Ryan Reynolds stars as the titular hero in question, Green Lantern or better know as Hal Jordan, a test pilot who has a cocky side to his personality that causes great friction in his work and personal life. He witnessed his pilot father blow up mid-flight and this has left deep emotional scars in Hal, who wishes to follow in his father's footsteps. Then we have the love interest, Carol Ferris played (if you want to call it that) by Blake Lively of Gossip Girl fame, who is also a test pilot and the daughter of the company they both work for. This is about as much as I could fathom from the plot. Its very thinly written so its hard to keep track the majority of the time. Whenever Hal and Carol's relationship is on-screen, its tedious and never furthers the plot. Then again, come to think about it, their relationship WAS the plot. But more on that later!
In deep space, the Green Lantern Corp is under attack from a sinister force that is known as Parallax (the stupidest name for a villain and who resembles an Octupus in space) who wishes to destroy them once and for all. Sinestro, played by Mark Strong, plots to destroy Parallax as well. So you have your standard superhero storyline at play here, it never deviates much from this. A purple alien by the name of Abin Sur comes under attack from Parallax, landing on the nearest sector which happens to be Earth, in order to find a successor for his ring in his dying hours. Of course, the ring chooses Hal and he becomes the new Green Lantern, sworn to protect 'in brightest day, in blackest night' and so on. Now so far, you may notice this review is very circumstantial and I'm just writing things down. If I had had a decent plot to follow, I would have made a more structured response. The biggest trouble with Green Lantern is that things JUST HAPPEN. There is no explanation or any cause-and-effect to the narrative. I mean this is Film School 101. Scenes and sequences have to effect each other logically and carry the plot through to its conclusion. Sadly, this never ever happens. An example of this is a scene where Sinestro is talking to a Citadel of aliens concering Parallax and all of a sudden, Hal appears. Now this may sound fine to you, but in the previous scene, he was having trouble (on Earth) accepting his new responsibility and could barely use his abilities. In one cut to a different sequence, he's learned to FLY and not only that but through SPACE and find the ALIEN PLANET in ALL of the UNIVERSE where the Green Lanterns are. I know the story is that if the Corp is in trouble, the rings of the Lanterns glow. This was never shown to happen and the scene JUST HAPPENED. Imagine a good 2/3rds of the film doing that. There's no structure, no coherence. Its so frustrating!
This trend seems to continue with the pointless inclusion of Hector Hammond, played by Peter Sarsgard (the film's other villain) who is a brilliant scientist and becomes infected with another alien lifeform whilst examining the dead body of Abin Sur. He subsequently grows a giant head (no reason! It just happens), plots against the Green Lantern (for some reason thats never really explained) and laughs manically. A lot. He's too eccentric for my liking. The one redeeming feature is the powers he inherits which are pretty cool; the usual telepathic powers you normally see. But for me, this is all just lazy filmmaking. In simple terms, the film is all over the place.
Onto some technical points. The film's budget, as said earlier, was $200million. Firstly, whatever that got spent on does not show at all. This is the cheapest looking $200mil movie you will ever see in your life. It really is shocking how bad some of the CGI is. It looks grainy and just totally unreal, even for a superhero movie. This was never helped by the $100million marketing campaign that was (never) set up to promote the film. Its only been the last 2/3 months where we've ever seen any real promotion for the film and because of Green Lantern's stature as a B-list hero, thats way too late. No one knew who he was and I'm sure they still don't. Iron Man was Marvel's B-list hero and the success that film achieved is something that Warners Bros. was clearly trying to emulate. But the bigger problem was that the trailer never really explained the issues going on in the movie. There may as well not have been a marketing campaign. This resulted in about 3 different trailers being shown to try and force the issue to the audience about the film's plot. You can tell they were running scared. A $300million investment into a film that is doomed to fail. Iron Man was made for $140mil, looks superior in effects and set design, has a story, a great lead actor etc. There is no doubt in my mind that Green Lantern was made as a way for DC to work their way towards the Justice League movie, the equal of Marvel's Avengers. This is all well and good but I think looking the bad publicity surrounding Green Lantern as well as the loss they are guaranteed to make will make them rethink.
Whilst a sequel is supposedly being written, I don't think an investment for that second installment will ever see the light of day. Expect a reboot in a few years time. Until then, we can only hope the Superman reboot is far superior to Green Lantern.
Overall, the film fails to tie together a plotline already written thin, a set of characters that you fail to relate from the get-go and CGI that looks like it was produced for a Doctor Who movie. I was expecting to have fun in the sense the film would have been so bad it was good. There's lots of stuff like that. Sadly, the film is just bad. Please don't waste your time with this. Stick with the far superior Marvel, whose recent films Thor and X-Men: First Class are more worthy of your precious time.
1/5 stars
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