Green Lantern (2011) **/*****
The Green Lantern Corps are an intergalactic police force that harness a powerful green energy composed of the universe’s collected willpower to keep peace across the cosmos. This isn’t a new crew of guys, they’ve been around for a long time, and they’re the brainchild of a group of little blue immortals called The Guardians. Despite the lengthy history of their organization, never before has there been a human member. Humans are a young species, weak and stupid, like the galactic version of infants. We’re so ignorant of what’s going on out there that we’re not even sure if there are other life forms in the universe or not. And there are. Ones that look like big fish, big bugs, big pigs, ones that look like mean guys with pointy ears and pencil thin mustaches. The Corps’ most deadly enemy is an entity named Parallax who harnesses the yellow energy of fear. He’s been imprisoned for quite a while, but now he is free, feeding off the fear of the universe, and planning revenge against the Green Lanterns who imprisoned him. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a free spirit, maybe a bit of a lost soul. He’s not so great with the responsibility thing, but he’s one of the best test pilots out there, and he’s the first human to be chosen to become a part of the prestigious Green Lantern Corps, at a time when their most powerful enemy is threatening the existence of the entire universe. It seems like Hal should be in for a pretty wild ride, but he’s not. Actually, Green Lantern is boring as hell.
Green Lantern fails for me mostly because the script just isn’t any good. It’s clunky, strangely paced, and the dialogue is more often cringe inducing than it is effective. From the very opening scene we are faced with expositional narration that sets up the mythology of these heroes and the threat that they face. We’re introduced to the villainous cloud-thing Parallax, and even though we get its history explained to us, at length, he and his history still come off as ill-defined mumbo jumbo. So, essentially, you’re sitting through a bunch of talking that adds up to nothing and feels like a waste of your time; or, at best, an effective alternative to counting sheep. If Parallax comes in contact with sentient beings it can feed off of their fear and gain power. All it would take for him to free himself and run amok is for somebody to stumble upon him. So what was the Green Lantern’s foolproof plan for keeping this ultra-dangerous being under lock and key after they finally defeated him? Putting him down in a cave and hoping that nobody would stumble across him for the rest of the entire history of the universe. Great plan, fool proof, I’m shocked that he escaped. What we get right away is boring and doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Not a good sign.
The introduction of Hal Jordan isn’t as bad comparatively. When we meet him he is waking up on top of a gorgeous girl he hardly knows, he’s late for work, and we’re then treated to a scene of him recklessly driving set to some sort of pop-punk monstrosity of a song. It felt dated now; I can’t imagine how it’s going to play in ten years; but at least it moves, it’s easy to follow, and it feels like we’re watching a summer movie. The first act continues to progress well enough after this. We get some scenes of Hal flying jets, we’re introduced to his sometime love interest Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), his tech minded friend Tom Kalmaku (Taika Waititi), an alien Green Lantern named Abin Sur (Temeura Morrison), we get a spaceship crash, Hal getting a Green Lantern ring, and his first experiences hanging out on the Green Lantern planet Oa. All in all, it’s some pretty interesting stuff, and though it’s not presented as skillfully as I would have liked, it’s perfectly acceptable for summertime, super hero movie shenanigans.
The second act is where things really fall apart. When Hal goes to Oa he not only is confronted with a vast legion of alien Green Lantern’s, he has personal interactions with a trio of pretty interesting characters. There’s focused, demanding Sinestro (Mark Strong), who seems to be the defacto leader of the Corps. There’s the gruff, drill sergeant Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan) who seems to enjoy breaking down new recruits. And there’s the scaled and beaked Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush), who mostly just seems stereotypically British. They’re a fun bunch of characters who are well realized, they’re living in a rich, alien environment, and they seem to be having a constant series of action packed adventures. There was a great movie involving this cast of characters and their space-police exploits on OA. Unfortunately that’s not the movie we get, the movie we get is one about Ryan Reynolds hanging out on Earth and having a bunch of mopey conversations about whether or not he has what it takes to be a Green Lantern. The extended, lengthy second act of this film is clunky, poorly performed dialogue scene after clunky, poorly performed dialogue scene. The summer movie fun grinds to a complete halt as you watch Hal talk to his ‘nilla Wafer bland compatriots about what it would be like to be a Green Lantern. We get a scene of him showing off his new Green Lantern powers to his friend Tom. It’s ended with the most awkward, apropos of nothing comment from Tom that Hal is now a super hero and, “Don’t they always get the girl?” Flash cut to a scene of Hal landing on Carol’s balcony. Really? That got past the first draft of the screenwriting process? Nobody talks like that. They just needed a way to end the current conversation and go somewhere else, and they handled it the most mindless way possible. And then we’re treated to another scene where Hal explains his Green Lantern powers to Carol. So we get the Green Lantern thing explained to us on Oa, then we listen to it get explained again to Tom, and then again to Carol. Can we please just get this guy in space and have him start doing something already? Between the four different writers credited as working on the script, it doesn’t seem like any of them were able to figure out how.
