The Green Lantern Review

Let me just start by saying that Green Lantern is not a bad movie.  I was of a mind when the casting was initially announced that Ryan Reynolds, at the time soon to be Deadpool, would now be Green Lantern as well, that this was an awful choice.  I am happy to say that I was wrong.  Mostly.

After seeing the first teaser trailer I thought to myself that this might be okay.  I, unlike most, didn't have any problems with the suit design.  It was something different, which is necessary in movies.  But when the first real trailer came out, I must say I pegged this movie for being awful.  Or that it was going to be.  Each new trailer only fed into this initial assumption.  I told everyone that I knew via facebook etc, that this movie was going to bomb.

The week before the movie came out to general audiences, the reviews started rolling out.  This was indeed a bad movie.  Yahoo berated the movie for its extremely weighty budget, and everyone seemed to be in agreement that this movie wouldn't even make the money back that had gone into it.  This movie was destined to flop from the beginning.

The question I propose is: Why?  

Thor was surprisingly good this year.  I know I had a lot of worries about it, but Marvel pulled it off, and I must say that it was a good movie.  Rottentomatoes rated it nicely, and most of the reviewers had little to complain about.  

X-Men First Class was really the movie to worry about this summer.  The previews didn't help the film, and neither did the production art releases.  But when the film came out, those who went to see it were surprised at how good it was.  And indeed, it was a very enjoyable film, mostly in credit to it's two lead actors who's dramatic interaction was beyond perfect.

So with Captain America still to come, one comic book movie had to take the fall.  Right?  Granted, DC is a harder sell unless it has Batman on it.  People accept Batman, unless it's George Clooney.  The last Superman, Superman Returns, didn't perform nearly as well in the box office as the studio had expected, and fans of the character had enough complaints to assure that Brandon Routh would never again don the cape of the famous hero.  But it was not a bad movie.  It was set as a tribute to the original films with Christopher Reeves, and carried the torch perfectly.  Brandon Routh portrayed the Christopher Reeves' patterned character with near perfection.  It was a delightful film on it's own, but not what people wanted to see in our new age of grittier and more realistic heroes.

That said, this was Green Lanterns first film.  Superman Returns had four preceding it.  Batman had a number of it's own before getting to The Dark Knight.  Marvel had started anew with Iron Man and has continued to make it's films in the same fashion.  Spider-Man started off good, and even had a better outing in it's second installment.  Where Green Lantern falls, isn't among it's fellow DC comics brethren, it's more along the lines of the superhero movie that rebooted the comics in films craze, Spider-Man.  

Green Lantern isn't inherently bad.  Granted the studio flubbed in how it chose to boast the film before it had come out.  They said it was like Star Wars.  But this is a statement that could be viewed two different ways:  Prequel, or the originals.  Green Lantern is more like Episode 2 of Star Wars.  So now that we have that out of the way, I'll get into it.

The inherit problems with the film are quite simply the wealth of information of the past decades of it's based-upon comic book source. 

The origin of the character was way back in 1940, but Hal Jordan didn't show up until 1959.  Comics were much simpler back then.  But after a few decades those simple tales of heroic feats were becoming a little stale.  The comics, in order to survive, had to take things further.  Monsters were bigger, enemies more devious, and our heroes more human, to a point.  

But with each new decade came a new viewership, and new writers that grew up with all the old stories.  The world had gone from watching the Dick Van Dyke show to Law and Order SVHU, and so, our heroes followed suit.  People died, came back to life, enemies sought to kill their heroic nemesis.  The world had changed, and so to did comic books.  We'd gone from a world where men and women still slept in separate beds, to the world where they weren't only sleeping together, but cheating on one another, getting drunk, there was simply no limit to the extent where real life events could enter into the panels of comics.

Green Lantern was no different.  Hal died, came back to life, was replaced as a Green Lantern, etc.  So much has happened to the character of the decades, and everything to the whim of individual writers.  While there were memorable moments for the character, some of the best stories had only come up over the past few years.  It is to the fans of these that the movie will be the most disappointing to.  

