What? Am I really the first to start the thread on Green Lantern, the movie?
I don't even get to use my disclaimer that I'm posting without having read anyone else's comments in the thread first ...
Anyhoo:
- I didn't read any reviews beforehand, although I was aware that the range was mostly from lukewarm to hostile. I thought it was okay, but only just. I mean, it's a comic-book movie, and no matter how bad any given comic-book movie might be, there's got to be some level of thrill in seeing pen-and-ink drawings come to life.
- That said, there was just that kind of thrill, such as when the helicopter nearly crashed into the huge dinner party on the Ferris Aircraft grounds, and Hal basically turned it into a large Hot Wheels race car and created a track for it (harkening back to an earlier scene at his nephew's birthday party where he casually sent such a car around a track).
- But -- no giant boxing glove?
- I'm not familiar with the lead, Ryan Reynolds, but he was mostly the Hal Jordan I always pictured -- a little too cocky for his own good.
- I say "mostly" because, unfortunately, the writers took the tack late '90s/early Y2K view that Hal was not a man without fear, but a man who can overcome his fear. I don't know if that makes for a better movie, or even a better story, but as one of the old heads, I didn't like it.
- Also unfortunately, Carol Ferris was presented as the love interest who butts heads with our boy Hal but really loves him, and it came off as quite tired.
- My son, who saw the movie a day before I did (albeit not in 3-D), was unimpressed with the CGI, calling it "fake." That's a problem when nearly everything -- like the planet Oa, the Guardians and the other Green Lanterns -- are CGI creatures.
- Speaking of the Guardians, they maintain their long-standing history of being revered immortals who are really, really stupid. This movie is based on the Geoff Johns stories about Parallax, here presented as infecting one of the Guardians who made a misguided attempt to tame it.
- Parallax was imprisoned by Abin Sur, but eventually escaped and went after him, which is why he crash-landed on Earth. Why the Guardians didn't kill Parallax dead when they had him, I'll never know.
- Further evidence of the Guardians' stupidity: The proud Sinestro, apparently the field general for the whole Lantern Corps, entreats the Guardians to send a team of the finest warriors from the Corps to take Parallax on. They say yes. Said team of a dozen of the best of the best Lanterns not only gets their butts kicked but wiped out to one man, Sinestro himself. So now they're left with 3,584 lanterns who aren't the best of the best.
- Speaking of which -- and I know this is not the fault of the movie, but a long-standing thing from the comics -- why is it only exactly 3,600 Green Lanterns for all of space? That's about as many cops on the Washington, D.C. police force, and they have to cover a mere 69 square miles! I mean, nobody on Earth has even heard of the Green Lantern Corps, which means Abin Sur never made it to this corner of his beat, am I right?
- Another long-standing thing from the comics: Hal gets the ring from Abin Sur with no idea how it works or what to do with it. It's only been a 1980s thing that there actually some kind of training to be in the Green Lantern Corps. Fine. But in the movie, Hal's training consists of getting smacked around by Kilowog and then Sinestro for 10 minutes all the while being told he's a nobody and he's nothing -- after all, he's a mere Earthman. So Hal quits. Yeech. What follows thereafter is some mumbo jumbo about how the ring chose him, so it can't be wrong; it saw something in him that he doesn't see in himself. Yeech. I would much rather have started from that premise and have his training build him up, rather than tear him down.
- Tomar-Re is from a fish species? All this time, I thought he was some kind of bird.
- Most of all, I felt overwhelmed by the notion that, being the first movie, this had to be an origin story. It's tiresome, but there seems to be no way around that. But here, we get not only the origin of Hal as a Green Lantern, but the origin of the Guardians and Oa, the origin of Parallax, the origin of Hector Hammond, and, so help me, even the origin of Amanda Waller! It's too much!
- And what the heck is Amanda Waller doing here, anyway? Now, I'm always glad to see Angela Bassett in anything, and I suppose she fulfilled the role of the functionary from the eeeeeEEEEvil secret government agency, but her presence seemed extraneous.
- Likewise Hector Hammond. I suppose having him be infected by Parallax was a way to make the cosmic threat of this beast more local and personal, but it just seemed like paint-by-numbers scriptwriting.
- Sinestro was pretty cool, though. Watch through the entire credits for the surprise at the end.
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I liked the movie. Sure it had a few issues. They were trying to fit a lot in. I thought it worked for the most part. The film accomplished what every film's goal should be, entertain the audience. I was entertained.
Blake Lively while very attractive, did really work for me as Carol Ferris. I liked Reynolds and rest of the cast though. There was a few "fake" looking CGI moments but overall I thought it looked pretty good.
While the fact that things from the page made it to screen is cool...for a movie to work, for me, the relationships between the characters have to feel a bit real-to-life. In other comic book movies, I could feel an actual connection between Superman and Lois, Logan and Rogue, Peter Parker and...well, a lot of people, and Bruce and Alfred. We are told that these people love or hate Hal Jordan in Green Lantern, but 1) we never really see why vis the story and 2) the quiet scenes are so clumsy, the actors don't get to show us either.
Parallax was a cool looking monster though.
One fanboy question...why the hell didn't the Guardians or Abin put up some warning signs to stay far away from where they imprisoned Parallax? Shouldn't there have been a GL guard there at all times?
He is, and said so in the movie. He also said that while his species is avian in nature it does share some characteristics of Earth's ichthyes classification, or words to that effect. So, his species is kind of bird, kind of fish, but all alien!
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Regarding "why 3,600 Corps members?":
As I understand it, each team member is assigned a patrol of 0.1 degrees within a 360 degree sphere that fans out from Oa, which is the center of the sphere.
That means that each lantern member's sector is shaped like a never-ending apple wedge. The further away from Oa you are, the more there is to patrol. This would also mean that every one of the corpsmen are responsible for Oa as well as their sector.
It also helps explain why being a GL is so tough. You can't hope to protect your entire sector because it goes on for eternity!
On the flip side, that must mean that Oa is supposed to be super-duper safe, eh?
I also would suppose the division of these degrees is based on the magnetic poles of Oa as well, though I've never seen that particular aspect explained.
Aren't there 7,200 now? Still not enough to patrol the frickin' universe, but still...
7,200 is double 3,600, so they just have a "smaller" piece of infinity to patrol.
(Of course you can't really make infinity any smaller without expressing it as a formula.)
Okay, if there are 7,200 Green Lanterns, that's equal to 20 percent of the New York City Police Department. about a thousand more than the Philadelphia Police Department, and half as many as the Los Angeles Police Department. But at least if you call 9-1-1, they'll show up in 10 minutes. How long would it take a Green Lantern to arrive from the other side of his space sector?
I mean, when Abin Sur crash landed, nobody from the Green Lantern Corps came to help him!
The thing to remember is that the GL Corps aren't beat cops, even though that's the analogy they seem to be going for in the comics these days. They aren't there to stop "routine crime"; they are to counter interstellar threats that are beyond the scope of normal planetary defenses.
If you think about it, complaining there are only 7, 200 or 3,600 of them is like complaining that with only seven members, the JLA can't possibly prevent every mugging.
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