Green Lantern certainly isn't terrible by summer super-hero standards. Unfortunately, you can tell right away that this is a checklist movie. Before a single word of the script was written, a bunch of people sat around and decided on a whole litany of things that had to be in the film. And worst of all for a long-running fictional character, Green Lantern was subject to a reverse chronological checklist. The heart of the film comes from what's been in the comic book over the past 10 years, then they thrown in some stuff from the 90s and then some stuff from the 80s and by that time, the story barely has room for either a serviceable plot or the original Silver Age stalwart.
Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot who is given a power ring by a dying alien and inducted into the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force created by the Guardians of the Universe. An ancient enemy of the Guardians called Parallax is on the rampage and it falls to Hal to stop it from destroying the Earth. In addition, Hal's got to contend with his ex-girlfriend and boss Carol Ferris (Blake Lively) and another old friend, Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), who winds up infected by Parallax and becomes a mutated and mentally super-powered bad guy. A bunch of other alien Green Lanterns waft through the movie, largely as scenery, and it all winds up with an epilogue that reveals that this film is essentially a prequel, with the story that should have been in this one set up for the next one…if there ever is a next one.
The good things about this motion picture are the special effects and the performances of Blake Lively and Peter Sarsgaard. They do better-than-usual versions of the super-hero's girlfriend and his evil rival, even though their roles are probably written a bit worse-than-usual. Ryan Reynolds tries hard but can't salvage much from the wreck this script makes of Hal Jordan. He may be a DC creation but I can only describe this movie's version of Green Lantern with a Marvel Comics reference. They've tried to cast Hal as equal parts Johnny Storm and Peter Parker. That sounds like a bad idea and proves to be one on screen.
What cripples this movie is that it getting to every item on its preconceived checklist takes so long and requires so many hoops to be jumped through that the story is just fat and laggard, with no personal or thematic conflict ever able to do more than sputter and fume. It doesn't help that the big fight at the end turns entirely on a bit of actual science that feels sorely out of place in a battle between a guy with a magic ring and an anthropomorphic cloud of fear energy.
7 different people are credited with writing Green Lantern and it shows. For a comic book character like this, one without a compelling origin or archetypal metaphor, a single creative voice and vision is probably what was needed. Maybe that can happen in the sequel. Oh, wait.
6.5/10
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