← Back to Reviews
in
#328 - Green Lantern
Martin Campbell, 2011
A human fighter pilot is recruited into an intergalactic league of law enforcers around the same time that a villainous alien escapes from captivity.
It's hard not to think of the existence of a Green Lantern movie as a cynical exercise on the part of DC Comics to keep up with Marvel's plan to create its own superhero-filled cinematic universe. Such a motivation would certainly go some way towards explaining the general lack of quality to this particular film, but even if this is the result of DC's best intentions then it doesn't really show. A lot of that might have to do with the fact that the premise of Green Lantern involves it going beyond the stark realism of Christopher Nolan's Batman films and instead plunging headlong into garish sci-fi fantasy by introducing the Green Lantern Corps and their ability to harness the power of will (which looks like green energy) for the purpose of fighting evil across the galaxy. The focus on an extraterrestrial mythos guarantees that there is a lot of CGI packed into the movie, and while some of it does look fairly slick (read: some), it's probably the only worthwhile thing about this movie.
The story is a pretty standard superhero origin story that is sorely lacking in any kind of personality. Our hero is a cocky fighter pilot (Ryan Reynolds) whose supposedly fearless attitude masks some insecurity about his past, which of course complicates things. Aside from him, the characters do tend to be clichéd and poorly acted, whether it's Blake Lively as the slightly-more-capable-than-your-average-damsel love interest or Peter Sarsgaard as the nominal misunderstood villain whose talent is wasted underneath a heap of prosthetics and ear-piercing shrieks. Not even the CGI characters and their respective voice actors such as Geoffrey Rush or Clancy Brown can do anything of worth with the material. It's a shame because I was hoping that this would be better than the "hype" but, despite the clearly expensive levels of special effects on-screen, it still feels woefully underweight and doesn't even offer any memorably glaring flaws like, say, Daredevil. Kind of hoping the next time DC attempts to bring a superhero that isn't Superman or Batman to the big screen isn't such a mess, but obviously I'm not hoping too hard.
Martin Campbell, 2011
A human fighter pilot is recruited into an intergalactic league of law enforcers around the same time that a villainous alien escapes from captivity.
It's hard not to think of the existence of a Green Lantern movie as a cynical exercise on the part of DC Comics to keep up with Marvel's plan to create its own superhero-filled cinematic universe. Such a motivation would certainly go some way towards explaining the general lack of quality to this particular film, but even if this is the result of DC's best intentions then it doesn't really show. A lot of that might have to do with the fact that the premise of Green Lantern involves it going beyond the stark realism of Christopher Nolan's Batman films and instead plunging headlong into garish sci-fi fantasy by introducing the Green Lantern Corps and their ability to harness the power of will (which looks like green energy) for the purpose of fighting evil across the galaxy. The focus on an extraterrestrial mythos guarantees that there is a lot of CGI packed into the movie, and while some of it does look fairly slick (read: some), it's probably the only worthwhile thing about this movie.
The story is a pretty standard superhero origin story that is sorely lacking in any kind of personality. Our hero is a cocky fighter pilot (Ryan Reynolds) whose supposedly fearless attitude masks some insecurity about his past, which of course complicates things. Aside from him, the characters do tend to be clichéd and poorly acted, whether it's Blake Lively as the slightly-more-capable-than-your-average-damsel love interest or Peter Sarsgaard as the nominal misunderstood villain whose talent is wasted underneath a heap of prosthetics and ear-piercing shrieks. Not even the CGI characters and their respective voice actors such as Geoffrey Rush or Clancy Brown can do anything of worth with the material. It's a shame because I was hoping that this would be better than the "hype" but, despite the clearly expensive levels of special effects on-screen, it still feels woefully underweight and doesn't even offer any memorably glaring flaws like, say, Daredevil. Kind of hoping the next time DC attempts to bring a superhero that isn't Superman or Batman to the big screen isn't such a mess, but obviously I'm not hoping too hard.