Agenda Movie Club: Green Lantern

Green Lantern

Martin Campbell

2011

The cool thing about Green Lantern is all the awesome stuff he can make with his ring. Right? So, what I don’t understand is why you would spend so much time not doing a whole bunch of awesome stuff with his ring.

I counted maybe three times they used Hal Jordan’s ring in an interesting way (the race track to stop the helicopter, the catapult to throw back Parallax’s ball of evil fear energy, and the pool of water to save Angela Bassett). The couple of times he turned his energy into a gun don’t count, those were boring. Who thought all this was a good idea? I would have spent about 60% of the movie doing cool shit with the ring.

The other good thing about Green Lantern is that there’s a whole ton of them. From all over the universe.

So imagine what a missed opportunity it was to spend almost all of the movie on boring Ryan Reynolds (really, he’s just supremely dull– not offensively bad like, say, Paul Walker, just really, really not interesting) and his abs instead of alien Green Lanterns and cool ring shit.

What a missed opportunity.

I don’t really mean the alien part. Obviously, they’re going to make the movie about Hal Jordan, and I’m fine with that. I could have even stood Ryan Reynolds, I guess, as long as he was making more neat ring stuff. But really. That’s not even close to what happened.

Peter Sarsgaard shows again that he’s usually better than everyone else he’s on screen with by making the bulb-headed Hector Hammond an interesting character (even while he’s mutating and breaking down). Some fantastic lines, delivered with panache. I hope Sarsgaard got paid a whole ton of money. But did it seem to anyone else like a whole lot of the Hector Hammond subplot got cut? I felt like there were huge chunks of the story missing.

My favorite thing in the movie came early on when we’d only had scenes in space, and something apocalyptic happened (I think Parallax escaped his bonds) and then we cut to black and it says, “SIX MONTHS LATER.” Yes. Six months. Because that is a meaningful statement when we’re dealing with intergalactic space travel. Unless there’s something I don’t get about how things like “days” and “months” work. Which is possible.

I didn’t hate Green Lantern at all. It was not terrible. About what I expected. But after so many super hero movies, why make one that just isn’t any different from any other one? They could have done much more. As it is, I just don’t see a lot of reason for this one to have existed. Martin Campbell is not a bad director– he made Casino Royale which was fantastic. But there wasn’t much of that vision here. Maybe everyone was just getting paid.