Running Time: 1 hr, 45 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Martin Campbell
Quick Impressions:
I went into this movie with expectations that could not have been lower. As a young child, I loved Super Friends cartoons, and the Green Lantern was my favorite member of the Justice League (aside from the Wonder Twins and their monkey Gleek), so I got excited by talk of a movie and was pleased when Ryan Reynolds was cast (over Bradley Cooper and Justin Timberlake), perplexed and vaguely irritated when Blake Lively announced that before being cast that she’d never heard of the Green Lantern. I was reasonably excited about the movie—until I saw the first preview. At that point, I pretty much decided (very vocally, ask my husband) that the movie was going to be a mindless CGI fest with a weak script and lots of pointless action sequences.
That said, I have to admit that the movie pleasantly surprised me. (Not because it wasn’t a mindless CGI fest with a weak script and lots of pointless action sequences. It was.) But going in with expectations low, I found the movie visually stunning, almost naively earnest, and thoroughly engaging. It’s even possible to find a satisfying story and meaningful message—but you have to work out the details yourself. The movie isn’t going to give it to you. Watching it is a bit like reading a very rough draft of an essay. All of the potential for greatness is there—a profound theme, the components of a powerful story. But it needs to be reorganized, presented a bit differently. By appearances, the problem isn’t that the filmmakers didn’t care if they made a bad movie (a trait so irritating in some big budget disasters that seem created deliberately to steal your money). It’s that they focused so much on one area—the special effects—that they got tunnel vision and forgot that the audience could only see their finished product and not their good intentions.
Still, my eight-year-old stepson thoroughly enjoyed it. He cringed at the roaring Parallax and cheered when the Green Lantern used his powers for good. If this movie had been made for TV and targeted at children, it would have been awesome. Adult movie goers probably have slightly different expectations, but it’s still a good time with lots of action, attractive if not particularly likeable characters, and stunning visuals. If you see it, definitely see it in 3D.
The Negatives:
What’s irritating about the movie is not how much it did wrong but how much it could have done right. With a few key improvements, Green Lantern could have been great.
The most notable weakness was the character of Hector Hammond, not what the movie did with him but what it could have done. The movie withheld a key piece of information about Hammond’s identity for a ridiculously long time. This exact kind of revelation happens all the time in the movies, but here it detracted from the story instead of enhancing it. We should have been introduced to Hammond much, much sooner. As soon as we knew about Hal Jordan, we should also have known about Hector Hammond. We should have learned his family background, his desires, his strengths, his weaknesses. By the time we find out anything interior about Hammond, he’s already undergone a major change. We care about the change, but we don’t care about the man undergoing it because we know nothing about him until it’s too late.
Also, what happens to Hector has such potential to be used in a clever way. But it isn’t. Several opportunities for an exciting, diabolically clever use of this power are wasted. That’s all I can say without spoilers. Hal, too, gets a pretty nifty superpower when he becomes the Green Lantern. But apparently, he’s just not a very creative guy. I hope that there will be a second movie so that we can see him grow into his new abilities and begin to use them in more interesting ways. (Quite honestly, I’m baffled at all the money that was thrown into this one. It’s had more media exposure than any other movie in recent memory. Maybe somebody realized earlier on that the script was a little bit weak and that the special effects were costing a fortune and began a relentless marketing campaign.) If there is a sequel, we should definitely find out more about Angela Bassett’s character, who right now seems like a major loose end.
In general, it’s very hard to get invested in the characters because they don’t seem particularly real or three-dimensional, particularly the ones on earth. Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris come across as a younger, less complex, less interesting version of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. These two are equally matched in their boringness. Their shared sense of witty banter, subtlety, innuendo, and clever pick-up lines suggests that for both of them social development ground to a complete halt in the second grade. (Not since the dreadfully awkward “mistletoe” exchange from Batman Returns have I heard a pick up line quite as painful as the one Hal tries at the senator’s party.) It’s amazing, really! These two ought to be exciting. They’re test pilots, after all. One will inherit a powerful company. The other has just received superpowers from a dying alien. And yet nobody in his right mind would want to get trapped at their table at a dinner party!
Several times while watching Green Lantern I thought of Thor, which I saw earlier in the summer. While watching the mind-blowing CGI, I could not help asking myself, What could Kenneth Branagh have done with a budget this size? In Thor, the small-scale scenes on earth were so much better than the portions of the movie that took place in Asgard. In Green Lantern, on the other hand, the exact opposite was true. The entire movie should have taken place on Oa. Not only was the (obviously expensively rendered) planet beautiful to behold, but it also seemed more real, more relevant than earth. An amateur golf tournament would make for more engaging viewing than Hal and Carol’s awkward social interactions. But the members of the Lantern Core on Oa had intriguing personalities and fascinating motivations. Some of the most engrossing moments of the movie happened when Geoffrey Rush’s Tomar-Re was speaking. Unfortunately for the overall quality of the film, he usually wasn’t speaking.
Another major problem with Green Lantern was its inability to advance the plot through action. Although the movie divided its time equally between action and dialogue, neither type of scene did much to advance the plot or develop the characters. Although the beautiful visuals screamed “See me! See me!” they didn’t show us much plot wise. Instead of learning by watching, we had to wait for subsequent dialogue to be filled in on what had happened. But the dialogue was awkward and seemed obligatory. It told us what the visuals should have. If the visuals had done that work themselves, the dialogue would have been free to reveal more about the interiority of the characters. The movie was inefficient, and as a result, the plot seemed simplistic, the characters flat.
