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.
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