Directed by: Martin Campbell
Written by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, and Michael Goldenberg
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, and Mark Strong
Running Time: 114 minutes
In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Green Lantern movie for years now. Not necessarily the Green Lantern movie now in theaters, however. The movie I’ve been excited for is the script I’ve had in my head for several decades now and never did get around to putting on paper. But that’s where I’m coming from in attempting to review this movie.
Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a cocky and irrepressible test pilot for private defense contractor Ferris Air. His immediate supervisor is his sometimes-girlfriend Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), whose father is CEO. (And they wonder why he chafes at authority.) Hal’s life is quite suddenly turned upside-down by the arrival of Abin Sur, a dying fuchsia-skinned alien whose final act is to bestow upon Hal the power-ring, and attendant responsibilities, of the Green Lantern Corps.
The Corps, as it turns out, is a kind of intergalactic peacekeeping force. The ring uses a mystical green energy to physically manifest the will and imagination of its bearer. Dependent only on his strength of will, Hal can use the ring’s power to create anything he can imagine. It’s the ultimate story of “With great power comes great responsibility.”
But Hal has never been the responsible type. When his best friend Tom Kalmaku (Taika Waititi) quips, “Maybe in their language ‘responsible’ just means ‘a—hole’,” Hal responds soberly, “I sure hope so.” But, as he will eventually find out, “responsible” in this case means saving Earth, the Corps’ homeworld Oa, and by extension the Universe at large, from the giant space-squid Parallax which feeds off of the fear of its victims before proceeding to destroy their planets and wipe out their civilizations.
As the story of Hal’s maturation from loose cannon to enthusiastic space-cop, the movie generally hits all the right notes. But as a space-opera, it falls flat. The Green Lantern comics have roughly fifty years’ worth of accumulated mythology, and the film tries to cram too much of it into this one movie. The effect is much like trying to get into Star Wars starting with Phantom Menace instead of the original trilogy. If you're not already a rabid fan (and quite possibly even if you are), you might find yourself wondering why you're supposed to care.
As a super-hero story it barely registers. What I found missing most of all from this film was the giddy sense of a hero coming into his powers. With everything the writers took from the comic’s expansive history, they seem to have overlooked one basic tenet which every GL origin story I’ve ever read takes for granted: throwing your hero into action before he has the least idea what he’s doing or is even capable of, making him learn on the fly, makes for good drama.
Think back to Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie, the scene in which a young Peter Parker first launches himself into the Manhattan skyline to swing from rooftop to rooftop. It’s one of the most engaging moments ever to come out of the super-hero movie genre because it lets us share in the euphoric terror of a once-ordinary guy discovering in the heat of the moment the extent of his new powers. Green Lantern has no scene like that, though it sorely needs it.
The movie is certainly entertaining. It starts strong, it ends well. It comes unraveled somewhere around the middle, but manages to pull together for a fairly satisfying conclusion. But there is a lot of wasted opportunity there. Green Lantern, with his ability to give substance to the whims of his imagination, should be one of comicdom’s most visually dynamic super-heroes. Green Lantern the movie just feels visually apathetic.