By the time we do finally get to our action climax, it didn’t even make any sense to me as to how we’d gotten there. When Abin Sur, the alien who crash landed on Earth and bequeathed his power ring to Hal, has his dead alien body taken in by the government, they bring in xenobiologist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) to study the corpse. Due to his exposure to the yellow gunk Parallax left inside Abin Sur’s death wound, Hammond’s head grows to a ridiculous size and he develops telekinetic and telepathic powers. Seeing as he’s a greasy nerd who’s been picked on his whole life, this experience causes him to turn into a villain. Eventually he takes over the secret government installation that is housing the body, starts tossing people around, and generally gets really violent… and then Green Lantern bursts through the wall to stop him. Why was he even there? How did he know the location of the secret base? How did he know that bad stuff was going on there? We see his ring beep once, was that it? His ring just has to beep once and then he knows that there is trouble going on and exactly where so that he can go and stop it? That’s not the case in any iteration of “Green Lantern” that I’ve ever read. And if it’s the case here, then I wasn’t aware of it. That means the Lantern powers, as they exist in this film, are pretty arbitrary and ill defined. But most likely it was just lazy screenwriting. “How do we get Green Lantern into the base for the big action scene?” “Just have his ring beep to tell him there’s trouble and have him show up, nobody will be thinking about it enough to care.” If there was some other reason that the Lantern knew to show up for this fight that I missed, I apologize. Honestly I was really bored and pretty tuned out of the film at this point. But once the fighting started I perked up. It was actually presented well. I liked the fight between Hal and Hammond, and once Parallax showed up at the end of it I was thirsty for more. But then Hal and Parallax have a bit of a tussle, and the entire film was over before I knew it. This movie takes a really, really long time to get to it’s action scenes; and then once we’re finally there it was all over before I even realized it. This gigantic Green Lantern Corps of warriors is established early on, your appetite is deliberately whetted to watch them perform as a unit, and then we never even get to see them in action. I couldn’t believe it. I was incredulous.
The other thing that really stuck in my craw, other than the fact that this movie was really boring, was that it got downright embarrassing every time it delved into dramatic material. A big part of Hal’s character is that he is haunted by the plane crash death of his father, who was also a test pilot. They don’t pull any of it off. It’s pretty much the heart of the character they’ve created, and I understand that they had to cover it, but they do it in the most melodramatic way possible. There are ways to convey that a character is haunted by the death of his father more subtly and effectively than having him freeze up and go into convulsions every time he’s in danger, and then to show us super dramatic, slow motion recreations of his memory of screaming while his dad blows up right in front of him. The dramatic, character-building moments of this film were so cheese filled that they felt like parody, and the scenes later on when Hal ruminates over them with Blake Lively, of all people, play even worse.
