Jan 31, 2012 17:48
A pilot is chosen to be the new protector of our planetary sector by the Green Lantern Corps, a group made up of thousands of aliens designated to protect the universe that garner their power from the green power of will.
That plot synopsis was hard to write because even though it’s a comic book movie the premise is pretty ridiculous. The movie starts with narration explaining the plot because it’s so bizarre we would never understand it otherwise. Some evil yellow planet eating creature escapes his moon prison and it’s up to the Green Lantern Corps to stop it. Our first introduction to Ryan Reynolds/Hal Jordan is him waking up next to his nameless but blonde one night stand and running out. He then drives around recklessly, Tony Stark style, before arriving at the airbase where he's supposed to pilot a regular plane to test out new stealth planes. After some expository dialogue about how he’s the best pilot around with the lead female character in the movie who is obviously his love interest/childhood friend/ex-lover/co-pilot/ heiress of the aviation company he works for (yes all of these things, not to mention the only female in the movie) we move into the next scene where he sacrifices his co-pilot, recklessly destroys a plane and puts his life in danger to prove a point.
He chokes up thinking about his dead father who used to be a great pilot, although this story plot goes absolutely nowhere. After some more back and forth banter about his reckless endangerment, we move to a scene where he goes to his nephew’s birthday party. His relatives(?) give him more expository dialogue about how he almost died in a crash. Then he gives his nephew a present. This scene also goes absolutely nowhere and I honestly don’t know why it’s even in the movie. We never see these characters again and this scene adds nothing to the film except to show he was late to the party and disappointed his nephew. So the first 20 minutes of the film essentially sets up that Hal Jordan is a careless, reckless narcissist. The original Green Lantern dies and the ring selects Hal as his successor bestowing the powers of green upon him. The film later beats us over the head that the ring chose him because he was brave and noble. This doesn’t really work when the entire intro of his character shows that he lacks morality. I love how the film opens with him waking up next to a nameless bimbo so I already hate him. His first romance scene with Blake Lively involves him getting mad and walking out on her leaving her at the bar. I almost feel like he originally hit her and they cut that part out of the movie. His first use of his powers is to beat up some guys who were upset with him about losing their jobs because of his reckless endangerment episode earlier. I kind of felt like these guys had a right to be mad. He screwed up at the company and everyone except him was fired for it. Not that it justifies them picking a fight or him beating them up but, where exactly was the film going with this?
I have to wonder, why didn’t they just open the movie with him at his nephew’s birthday party. They could have shown he was close to his nephew and the kid was worried about his test flight. He could have out maneuvered the stealth planes without being a jerk about it. He could have used his green lantern powers for the first time by helping someone who was being robbed or something.
We then get an introduction to the Green Lantern Corps. Aliens both explaining what they do and training Hal. The Green Lantern costume is terrible looking and I honestly have no idea whey they didn’t just have him wear a real mask instead of a CGI one. It looks ridiculously bad. But then there’s really no point to him even wearing a mask at all because every character in the movie knows his identity. So we see a training montage which is surprisingly the most interesting part of the movie. I have to admit that I really liked Mark Strong’s performance as Sinestro. I bought his character and he was kind of bad ass in a weird space alien with green powers kind of way. After having his ass handed to him by Sinestro, Hal decides to “quit” being a superhero even though he never was one to begin with. He honestly didn’t do anything besides beat up some ex co-workers up until this point.
Meanwhile, Peter Sarsgaard is selected for no reason to do the alien autopsy on the former, now dead, Green Lantern that Hal got his powers from. Well, I guess Peter was chosen because Tim Robbins is his dad and he’s some kind of senator or something with ties to Blake Lively’s dad. This forms some kind of forced love triangle not mentioned previously between him, Hal and Blake. Later in the film he literally says something along the lines of “I always loved her but you got in the way” although this triangle of conflict is never set up fluidly or makes any sense given Peter is significantly older than both of them. It think he was supposed to have grown up with them too but I’m not sure. Anyway, during the autopsy the evil power of yellow invades Peter’s body giving him telekinetic mind reading powers and a super inflated head. He uses his powers to do something evil, like read minds and throw one of his students in class. Later he hates his dad for no reason other than he couldn’t live up to his expectations and crashes a helicopter at a party. Green Lantern shows up and saves the day by making the plane land on a race track. It is as ridiculous and stupid as it sounds. By the way, the Green Lantern’s power is that he can make anything he imagines in his mind appear in green. So after he stops the plane from crashing via prolonged race track he takes off. Then he decides to use his power to hit on Blake Lively. They sit in front of a nice CGI sunset and talk about their past relationship.
