubled, self-doubting, reluctant hero of the 2000s. The hapless Ryan Reynolds, a potentially appealing Hal Jordan, is subverted in this film by a limp, clichéd script and direction that doesn’t allow his heroic character to emerge until about the last three minutes of the film.
Hal at least does seem to generate the right chemistry with the film’s hottest babe. Blake Lively is an attractive Carol Ferris, Hal’s longtime girlfriend and eventual CEO of Ferris Industries where Hal works as their crack test pilot. But there’s a problem here, too. If Carol is supposed to be Hal’s love interest, why does she come across as mentally tougher than he until close to the conclusion of the film? Maybe Abn Sur, the dying GL who crash lands on earth in search of his replacement, should have hired Carol to be his successor, not Hal.
“Green Lantern,” the film also unintentionally squanders some first rate talent, relegating at least two big names to the far corners of the film as little more than cameos. Angela Bassett and Tim Robbins in fact do add star power to the film, but their skills are wasted in what are essentially meaningless bit parts.
In the end, “Green Lantern” is actually a visually beautiful film, filled to the cinematic brim with eye-popping special effects and a bevy of clever space-alien fellow Lanterns to boot. Minus the director and the script, the film boasts an otherwise appealing Hal Jordan and a knockout Carol Jordan. It’s well worth buying or renting if you’re a Green Lantern fan or love superhero movies, though other films have done this shtick better.
The most distressing thing about this bizarre mélange of a film is that GL—at least for a long-time fan like yours truly—is the potential longer-term outcome of this film’s mediocre box office returns. The movie’s mixed reviews and foggy trajectory could have launched a viable film franchise for this popular DC character. Instead, although a sequel has been vaguely promised for, maybe, 2013, such promises have been vague and limp-wristed at best.
Well, we can always hope for the best. A better sequel would work. A series reboot would work as well, but maybe not so close to this original release.
In any event, there was a far more impressive summer superhero release that’s also now out on DVD and pay-per-view. It’s good old old “Captain America,” and we’ll be visiting Cap’s impressive 21st century film reboot in an upcoming installment of “Movies in Total.”
Read more of Terry's news and reviews at Curtain Up! in the Entertain Us neighborhood of theWashington Times Communities. For Terry's investing insights, visit his WT Communitiescolumn,The Prudent Man in Politics.
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