As I said earlier, the film is most like Spider-Man in feel.  A simple, colorful, origin story.  Ryan Reynolds actually plays Hal very well.  In fact, the only problem with the choice of actors is with Blake Lively, who seems incapable of having any on-screen chemistry, or humanity, with either herself or her costars.  While that's a huge downfall, Ryan Reynolds has someone else to act opposite of, and that's Mark Strong's portrayal of Sinestro, which was perfect.  It is these two characters interactions that make me hopeful for a follow up movie.  

So while the movie has it's faults, it's not awful.  The enemy Hal has to defeat, Parallax, is equally monstrous and evil, so it's easy to root for our new hero.  Sure some of his solutions, like making race cars with his power ring, are a little silly, but the movie isn't bogged down by these instances.  All in all, it's an enjoyable enough film, one that starts up the character well enough.  So I encourage you to go and see it so that we can get a second film, one that I'm sure without the weight of the origin tale, would be closer to what people want.

Do you Yahoo?

Click below, and read it if you want, or just skim the first few lines.  It's really all you need to know.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100701/sc_livescience/thedownsidetotherecoveryoftheozonehole

WTF?!

Who writes this stuff? And even worse: who in their right mind is listening?

The answer? That’s an easy one: everyone. Again, this is on the front page of Yahoo. Do you Yahoo?
This is a problem. Yes, I’ve said it. This is what we are given, what we are to believe is fact. The ever-changing facts. Is it the Government? This mythical BP (as we’ve not heard much about them until the great oil leak of 2010), or is it our wonderful American Scientists? Whom in the 1970’s reported that our world was in fact cooling. That’s right, not warming, but cooling. Scientists, who every other month are either being restricted from telling us the full truth, or whose information is being herded into different camps, dissected and re-lettered to inform us of a point that someone wants to prove. Sure, there is undoubtedly truth in the words, but likely not in the context that it’s being delved out to the greater bodied American, nay, global community.

Is it wrong to think that we could do some good by polluting less? No, not at all. In fact we should be doing a lot better. But Auto companies are still producing gas guzzling cars and trucks, Semi trucks are still transporting goods, and planes are still flying daily for vacations, business trips, and again, delivering supplies and goods. Oh, and our military. They like to do a lot of the same.

So over the past couple of decades, people on televisions and in newspapers, and even at our concerts, have been telling us we need to conserve. Recycle. They kept telling, holding huge events, raising money (for what, I don’t know) and still nothing happened. We humans still needed wood for housing and entertainment centers, so the rainforests and other forests have been continually chopped down. Rivers are still being dammed. Celebrities are still driving Hummers. (Yes, even the ones that are pro-conservation) And we in our everyday lives will choose our car over walking a block to go to the grocery store. Not all of us, but a vast majority of us. After all, it is our privilege.

But efforts have been made. Solar panels caught on sometime in the 90’s or so, who really knows, and then Wind energy started gaining ground. Hybrid cars were made, and were a selling point for a number of SUV’s that sported a whopping 1 MPG difference from their fully-gas powered twins. But there are a couple of decent hybrid/electric cars out there, so it shows some progress. Mass transit in larger cities has unclogged much of the congestion of days of old, but we are still reproducing at an alarming rate. We’re even having children at younger ages. WE are out of control. And unfortunately they just don’t have enough room on the mass transit lines for every single one of us. Not that most of us are even trying to do this.

So while we have made efforts, and many of us have felt that we’re making a difference in our everyday lives, things have not changed that much. Sure, some of our power plants have been shut down, but the amount of people in the world has increased, which mean more cars on the road. And yes, planes aren’t taking off quite as regularly as they used to, but they’re still up there. Airports are still polluting. Cars are still polluting. We are still polluting. And now one of our oceans is polluting non-stop. So the question is, have we really done enough to start repairing the ozone layer?

How could we? We have, some of us, made efforts. And maybe the amount of pollution has been curbed SOMEWHAT, but the idea that we have curbed soooo much that the hole is actually closing, is so reproved that it cannot be fact. The stats are continually out there, shoved down our throat, and to have someone come out and tell us, ‘you’re doing well America’ is the kind of ill-mannered lie we could do without. If the government or whoever wants people to change, maybe all they really need to do is give us the truth.
Unadulterated, unopinionated, and with a blunt edge of unavoidable reality.

Then again, it’s just my opinion. One of many. And while I’m ignored, we’ll just keep letting dis-truths pummel us with the idea that all is well.