Oh yeah, that evil yellow cloud is still roaming around so don’t forget about it since we’ll need to remember it’s a threat for the ending battle. I guess Peter is controlled by the evil yellow cloud so that Hal can have a tangible human villain to face instead of just spending the whole moving fighting a cloud. Otherwise the film might be even more silly than it already is. So Hal and Peter fight where neither one of them wins or they both lose, I can’t really tell, and they just lay on the floor talking.
Back on the alien planet Sinestro takes about five generic Green Lanterns to fight the yellow cloud instead of all three thousand Green Lanterns. They all die except him. He decides that he needs more power and wants to harness the color yellow which represents fear even though the ancient guardians stated in the intro that green, the color of will, was chosen because it is the strongest color. They also reveal that one of their elder guardians previously tried to harness the power of yellow and it overcame him creating the cloud monster that everyone’s been fighting the whole movie. Despite all these logical arguments as to why the color of yellow can’t be harnessed and corrupts everyone to evil, they decide to forge a yellow ring for Sinestro as sequel bait. This makes even less sense when Sinestro puts the ring on to succumb to the evil powers of yellow at the end of the movie after the cloud monster is destroyed and there’s no longer a threat to the universe at all. It’s just like Borimir in Lord of the Rings trying to get the ring to save his people from Sauron, only if it took place after Sauron was already destroyed.
Anyway Hal faces off against Peter again only this time inside of a hangar bay with Blake being held captive instead of a science lab with Tim Robbins being in peril. Hal gives him the ring but then uses it to blast him because apparently he can still control the power even if he isn’t wearing it. The yellow cloud shows up and kills Peter because… he failed? Apparently Hal can’t command the ring to return to his finger on it’s own even though he can control it's powers and the yellow cloud captures him getting ready to eat his lifeforce or whatever. Blake, not wanting to be a totally useless female character in the movie starts up a computer to activate a jet engine in an overcomplicated and painfully slow manner. This blows the cloud away.
But not far because the cloud starts eating people in the city. Hal distracts it making it chase him into space and fly itself into the sun with Hal narrowly escaping. What a stupid master villain. It basically killed itself. The argument being the gravitational pull from the sun trapped it and sucked it in when it got too close but, still a pretty stupid villain if I ever saw one. They could have just had the three thousand green lanterns put a force bubble around it and push it into the sun. Having saved the day, the movie ends.
I have to say that the Green Lantern was the least worst superhero movie I’ve seen this year. That’s not saying much, but since my expectations were so low I enjoyed the movie. Blake Lively was a good female character simply because she was not annoying. They didn’t bother to try and tie in other DC movies, which is a plus from Marvel. I half expected Green Lantern to say something like, “Why’d you choose me instead of Batman” but thankfully we were spared. His power usage was either really stupid or kind of neat. The story was flawed to say the least. The acting wasn’t bad, particularly Mark Strong. The movie did seem to lack direction. Even with a ridiculous premise like “The Power of Green” the movie still could have been coherent. I think it spent a lot of time focusing on the wrong things. The Hal character isn’t really likeable from the start and people only like him because he’s Ryan Reynolds. I feel like Ryan Reynolds is like Seth Rogan. You aren’t watching a character, you’re watching Ryan Reynolds. At least he isn’t anywhere near as annoying as Seth Rogan though. Off topic but the Green Hornet movie was so horrendous and painful to watch I couldn’t even finish it, otherwise I would have reviewed it. It was intolerable when Seth spouted his “Who the hell makes my coffee” line but I just had to shut it off when he started sexually harassing Cameron Diaz during her job interview.
Anyway, Green Lantern was a fun watch but only because I was starving for a Superhero comic book movie and this is literally the least worst to be released that year. I still haven’t seen Thor but I’ll review that next. And although the story was flawed and silly it was at least somewhat coherent and not all over the place.