Triumph of the Will: A Green Lantern Review (may contain spoilers)

Another poster better than the film deserves, by James White.

Well, by my reckoning I'm about six or seven months late to the party with this one. This film has had the stench of death about it for quite some time. Not just the reviews, which could charitably be described as unkind, but the lead-up to it - there was the muted reaction to the first reveal of Ryan Reynolds' CGI sausage-man costume, then a lack of anything noteworthy at the Comic-Con preview, and the report that Warner Bros had spent $9m fixing up the special effects in post-production, on top of the film already having something like 1300 visual effects shots (according to director Martin Campbell). Several effects studios were working overtime on it until the film's release, and this has, on balance, not turned out well (see the big fat bomb Last Action Hero).

2011 would see the end of the Harry Potter franchise, meaning Warner Bros needed to find a new franchise they could print money with. DC Comics, a new subsidiary of Time Warner, also needed more exposure for their label, as so far they've been understated in the comic book movie business as of late. Oh sure, they had The Dark Knight grossing $1bn, but for every one major success, they had box office disappointments like Superman Returns and Watchmen. And with Marvel quickly dominating the superhero film field with their big tied-in universe, DC chose to throw Green Lantern in as their best bet. There was a lot riding on this film, so it came as a real shame that the resulting film was not very good.

In my V for Vendetta review, I was accused of letting my knowledge and love of the comic colour my enjoyment of the film, and not one without precedent. After all, an adaptation must stand up by itself, the source material is still sitting there undamaged, and Green Lantern as a series is stooped in a deep cosmic mythos that would be a nightmare to introduce in the first film. So I'm going to divorce my feelings about the comic from this as much as possible, but I make no promises. It really is quite frustrating to see a promising franchise get pounded into the dirt so quickly but...here we are.

Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a test pilot for Ferris Aircraft who out of the blue (ahem) is chosen by a dying alien, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), to take his place in the Green Lantern Corps, a sort of intergalactic police force in charge of keeping the universe safe. Coincidentally, Jordan's appointment comes with the arrival of Parallax (Clancy Brown), an entity of fear bent on consuming all life in its way. Parallax's arrival is heralded somewhat by xenobiologist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), who after performing an autopsy on Abin Sur's corpse becomes infected by fear...somehow...and gets psychic powers. Because that's how infections work in superhero land.

Now, when making a superhero movie, it's important your main character be heroic, a good person, someone to root for. You'd think this would be obvious, but Green Lantern dares to be different by making its protagonist a complete wanker. Part of the problem is Hal Jordan himself - even in the comics, he's pretty bland, a milquetoast ace pilot constantly dating a succession of pretty women. Compared to the other Green Lanterns - the stentorian badass grandpa Alan Scott, the boisterous rough Guy Gardner, the youthful creative artist-turned-saviour Kyle Rayner, or the cool-headed intelligent sniper John Stewart - Hal lacks a lot. The only attempt so far, both in the comics and the film, to make him more defined is giving him the tired old trick of daddy issues: he saw his dad die in a flight test, and this somehow doesn't put him off getting into fighter jets for a living.

Red Dawn references. This is why Guy Gardner is better than you.

In an effort to sidestep this, Hal is turned into a reluctant hero, because we can't get enough of those. It would work if he was a good valiant person who cared about protecting people while still unwilling to be caught up in the grand scheme of things, but he isn't. Here's a list of things Hal does throughout the course of the film:

• Shoots down his co-pilot, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, who contributes nothing), during a flight test with military drones, breaking the rules of engagement. To make things better, he doesn't use this for anything other than to buy time.
• Causes the company he works for to lose a lucrative military contract, which forces his boss to lay off several workers.
• Gets beaten up by the people he left unemployed, and then beats them up with a giant green energy fist. This is how our hero uses his superpower for the first time.
• Trains for about two minutes with the Green Lanterns, then decides it's too hard and flies back to Earth.
• Saves the lives of everyone at a party by creating a needlessly ostentatious race-car track to catch a falling helicopter and dragging the scene out, rather than, say, catching it with a giant hand.

Hector Hammond, the villain of the piece, and a guy who spends the last 30 minutes looking like he's had a severe allergic reaction to peanuts, is about 10 times more likeable and sympathetic than Hal, who only ever gets a present for his nephew and saves a few people. A shy Xenobiology teacher, ridiculed by his class and his peers and considered an embarrassment by his senator father (Tim Robbins), he's inexplicably called up by the government to perform an autopsy on Abin Sur's body and ends up tainted by a wound on the body infected by Parallax. Hector has a reason to be angry - his father thinks little of him, his students think he's a joke, and he apparently has some jealousy towards Hal over Carol. That last subplot is thrown in around the last stretch of the plot, but he does have justification for going on a psychic rampage. 

Yeah. This guy is the real hero.

Unlike Hal, who only gets saddled with "daddy issues" (the lazy writer's approach to character motivation), and is written here as a poor man's Tony Stark. Which seems appropriate given that the film's early trailers tried really hard to convince you this was like Iron Man, only he doesn't do anything quite as cool as Stark, and Reynolds, charming man though he is and clearly trying the best with what he's given, just can't compare to Robert Downey Jr. The hero of this film doesn't have a whole lot to do, but that might be because the plot itself is so full of excess fat.

This is a major problem with the convention of the three-act structure. I already mentioned my beef with it in an earlier post, with aid from Film Crit Hulk, but allow me to expand. The three-act-structure doesn't help a writer structure a story because it's literally a summary; it lays a plot out as beginning, middle and end. The characters are rendered inconsequential because the plot moves along without them, they're just puppets following the direction of some unseen omnipotent storyteller. Act breaks - act one changing to act two - are brought about with plot points, not the characters' actions. 