Which brings me to the acting. It’s not great. Ryan Reynolds isn’t a terrible actor, he’s shown some range in things like Buried, but I just don’t really like him. Hal Jordan called for a brash, charming, Harrison Ford type. Reynolds isn’t brash and charming, he’s a smarmy frat guy. That worked well for his breakout role in Van Wilder, but it hasn’t done much for me in anything since. An actor like Harrison Ford is able to play these anti-heroes as cocky, but kind hearted. They’ve got protective walls built up, they’ve got a big opinion of themselves, but when push comes to shove they’re going to put other people before themselves. There’s just something about Reynolds that I don’t find likable. He takes cocky too far and makes it snide and sarcastic. His characters have big opinions of themselves, but it doesn’t play as coming from insecurity, it plays as coming from self-satisfied douchiness. To offset this we get a scene of him being a super nice guy at his young nephew’s birthday party that was manipulative, corny nonsense. When it comes down to it, I just don’t think he was the right choice for this character.
Blake Lively is horrible in this. She has all the life and personality in her eyes of a sea bass. The only other thing I’ve seen her in is The Town, and I was kind of impressed with her as the strung out, trashy, ex-girlfriend there, but she displays none of the character or energy in this that she mustered up there. She’s not just a blank page as Carol Ferris, she’s a black hole. Lively and Reynolds have negative chemistry. I wasn’t too fond of either of them on their own, but when they got together and started trading dialogue and flirtations they both got even worse. The dialogue scenes they share in the second act of this film are a huge chore to sit through, and if there’s anything a movie shouldn’t be it’s a chore.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Peter Sarsgaard is pretty awesome as Hector Hammond, and he ended up being one of the only things that I liked. He seemed to be the only person having any fun shooting this movie. He really jumped into the socially awkward, creepy, dangerous nature of his character and ended up making one of the film’s subplots shine as the best stuff it had to offer. When Sarsgaard, without using his hands, takes a sip from a martini glass sitting on a ledge at a fancy party, I guffawed. When he sniffed Carol’s hair when she hugged him hello I cringed. Sarsgaard seemed to be the only person to know that he was in a dumb comic book movie and that he should just have fun with it. Everyone else played this dumb material as so serious and important that it was off putting. People liked Iron Man so much because it was just Robert Downey Jr. having fun through the whole movie. On the opposite end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight was super serious, but everyone loved it because it was actually good. You can’t merge B-level writing with a super serious approach to ridiculous material. It produces the worst results imaginable.
And though I feel that every work of art stands on its own as something unique and shouldn’t be beholden to whatever material that it’s adapting, I also feel like I should say a little bit about what this movie got wrong in adapting the comic books; because what it got wrong is the character of Hal Jordan. They called this character Hal Jordan, and they followed the basic timeline of his origin story, but this character in no way felt like or acted like the Hal Jordan of the comic book universe. It cut out all of the stuff that makes him cool. I mentioned Harrison Ford earlier in the review, and that’s because Hal Jordan is Indiana Jones. He’s not worried about the particulars; he’s making this stuff up as he goes. Hal Jordan is the most self-assured, fearless man on the planet. If anything, he’s overconfident. Hal’s conflict doesn’t come from being unsure about his position in the world; it comes from barreling into things bull headed, full steam ahead, and getting himself into trouble by not thinking. This entire movie is centered on Hal almost instantly losing faith in himself and then sitting around and navel-gazing about whether or not he really should have been chosen to be a hero. That’s the absolute opposite of the Hal Jordan character that people have loved for decades, and it’s much less fun to watch. The screenwriters of this film didn’t just ruin the character of Hal Jordan; they made their movie way lamer than it had to be.
So, I don’t really like the lead actors chosen, I thought the script was terrible, and largely I was bored by what should have been a thrilling tale of super powered space cops battling a seemingly unstoppable threat. That makes Green Lantern a failure as a summer blockbuster. But the coup de grâce, the final nail in the coffin, came during the post credits scene. You know what I’m talking about, that extra little tantalizing scene that these super hero movies have started giving us after the credits that point forward to possible sequels. This one is a huge character moment that should have gigantic repercussions for the rest of the potential franchise. And it’s presented with absolutely no build, no weight whatsoever, in the middle of the credits. What happens during the credits of this film would be akin to having Vader tell Luke that he’s his father and then cutting off his hand in a 20 second scene after the credits of A New Hope. This scene didn’t just solidify Green Lantern as a disappointing addition to the super hero genre; it solidified it as a terrible example of studio driven, committee filmmaking in general. Green Lantern is a special kind of stupid.
