I really wanted this one to work, I honestly wanted my bad feelings about it to be wrong; for a start having a decent DC franchise on the big screen other than Batman and Superman, that would have been awesome! But no, it was not to be...
I'm actually going to start with something that didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would; the CGI! There's been lots of complaints about Hal's CG costume, and the look of Oa and such, but oddly it didn't bother me too much. I put this down to two reasons; one, I had already been prepared for it from all the trailers and such, and two, there was just so much else wrong that the effects are almost a side note! That being said, there's one effect in particular I nearly burst out laughing at every time; Parallax! He's a cloud with a head poking out, he looks ridiculous, especially in all his dialogue scenes!
Speaking of trailers and established characters; you the saying of "seen the trailer, seen the movie"? Well here, that's almost literally true for a lot of the established Green Lantern characters; Tomar Re and Kilowog (you know, I hadn't appreciated how unfortunate that name is until I heard it said out loud in here...) get like a total of 3-4 more minutes than what you've seen in the trailers! Sinestro and the Guardians are the only others to get any more time, the rest of the corps are basically extras or cannon fodder!
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A better look at him than you get in the movie... |
Onto the mythos, the thing that kills this movie stone dead is the pacing; it flings us right into the Green Lantern universe from the word go, and expects us to just keep up with huge amounts of exposition chucked at us from the very start. It then makes no attempt to segue into the stuff on Earth, it just cuts straight there like it's any other scene; then, when we get our first glimpse of Oa, it's not some grandiose reveal, we just cut to it like it's any other location! The movie doesn't use the ready made viewpoint character of Hal Jordan, first Human GL in training to pace itself that way, introduce this stuff to us as it is to him! In terms of merging big grandiose sci-fi setting with the real world, Thor did this miles better!
The whole film has this really choppy stop-start pacing, which I'm not sure is more the fault of the editing or the script. Evidence for the former does come in the form of more than a few moments like the introduction of Hal's extended family, who we never see again after this scene, which makes it entirely pointless unless we assume there's some deleted scenes giving us more of them. Evidence for the latter also comes in this scene, as it includes a "touching" moment with a young nephew idolising Hal which I nearly wet myself laughing at not just because of the horrendous cliché usage, but also for how much it reminded me of a scene from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace!
Another big flaw with the script is characterisation; in here, you get Daddy issues or nothing! Really, that's all the characterisation most of them get! I understand somewhat having it with both the hero and villain, as it adds the sort of dichotomy film school students love, but Hal Jordan and Hector Hammond are so different, this one thing in common just seems like a lazy attempt to make it look like an appropriate match up!
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| Ha ha ha, I have pow- ARRGH, MY HAND!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME? |
The dialogue doesn't help matters either; as the Robot Devil once said, "You can't just have characters announce how they feel; that makes me feel angry!" The way the dialogue keeps battering us over the head with lengthy diatribes about fear, over coming it and such, a lot of it being repeated, it's like a lot of the characters have come down with a major case of Torgo syndrome towards the end (especially Parallax; I lost count of how many "You have fear"'s he had!)! Plus, I defy any actor to make lines like "Yellow Energy of Fear" sound good as their debut line!
Acting wise, everyone's pretty much phoning it in; hell, some of the voice work by Geoffrey Rush and such I wouldn't be surprised if it was done entirely via Skype call. The only exceptions are from Peter Skaarsgard as Hector Hammond, who seems like he belongs in a different, better movie, and Ryan Reynolds, who alternates between looking very lost and confused, and wildly mugging at the camera almost, desperately trying to make the material work!
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| No use hiding Ryan... |
Maybe some of this could have been saved by decent direction, but Martin Campbell, as good as some of his stuff is (The Mask of Zorro, Goldeneye, Casino Royale...) he's one of those directors that's only as good as the screenplays he's given (perfect example compare the utterly brilliant original TV version of Edge of Darkness with the Mel Gibson remake...), and as we've established... All the big action scenes have a very unsatisfactory "so what!" feel to them, with the worst example being what should have been an epic battle between the corps and Parallax, that seemingly gets bored with itself halfway through, and cuts away to Sinestro talking about it before it finishes ("Leaving aside the details of my miraculous escape...")
I was so disappointed with this, even with the bad press! I wanted them to capture the essence of what's made the character and franchise a favourite for 50 years, I wanted to see DC expand their movie range, I wanted it to be like the birth of Marvel movie-verse, think about what that could have lead to...
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| Like this for a start... |
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