This is how you write plots, apparently. Isn't it exciting?!

Look at the picture above. See how incredibly vague the definition of Act 2 is? All we get is that it's "the real 'meat' of the conflict", and that's it. No indication on how you build it up, just "The conflict rises here. What, you want me to hold your fucking hand? You figure it out, asshole!" Green Lantern is an excellent example of the problems - things don't happen so much as bleed out slowly while the characters just stand around doing nothing. Hal gets the ring, gets zapped to Oa - neither of which are decisions he makes - trains for a bit then pisses off back to Earth (and curiously doesn't have his power ring confiscated). He saves some people, but that doesn't matter in the greater context. It's only about 20 minutes before the end that he mans the fuck up and acts like a hero, meaning we still have about an hour and a half of him moping about Earth talking about how afraid he is. 

This is the only time Hal does something that propels the plot forward, everything else is an external force - Abin Sur crashing on Earth, Hammond getting powers, Parallax moving towards Earth, etc. Intermixed with this, we have Sinestro (an excellent Mark Strong) petitioning the Guardians of the Universe, who all resemble Smurfs ascended to a higher plane of consciousness, into explaining more about Parallax and approving more extreme force to deal with Parallax. Even this proves pointless - Sinestro's weapon, a ring made of the yellow power of fear (just go with it, it'll hurt less), is introduced then cast aside just as quickly so Hal can take charge and save the day. Fuck, even Sinestro - who has purple skin, a widow's peak, pointed ears, a Snidely Whiplash moustache and is fucking called SINESTRO - proves more heroic than Hal - he's seen rallying the Lanterns into battle, cares about maintaining peace and justice, and wants to avenge the death of Abin, who he speaks fondly of.

(Oh, and he also turns evil at the end of the credits, a decision that makes NO FUCKING SENSE given what we've seen of him in the film where, at worst, he's a well-intentioned jerk.)

Hey, who wouldn't trust that face?

I don't usually mind people in films getting chucked about by the plot, but this is an action film, a superhero film, and a summer blockbuster; not a gritty film noir or introspective drama. It demands its hero be proactive, and is meant to get the audience excited and rushed up in a surge of adrenaline, leave them blown back in their seats. So little actually gets done in Green Lantern, except stirring the waters for a possible sequel, this counts less as an action film and more like inertia.

Remember that $9m budget hike I mentioned earlier? Keep that in mind when watching the film because you'll be wondering where that money went. The effects still look like arse, and most of the blame can be put on Hal's stupid CGI musclesuit. What's so wrong with hand-designing a suit of armour? The only bit you really need to CG for that is the Green Lantern emblem on the chest, it saves the FX studios the problem of animating an entire costume. In the scenes on Earth, it doesn't quite gel and has a weird cartoonish blur to it that makes it stand out. On Oa, the base of operations for the Green Lanterns, it just accentuates Ryan Reynolds' head as the only real thing in those sections. It just doesn't work on any level.

(Image by me. Make it catch on, Internet.)

Did I mention this film had a $200m budget? Oa itself is lifeless and uninspired, being mostly weird buildings  barely a Lantern to be seen flying about, with the only shots of it being the backgrounds and one or two locations. We never get to explore this alien world, or any of its quite strikingly designed characters. The promotional material later on made a point to emphasise the alien-ness of the film, but it's never actually explored. The film mostly stays Earthbound to save on budget, but this had $200m spent on it. Surely more time could be spent there? 

Part of Green Lantern's appeal as a comic is that it's a genuine space opera. Clashes occur on planets in distant galaxies with aliens of all manner of appearances joining in. Some of the Green Lanterns seen in the comic include flies, sentient planets, alien brigands, aliens with no concept of sight, and even sentient viruses! How cool does that sound? But Green Lantern the film squanders that in favour of focusing on Ryan Reynolds find his testicles for 90 minutes. The only ones that get any focus are Sinestro, Abin Sur, bulldog-like beast of burden Kilowog and fish-parrotman Tomar-Re, the latter two voiced professionally by Michael Clarke Duncan and Geoffrey Rush respectively. Not great, not bad, just a day or two in a voice-over booth. The rest? Look quite interesting, don't they? Too bad you'll never hear a peep out of them.

Sirs and Dames Not-Appearing-In-This-Film.

Green Lantern left me more disappointed than any other film has this summer. I really do recommend the comics, especially Geoff Johns' run. With Green Lantern: Rebirth, Johns began a lengthy stint turning Green Lantern from a B-list hero, just another backup when compared to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, into the core of the DC universe. Pick up any Green Lantern comic by Geoff Johns, but I recommend in particular the Sinestro Corps War event. Some details may be confusing to newbies, as it relies a little bit on past knowledge, but it's excitingly written and feels like a genuine blockbuster. Given that a sequel is apparently on the cards, it may also be a sneak preview of what's to come. We live in a strange world where a film can make $200 million at the box office and be considered a failure, but that's what Green Lantern is. Everything feels lackluster and handled by people who didn't care - OK, Reynolds is a comic book fan, but he seems to be the only one who really tries. Director Campbell doesn't make anything distinctive, shooting instead for journeyman quality; especially damning for the man who revived James Bond twice. The effects are uninteresting and badly executed. Even James Newton Howard's score is off, with no distinctive tunes or melody. 

But worst of all, it may very well have killed a promising franchise. Sure, they talk of a sequel, and it may very well be better, but who's going to see it? When I first saw this at Winchester's film night on Sunday, people laughed at the effects used to bring the Green Lantern uniform and the Guardians of the Universe to life. At best, the general public see this as adequate. I somehow doubt they'll pay all over again just for adequacy.