Superheroes: We cover our cheekbones so no one will recognize us! I think Green Lantern is the first film to acknowledge just how silly it is that just because a superhero has a tiny mask on, no one they know will ever be able to recognize them. Uh oh, I can’t recognize my child I’ve raised and known for 30 years because his cheekbones are covered! It’s impossible! You see this in several films, but this time Green Lantern got it right! One thing I loved about this film is that Carol Ferris (Blake Lively) is able to recognize who is the mysterious Green Lantern as soon as she gets close enough to him. I’m all in favor of cutting the “I’m in love with Superman, not Clark Kent” crap and getting to the point.
Green Lantern is based on the DC Comics series with the same name and stars the incredibly ripped Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, a test pilot who doesn’t really have his life together until he is chosen to be a Green Lantern, a member of an intergalactic police force with extremely snazzy jewelry. Meanwhile, out in space, an evil force known as Parallax is brewing and has destroyed two planets, setting his sights on Earth next. Hal must grow up and quit being a scaredy cat in order to save the planet from Parallax.
Sooo…..Green Lantern was decent enough. It was enjoyable, mildly humorous, and looked amazing; BUT, it wasn’t the amazing superhero film I had hoped for. It lagged a bit, didn’t have all that much action, and was a bit too caught up in the seriousness of itself to enjoy the superheroic antics that we’ve grown accustomed to.
Dr. Hector Hammond
Reynolds did a great job filling out that CGI suit and saving the planet. There were a few bits of humor here and there, but I’ll bet it would be far less funny upon a second viewing. It was extremely formulaic and spent too much time on badgy Hector Hammond for my tastes. All the time spent on him could have been used on showing the Green Lanterns investigating planets destroyed by Parallax and fighting mini evil creatures left behind by Parallax. That would have given us more action and excitement, and more Green Lantern action! Come on! That ring can do anything you can imagine! Oh the possibilities!
Anyways, Green Lantern is worth seeing, but by a slim margin. Go, support it because it cost a lot of money to make, and let’s look forward to the possibilities a sequel will bring us. Like some other superhero films, the story took some time to set up, but the sequel will hopefully be balls to the wall awesome stuff. Green Lantern has its problems but still leaves room for an awesome sequel to finds its place on the entertainment centers for flat screen TVs of fans who have a love of true superhero filmcraft.
So, readers, if you’ve seen Green Lantern, did it live up to your expectations?
Time Until Action Starts: ~ 3 minutes
Action Rating: 2 ½ Bunches of Green Stuff, out of 5.
This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!
And click the webcomic thumbnail to check out “Action Chick vs. Green Lantern,” part 1.
“In Brightest Day or Darkest Week, No Evil Shall Escape My Beak!”
Go, support it because it cost a lot of money to make, and let’s look forward to the possibilities a sequel will bring us.
I know you mean well, Kat, but this isn’t some struggling indie filmmaker. DC is now tied to a multi-national corporation. If it can’t get its’ act together to pull this off, my sympathies are minimal. I’d rather pay money for 13 Assassins.
Pull a Superman 2, probably now known as a Spiderman, and give us a nice origin in front of the theme song(which i kinda liked).
Better’n THOR s’all I care about.
I was tempted to watch this b/c I really want to see DC films other than Superman and Batman, but then I decided against it. The reviews were just too bad.
I have to say, that tossing in Parralax was probably the biggest downfall of the movie. If the movie had stuck to Hector Hammond as the primary villain, it could have managed much better pacing, and managed to avoid making pretty much every lantern EVER look like a horribly inept space cop.
Basically, to fix Green Lantern, they should have simply cut the Parrallax story line, and used all of that time to give some training to Hal Jordan. And then had him forced to return to Earth when Hector Hammond does something insane… Then, toss in a Parrallax scene during the credits to make a nice push for part two….
I loved Green Lantern. I’m more of a Flash fan, and really, my GL is Kyle or Guy (& always Kilowog) but I never gave a damn about Hal until GL Rebirth. That said, Geoff Johns killed it on the regular series (with a lot of cover fire from Tomasi on GL Corp). But after the first few trailers, that shot of the costume, and all the crap I was hearing, my expectations were about as low as possible. And that was the key to LOVING this movie.
It’s DC’s first foray into the superhero movies (let’s not include Superman or Batman shall we? Cause really they’re bigger and more media saturated than any other) and the idea that it’s willpower forging what they imagine into the world is a very poetic metaphor. From the overall response it seems they made a passable movie that movie go-ers somewhat kinda sorta liked. I mean, I would have kind of hated it if I was looking forward to it so much.
The script was tight, with just enough characterization to make the thing feel human, but a lot of aliens and CGI, and god damn how cool is all that?! I mean, OA?! That looked right, the other Corp members were there for their cameos, the constructs were cool and well thought out and used in battle. Hector Hammond was cheeseball but they did a nice job tying him into Hal and the whole father thing. But the “fear” Hal felt was terribly ham-fisted in there and I didn’t buy it at all.
Also, a rogue Guardian becomes Parallax? Okay, I guess that’s fine. We can always just say that the entity Parallax had consumed that one, and could possibly infect Hal or whoever else. But does he really need to look like a swarm, a dust cloud? I mean, didn’t we learn from Fantastic Four that Galactus should have some sort of body? I guess we’re just not ready for giant techno purple men in helmets, but a giant yellow space bug? We can certainly get that right?
Either way in the end, it was a cosmic cop space superhero flick, and maybe it wasn’t an epic action movie like it promised it would be, but it definitely serviced this DC Comics fan and took superhero movies beyond Richard Donner’s Superman, Tim Burton’s Batman, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, while combining many things that worked (and some that didn’t work) in one new direction for flying do-gooders with superpowers.
Interesting to hear. I do admit, I’ve been a little bit up in the air about this one. I kind of confused Green Lantern with Green Hornet and didn’t really know the difference between the two! Though, I’m suspecting this one is made and catered more to the fans of the franchise.
http://is.gd/LANTERN