Green Lantern was definitely not a movie that required much thought to follow. Nothing too unexpected happened, and key words and phrases were repeated over and over and over and over and over again. (It was kind of like Spiderman (a much better movie). If you left the theater not knowing, “With great power comes great responsibility,” something was seriously wrong with you.) You know your brain is not being adequately stimulated when in one scene you encounter a junior high science lecture and think, “Oh please, please go on,” and then get mad when the explanation of extremophiles is interrupted by pesky emergent villainous superpowers. Thought is required, however, if you want to get something meaningful out of the action because, again, this movie is like a rough draft of an essay. Lots of great ideas and gestures are there, but as a viewer you have to put them together in the best way for yourself. The movie doesn’t do it for you.
I thought the ending was especially disappointing. (Hal is human so he knows that no one can resist watching an air show?) I think I know what the movie was trying to say, but the thing is, we should have been able to get the point by watching the action.
The Good and The Could Have Been Better:
The opening of the movie was both beautiful and gripping. The world created on Oa was amazing (to look at, anyway). No wonder Sinestro was a bit wary of allowing a human into the corps. The non-human characters were infinitely more interesting than the dull crowd on earth. I thought that the blue guys were hard to take seriously, but I’m sure that they’re probably from the comics and quite authentic. (I don’t know that for sure, but the scenes on Oa feel very reverent, as if they were created by someone who really loves the source material.)
Best Action Sequence:
None of the action was bad (although some of it was a bit mindless, especially considering the nature of Hal’s superpower). The scene at the senator’s party definitely got my attention. The way Hal used his powers was all right, but what happened before was the truly dazzling cinematic event. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like that happen in a movie. (Maybe on ER.)
Best Joke:
I only remember laughing twice. Once was when Hal took the oath in front of the lantern. (You see part of this scene in just about every trailer, but it’s extended a bit and was kind of amusing.) The other time was when Hal looked over and saw his father’s picture in the bar. (The moment wasn’t supposed to be funny, but it felt really forced, off, and just weird to me.)
Best Scene:
My favorite part of the movie was Hal’s training sequence on Oa. The entire time Tomar-Re was talking and we were looking around, I thought, “Wow! This movie just got good!” Unfortunately, Tomar-Re only talked for a couple of minutes. Kilowog and Sinestro were interesting, too. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for sword fights, but I seriously thought these few minutes on Oa were more interesting than any of the stuff that happened back on Earth.
Best Surprise:
Carol Ferris’s reaction to the Green Lantern’s mask and costume genuinely surprised me given the way the film had progressed up till that point.
Best Scene Visually:
Every scene on Oa makes the price of the 3D worthwhile.
The Performances:
Green Lantern had a great cast, and all of the actors performed well, which made the lack of character development even more frustrating.
I’m not lying, exaggerating, or trying to be funny when I say that Geoffrey Rush gave my favorite performance in the movie. He voices Tomar-Re (or as my stepson calls him, The Fish Guy), and he probably only has five minutes of screen time (if voicing someone counts as screen time), but he really and truly was my favorite character. Geoffrey Rush really should join Morgan Freeman in narrating an HD cable show about space.
As soon as I heard Kilowog speak, I thought, “Why do movies always make enormous characters sound like Michael Clark Duncan?” For the rest of the movie, I kept asking myself, “Who is that guy who sounds like Michael Clark Duncan?” Guess who it was? Like Tomar-Re, Kilowog wasn’t given enough to do. (The lanterns should have spent a few minutes with him before tackling Parallax the first time; that would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.) But Michael Clark Duncan voices him well and manages to sound exactly like himself.
I’ve loved Mark Strong since I saw him in Body of Lies, and he was great as Sinestro, one of the better developed characters in the movie. We actually saw some layers in Sinestro, and hopefully we’ll get to spend more time with him in a second installment.
Blake Lively does a fantastic job as Carol Ferris. If only they had given the character more to do! Ferris had the potential to be an interesting person, but she came across instead as someone who had been terribly interesting in the past but had recently become two-dimensional and boring. I went in biased against Lively after reading in an interview a few months ago that she had never heard of the Green Lantern before getting cast in the movie. For some reason, that just annoyed me. I’ve never really watched Gossip Girl, so previously I’d only seen Lively in The Town, and while she did an adequate job there, I couldn’t help watching her and thinking, Well, she’s not as good as Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone. But she really was very good as Carol Ferris.
Angela Basset and Tim Robbins were both very good, too, but neither of them had much to do. Since I understand that Dr. Amanda Waller is a semi-important character within the D.C. universe, I sincerely hope that Basset has a bigger part in an envisioned sequel. Otherwise she’s a distractingly fascinating character who was given absolutely nothing to do.
Peter Sarsgaard always walks a fine line between charismatic and creepy, and he plays Hector Hammond magnificently, but the movie wastes the character.
Ryan Reynolds is perfectly good as Hal Jordan. (In hindsight, Justin Timberlake might have been better.) He’s easy to watch and conceals his emotional turmoil so well that it’s no problem to believe others don’t notice that he has any.
Overall:
This was not a great movie, but I didn’t expect it to be. I have to say that usually when I watch movies that make as many mistakes as this one, I find the experience painful and protracted. But surprisingly, Green Lantern was a pleasure to watch. I don’t know that I’d go again, but I’d watch the sequel. It’s a shame that some scenes would frighten young children because children would love it. It’s a movie where everything is what it seems to be on the surface (which is such a shame because a major plot point involves the potential disconnect between surface and interiority, and the movie could have done so much more with that). If your kids aren’t easily scared, go and take them with you. It’s a fun movie and the first movie that I’ve seen since Avatar that made the 3D glasses seem worthwhile.