Green Lantern (3/5)
Over the last decade, the summer and holiday months have
been littered with the cast off remains of failed franchises. Eager for the consistent influx of cash that
popular series like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Twilight bring in over the course of
years, or even decades, studios have been caught counting their chickens long
before they have hatched, hoping that whatever rebooted 80s cartoon, young
adult novel, or underused superhero will leaven the strain of actually
producing new material. Some of these
failures have taken on the veneer of cult success (I would argue this in the
case of the Wachowski’s Speed Racer
or Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer),
where others fail to live up to the promise of their source material (such as Jonah Hex or The Golden Compass), and still others should never have been put
into production in the first place (Prince
of Persia, Battlefield Earth). And while there have been rumors of a Green Lantern sequel, I have the feeling
that the first film’s poor showing at the box office will dissuade the bean
counters from risking another go at DC’s space cop. And that’s a shame, not because the first
film was such a triumph, but because, despite plenty of flaws, there’s a lot of
potential in the Green Lantern, even
if much of it is squandered by the movie’s end.
I watched Green
Lantern after reading some damning reviews, so imagine my surprise when,
for at least the first half of the film, the movie turned out to be an engaging
balance of sci-fi spectacle and carefully executed character building. We begin the film in the far reaches of space
where some alien astronauts stumble upon a trapped entity known as Parallax who
feeds on these victims and escapes.
Parallax proceeds to chase down and mortally wound the Green Lantern who
had trapped him in the first place, Abin Sur. Sur manages to escape from Parallax and crash
land on Earth where he, knowing how little time he has left, instructs his
ring, the source of a Green Lantern’s power, to find a suitable replacement.
The ring eventually chooses Hal Jordan, a test pilot for
experimental aircraft. Hal’s portrayed
as a womanizer whose talents as a pilot far outstrip his discipline. He works for Ferris Aircraft and has some
romantic history with the boss’s daughter, Carol Ferris, who also happens to
balance her career helping run the family business with her roles as a test
pilot along with Hal. The two must run a
demonstration for the government in hopes that Uncle Sam will buy their
non-manned fighter pilot drones (take that China!). While the ultimate goal of this demonstration
is to show how good the drones are, Hal decides to break the rules of
engagement by taking his jet much higher than permitted, which allows him to
take out the drones, but also forces him to crash his plane in the
process. Naturally, Carol is upset when
Hal not only uncovers flaws in their product but also trashes a multi-million
dollar piece of equipment.
Hal is played by Ryan Reynolds, who got his start as a
cartoony wiseass in sitcoms and teen comedies but has since attempted to break
his way into marginally more serious action work, and he has spent years trying
to prove himself as a potential blockbuster lead. Here his ability to crack a joke not only
serves to accentuate his character’s freewheeling nature, but also helps ground
the more absurdist aspects of a comic book character who was created fifty
years ago. The movie manages to be funny
without becoming jokey. Reynolds also
happens to have great chemistry with love interest Carol Ferris, played by
Blake Lively. The two of them have a surprisingly
emotionally complicated scene at a local bar for pilots that could have been
sliced into a more dramatic film without much trouble. The central love story reminded me of the
scenes in another film by directors Martin Campbell, the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, whose romance between
Bond and Vesper served as the heart of the film.
It’s not long after he downs the company jet that Hal is
swept away by Abin Sur’s ring and taken to the crash site of Sur’s escape pod
where the dying alien tells him how to use the ring. After figuring out the basics Hal is whisked
away to the planet Oa, the headquarters of the Guardians, a race of blue aliens
who forged the Green Lantern rings in order to form the Green Lantern Corps, a
group tasked with policing the entire universe.
The planet Oa is beautifully filmed, a strange mixture of darkened
crags, smooth surfaces of technology, and tasteful waves of color. It is as if an aurora borealis went off in an
Apple store after hours. Here Hal learns
of the history of the Green Lanterns and begins his training with Kilowog, a
beast of an alien with the face of a pig, the body of a brick wall, and the
voice, conveniently enough, of Michael Clark Duncan.
It’s at this point in the movie where I excitedly awaited for
the film to really take off. Until now
there had been some exciting action and nice character work. Hal had been firmly established as a screw
up, adrift in life, hoping for something bigger, and now that fate has handed
him the chance to join the Green Lantern Corps, he presumably has a chance to
right his course in life. But in an
incredibly contrived moment, he decides that he’s not up to snuff, quits the
corps and returns to Earth (although, strangely enough, he is allowed to keep
the ring). Instead of the epic space
opera I was expecting, the filmmakers decides on something far more quotidian:
a superhero movie. The rest of the film
goes through the usual superhero motions: the main character reveals himself to
the public by bravely saving hundreds of people and afterwards visits the love
interest/damsel in distress. Green Lantern is a decidedly
schizophrenic movie. Where the first
half of the film provides the perfect set up for the “hero’s journey,” a story
about one character being plucked from the mundane world and lifted into an
exciting realm of adventure, the second half of the film seems content on playing
superhero connect the dots. There is
even a second villain, a scientist who becomes infected by Parallax, who is
obviously there to make sure the action doesn’t stray too far from Earth.
I’m convinced that the studio didn’t really know what they
had with the Green Lantern. Unlike
Batman, Spider-Man, or even Superman, the Green Lantern Corps lends itself to
interplanetary superheroics more in the vein of Star Wars and Flash Gordon
than Iron Man. But this is also what makes the character
exciting. Where we have seen the basic
outline of a superhero movie time and again, Green Lantern offers the chance of
more science fiction tropes, which could potentially differentiate him from the
glut of other superhero movies. Instead
of shying away from the imaginatively bizarre, the filmmakers should have
embraced the alien aspects of the Green Lantern mythos. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Green Lantern is that it represents a
missed opportunity. The few moments we
spend in space are exciting because of their promise of the weird, and because
they are one of the few images of space made by people who have actually looked
at photographs from the Hubble Telescope.
Instead of peregrine flights of fancy, the movie clings tight to
formula, and suffered for it, both artistically and at the box office.
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