I'm a little behind on my superhero movies these days. I have yet to see Thor or X-men First Class. In fact, I haven't even been to the movies since Tron Legacy around Christmas. So I was due to start catching up on films since I'm off for summer vacation for about 2 months. My expectations for Green Lantern were not that high. I've never seen a Ryan Reynolds movie, but my impressions of him were that he was a dopey hunk that got in movies solely based on his looks and his sixpack. I think this is still partly true, but I was pleasantly suprised by his acting in this movie, especially in the sequence where a dying alien recruits him to be a Green Lantern.
If you're a comic book fan of the Marvel and DC superhero books like I used to be, you probably already know the basic plot of Green Lantern. But for those of you who don't, I'll give you the quick rundown.
A kazillion years ago, the Guardians of the Universe set up an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. They each have a power ring which uses green energy, symbolic of willpower, to create anything they can imagine in their minds. In the comics that I remember, the ring's only weakness was it was weak or ineffective against the color yellow. I think they might have gotten rid of that later on after I stopped reading them. In the movie, the color yellow signifies the power of fear (cowardice?). The original Green Lantern from the Golden Age had a ring that was powerless against wood, of all things.
The biggest baddie in the whole universe, Parallax, a humungous dust cloud of tendrils and and a vaguely humanoid head, has harnessed this yellow power for evil, going along absorbing the lifeforces of countless galaxies and worlds. That is until an equally powerful Green Lantern named Abin Sur imprisoned him underground on a remote and uninhabited planet (even he wasn't powerful enough to kill him). When some unlucky aliens crashland there, they awaken Parallax, who goes around eating entire galaxies again and also to take revenge on Abin Sur, who he mortally wounds.
Abin Sur's ring picks cocky test pilot jackass Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) to become the new Green Lantern. While the ring is supposed to pick somebody without fear, Hal seems to have some emotional issues. He's still haunted by the death of his father in a flying accident, he runs away from responsibility and he also runs away from love with his childhood friend Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Carol just happens to be the daughter of the owner of the the company he works for, which has allowed his dangerous and childlike behavior to continue for longer than it should have. Carol sticks up for him and keeps him from getting fired because she sees potential in him, even though he's really never done anything to earn that faith.
The rest of the movie is about Hal learning how to use his power and whether he's going to accept the responsibility of protecting his portion of the universe. But he's going to have to decide pretty quickly because a piece of Parallax infects a human scientist (Peter Sarsgaard) and begins to take over his body. Through this human, Parallax learns that ring of his hated foe Abin Sur resides on Earth, and he makes plans to destroy our world.
I started to get a bad feeling about this movie during a dogfight sequence at the beginning of the film where Hal and Carol are doing a mock battle against some new AI controlled jet fighters. Hal goes into flashback mode right out of the old Airplane and Hot Shot movies where he sees his dad get killed in an explosion. This goes on for long minutes as his plane is spiralling in a death roll. I kinda rolled my eyes at the point and was thinking of Charlie Sheen being told "Topper, pull up, Topper, pull up!". Man, whoever wrote this movie must have grown up watching 1980s films. Speaking of that, Tom Cruise had the same flashback experience in Top Gun "Maverick, pull up, Maverick, pull up!". It just seem so old and cliched. I wouldn't have been surprised if Hal had went through some sort of training montage a la Rocky with the "Eye of the Tiger" blaring in the background.
I was really pleasantly surprised by Ryan Reynolds. Even though I still think he's kinda like a lovable dork with good looks, I thought he had some good acting moments in the movie, when it called for drama. Unfortunately, some of those moments are ruined by the lonely guitar doodling music that seem imported straight from some crap TV show like Grey's Anatomy. When this guitar comes in you know you are supposed to think "ok, these characters are having an emotional revelation" or "this character is sad". James Newton Howard, the soundtrack's composer, is usually a master of writing muzak, like an anti-John Williams, and his generic music choices are right on par with his other mediocre scores. I thought Blake Lively did a good job in the film too, and like Reynolds, this is the first movie I've seen of hers.
As far as the special effects, the CG is on overdrive during most of the film. Especially on Oa. At times I think that the only thing on the screen that is real is Ryan Reynold's head. And there are probably a lot of women out there that would be satisfied with just that. Unfortunately, for having so much of it, the CG looks really average. I'm not saying it's horrible, just that they made it look just good enough. There's nothing eye-popping like Avatar here. It looks like a sci-fi cable show on HBO at times.
Is it really necessary that anytime you need a big hulk looking character in any film or cartoon, you have to hire Michael Clarke Duncan? As soon as a I saw Kilowog, I was like "damn, they're gonna have that dude from the Green Mile voicing him".
All in all, I didn't dislike this movie, but I didn't think it was very good either. It just had too many cliches from the 1980s. Almost like it was a homage to that era of filmmaking, which by the way, was not very good. The story and the CG and the music all firmly root Green Lantern in mediocrity which Reynolds and Lively try desperately to break out of but are ultimately held back. The two main villains of the picture kinda brought it down too. You basically have this CG cloud that looks like Liquid Drano in space and a wimpy big headed mad scientist who is in a wheelchair for this climactic fight with GL. There's nothing more boring than watching a superhero fight a cloud of gas. Witness the fight at the end of the 2003 Hulk. Is Green Lantern worth seeing? Yes. Is it worth buying when it comes out on DVD/Blu-ray? No.
I leave you with this. When Hal Jordan put on his mask on in this film, a little kid in the audience yelled out "It's Batman!"
My Grade: C+
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