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Green Lantern
| Released |
17 June 2011 |
| Director |
Martin Campbell |
| Starring |
Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong |
| Writer(s) |
Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg |
| Producer(s) |
Greg Berlanti, Donald De Line |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
115 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, crime, sci-fi |
| Rating |
12A |
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Poochie.
The Green Lantern never really hit the upper echelons of comic book super heroics, in the tip of your tongue stakes falling some distance below the big three; Spiderman, Superman and Batman, and (Marvel and DC divide allowed) not being a member of a recognizable team like the X-Men or The Fantastic Four. Well, at least, in my humble opinion, and if I am offending a great internet grouping of Green Lantern aficionados somewhere, I'm very sorry.
So slight lack of personal significance understood, I found myself asking what exactly does The Green Lantern bring to the table? Well, our boy Hal Jordan (the unmasked counterpart who holds the Green Lantern mantle) owns a pretty nifty ring which allows mind/matter manipulation and is part of a galaxy-wide peace keeping force called The Green Lantern Corps who fight various villains (domestic and intergalactic) and generally fly around being pretty awesome. Other than that Hal is an aeronautics test pilot and hangs out with main squeeze Carol Ferris (played by Gossip Girl's Blake Lively). So, basically, as premises go, it all sounds pretty fun, right?
Well, it could be in the right hands, I guess, but in this instance, honestly, not so much. When I initially sat down, popcorn at the ready, 3D glasses donned, I was ready to be awed, but the first few minutes of Green Lantern quickly changed my mind. In fact, one comparison came constantly to mind; Poochie, the anthropomorphic dog designed by mass market research and injected into The Simpsons cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy to boost ailing ratings. Poochie was cool, hip, radical and kerrazzy (or at least he constantly announced he was) but was so cynically designed by marketing executives and lazy writers to have all the trappings of cool that he was totally despised and ultimately cut in his second episode (to much applause by all).
To round up an unwieldy metaphor, Ryan Reynold's Hal Jordan is a lot like Poochie, and the writers spend a surfeit amount of time convincing everyone how awesome he is in a manner so trite, hackneyed and embarrassing that I'm sure it will make many recoil. So much so that by the movie's predictable close I began to ponder that, perhaps, if in place of harnessing the power of his 'will' to operate the glowing green ring Hal receives from crashed extra-terrestrial Abin Sur, to defeat the arcane villainy of the world destroying Parallax, Ryan Reynolds could somehow harness the far superior and possibly infinite might of his utter douchery we'd have a much quicker resolution. Additionally and although the plight of feminism often goes unheard in comic books movies, with countlessly cipheric girlfriends floating around feyly awaiting rescue from their appropriate hero, Green Lantern's female characters are so woefully underdeveloped as to be of particular note, and fail The Bechdel Test dramatically in almost every instance (if you don't know what it is, have a google).
To end on a positive, if you can avoid most of the main characters, writing and any subsidiary Ryan Reynolds smugness leaking from the screen, the CGI 3-D sequences in Green Lantern are genuinely spectacular, really capturing the pop cultural majesty of the comic book's outer space shenanigans and, as things go, Peter Sarsgaard makes for a pretty unpleasant villain.
- Cormac O’Brien |
