Creation is an act of sheer will
GREEN LANTERN
Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, and Temuera Morrison
Reviewed by Matt Brown
June 16 2011
Screened in Real-D at an AVX theatre. Oops. I tried to see it in 2-D; I really did. Proper projection is becoming a dinosaur.
Neither a spectacular disaster nor any kind of a good time, Green Lantern is an ugly film that reeks of compromise and committee thinking. I have rarely seen a safer picture. Confronted by galaxy-spanning adventure and homebound secret-identity capering - opportunities for raw weirdness and sneaky fun of the highest order - the makers of this film have made a product that never lifts itself up, never whispers a word into our ear about what makes Green Lantern a cool idea. It makes me wonder if anyone involved was ever "wowed" by the work they were doing. Green Lantern seems instead to be an amalgam of the surest choices made under constrained circumstances, to meet presumed requirements. It gets the job done, after a fashion; there's a Green Lantern movie now. But boy, that doesn't seem to be much to get excited about any more.
The story, for those unfamiliar, finds Hal Jordan blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Green Lantern. It would have taken someone with a real set of balls to give us anything other than Origin Story, Version XVIII, for this project, but those balls are not swinging on this one. If you've seen any film between Spider-Man and Iron Man, you will spend most of Green Lantern twenty minutes ahead of the characters. I'd also argue that in Green Lantern's case, the de rigueur insistence upon telling us how Hal got his magic glowing ring is actually working against the film's ability to find a general audience: telling us how strange all this is will only make people notice it faster. He's a superhero with a ring who can make energy projections with his mind. Jeez, skip the essay and just have Green Lantern fight something, will ya?
Green Lantern is directed by Martin Campbell, a workman director who delivers a superhero film utterly devoid of flavour. Flavour is substantially important in these cases: think of the chilly thunder of Batman Begins, or the pop-rocks fizz of Thor. On paper, there may be no such thing as a really good superhero story, but the entries that have risen above the others are the ones given particular dimension, and whimsy of spirit, by their directors. Campbell is not batting in that echelon, nor, I think, even claiming to be able to. He was hired to do a job, and does it as he's done the ones before. He leaves opportunity after opportunity on the table as he busies himself with delivering the labourious machinations of his overstuffed plot.
The best example occurs early in the film. Hal Jordan, fresh out of failure school, pops by his brother's house for a bit of family downtime. After a ham-handed chat with his cherubic nephew, Hal wanders out into the street and is immediately snatched up by a glowing orb of green energy, which drags him to his green-ringed destiny. The emphasis here is on the word immediately. Whatever emotional breath we might have drawn in Hal's vulnerable state, spent with the people who know him best, is never given the chance to exhale. The plot grabs him - again, literally - so quickly that the entire sequence with the family might just as well never have happened.
Hal finds himself on the planet Oa in a neon-green CGI space-suit. Here, at least, is a beautiful idea, beautifully executed. Green Lantern's costume, an extension of his ring's ability to construct objects and weapons, pulses and breathes with the power of will that Hal, like all of the Green Lanterns, is channelling. The effect varies wildly in execution, but nonetheless, there's a quantifiable "gee whiz, cool!" factor to the look and feel of the Corps that really kicks into high gear in the film's final act, when Green Lantern finally gets to start fighting some super-baddies. For about ten or fifteen minutes, you can smell what a Green Lantern movie should have been like.
But getting there is hard. The film is over-laden with plotlines, even at a scant running time of an hour and forty-five minutes. The chief offender is creepy doctor Hector Hammond and his transformation into a supervillain; the whole throughline is unnecessary and does not serve the story in any useful way. Peter Sarsgaard, nominally a fairly inconsequential actor, brings surprising investment to the role, but Green Lantern has already settled on the giant glowing ball of space-snot called Parallax as its principal villain and plot driver. The berserk and increasingly diabolical Hammond, for any richness that Sarsgaard brings, is just a needless distraction.
As Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds sends his punches flying as hard as he can, albeit under extremely limited performance opportunities. I appreciate the fact that he came to play, and that he gives his scenes more than what's on the page, which is more than can be said for a lot of the cast and crew. Blake Lively, too, is a surprisingly likable Carol Ferris - or maybe it's just that she's so skull-scaldingly hot. If the filmmakers want my moviebucks for any proposed sequel, they need to think seriously about advancing Carol to the Star Sapphire portion of her career.
But hold up a second, on that last point. The people behind Green Lantern seem so certain that this is the first strike in a long and successful franchise that they even have the Star Sapphire logo emblazoned on Carol's fighter helmet. There are call-outs to the future throughout the movie, and whole scenes and plot points that exist for no reason other than that they pay off a larger Green Lantern movie to be made later. The people who made this film should consider - as should all filmmakers, everywhere, on every project - what it would be like if they were not guaranteed a raft of sequels just for having shown up with a comic book movie? What is it about this story that makes it worth telling? If the film weren't franchise-baiting, how would it have treated Hector Hammond, or Carol, or the quantifiably unsupportable "stinger" featuring Sinestro going yellow, mid-way through the end credits?
If you only had this Green Lantern story to tell, right now, how would you tell it? These questions would have yielded a better movie.