I finally saw Grenn Lantern, not as bad as I expected.

[Dantheman]

Personally, I thought Sinestro should've been the only villain in the movie, with a sequel hook hinting at Parallax or the Sinestro Corps. It seemed like having both Hector Hammond and Parallax in the film was Geoff Johns using his position as both the Green Lantern comics writer and a high muckety-muck at DC Entertainment to influence things, and not in a good way.

[Icemizer]

Had they edited out more of the overly comedic moments I thought it would have been a much stronger movie. As it was the movie suffered from bad villain syndrome. Fighting a giant evil cloud is a tough sell. Now had the cloud fully taken over Hammond and given us a giant one on one battle that might have improved things as well.

[Guy Gardener]

The ring is supposed to find someone without fear.

It chose a choking pussy.

Paralax is supposed to be Hal Jordan gone insane killing all his friends (Geoff Johns can go fuck himself.).

They turned Crazy Hal into space AIDS where there's no sense of victory or accomplishment in defeating a single outbreak of space AIDS, because out in space it's EVERYWHERE still growing!

Carrol Ferris is supposed to be a Supervillianess in hot pink skin tight lycra trying to sleep with and murder Hal Jordan at the same time.

They cast a tiny bony blonde dim child who can only act with her hair.

[Christopher]

Icemizer wrote:

---

As it was the movie suffered from bad villain syndrome. Fighting a giant evil cloud is a tough sell. Now had the cloud fully taken over Hammond and given us a giant one on one battle that might have improved things as well.

It wasn't the nature of the villains I found disappointing, but the nature of the heroism. They'd have the villain, whether Hammond or Parallax, spend over a minute endangering or killing large numbers of people, and then Hal would belatedly fly in and protect just one or two people. The scale of the heroism was too small. The fun part of superhero stories is watching the heroes save people and make a difference. That's the whole wish-fulfillment quality that makes heroes appealing in the first place, the idea that they can protect us and keep us safe. That's one thing The Avengers got right -- even in the midst of a huge battle against alien monsters, Whedon never lost sight of the heroes' priority to protect civilians and get them out of harm's way.

Guy Gardener wrote:

---

The ring is supposed to find someone without fear.

That's an outdated interpretation, and frankly a rather silly one, since no rational being would be devoid of the capacity for fear. The modern take, ever since the Emerald Dawn miniseries from 1989, is that the rings choose people who have the capacity to overcome fear. Here's an article about the evolution of the concept.

Paralax is supposed to be Hal Jordan gone insane killing all his friends

Sure, and Ra's al Ghul isn't "supposed to be" Batman's mentor, and the Joker isn't "supposed to be" an anarchist wearing clown makeup, and Tony Stark wasn't "supposed to" reveal his identity to the world right at the start of his career, and Heimdall isn't "supposed to" look like Idris Elba. There is no "supposed to." It's not wrong for an adaptation to do things differently than the source material. In fact, it's the whole point of an adaptation. If you want something exactly like the original, just read the original. Doing an exact copy would be redundant and pointless. The thing that makes adaptations worth doing is that they add something new, find a fresh angle on old ideas. Sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it works brilliantly. Sometimes it even works better than the original version.

Hell, the whole problem with the Green Lantern movie was that it was too faithful to the source, threw in too many threads of comics continuity that had accumulated over the decades and thus made the movie unnecessarily cluttered.

[Mr Light]

How does one act with one's hair?

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I liked Green Lantern quite a lot.

If it had faults - and it did - they were mainly in being way too faithful to the source material. Hal Jordan is not a character with a real strong arc in the comics, though Geoff Johns (and others before him) have tried valiantly to retrofit some kind of character exploration and growth on to him.

They probably invested way too much time and the wrong kind of effort in the "Green Lantern Corps" and Oa. Much as I love the Corps, if you're not prepared to make an all-out Avatar level technical effort you sure shouldn't be trying to portray humanoids like the Guardians via CGI; the way that Sinestro was done would have been preferable. Too much of the off-world stuff came off as day-glo green crowd scenes with no particular emotional punch.

Hopefully the Justice League movie, rumored to feature the Jordan incarnation of GL, will rehabilitate the property's movie potential some; the Earth-based Lanterns other than Hal are nonentities and also-rans.

[FPAlpha]

Christopher wrote:

---

For me, GL wasn't a bad movie at all; it was flawed, but reasonably entertaining. It just had the bad fortune to come out in the same year as three really brilliant superhero movies, Thor, Captain America, and X-Men First Class, so it felt inadequate by contrast. If a film with this same story (though obviously less advanced VFX) had come out earlier in the decade, at a time when we had some good movies like the first two X-Men or Spidey films and Batman Begins but also a lot of weak ones like Catwoman and Elektra and Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider, I think it would've been regarded as one of the better superhero films. It's just that the bar has been raised so much in the past few years.

Your last sentence says it all.. there is no excuse to make mediocre superhero movies because others have proven that you can make great ones.

Green Lantern isn't a boring or worthless character.. in fact the whole Green Lantern thing just reeks cool in the same vein as a grumpy short guy with an indestructible skeleton who can pop claws from his hands and heals almost any wound in seconds.

Yet the movie fell just flat.. for me it seemed the producers were more concerned about it looking pretty and visually captivating instead of crafting a rock solid story first and then concentrating on the flashy scenes.

Why was Batman so successful? The characters and his story is interesting, that's not the point. It's that Nolan managed to almost perfectly capture the essence of the character and work with it whereas the GL guys launched more reports on the CGI costume.. there's the difference.

There ware way worse movies out there.. you already mentioned Elektra and Catwoman as examples but Green Lantern is still mediocre.. i don't mourn the two hours i spent on it but there are definitely better superhero movies out there now to choose from (though counting Thor as better than GL is up for debate and a topic for another thread).

[Guy Gardener]

Christopher wrote:

---

That's an outdated interpretation, and frankly a rather silly one, since no rational being would be devoid of the capacity for fear. The modern take, ever since the Emerald Dawn miniseries from 1989, is that the rings choose people who have the capacity to overcome fear. Here's an article about the evolution of the concept.

I usually bring up that Peter David Action Comics story which was hilarious. Jordan actually decided that if he was really a man without fear then he didn't need his magic ring to fight his battles. He throws his ring away and walks unarmed into a machine gun toting hostage situation of a human street crime.. Possibly a bank robbery?

The point is that Jordan knew that what he was doing was crazy but he was looking for fear inside of him to stop the crazy because he was sure that without fear that he was crazy, and he really really didn't want to be Crazy.

Yes, I'm still reading new comics.

However my retention for the new stuff is awful.

I like the idea that the Guardians are only looking for crazy people who will die fighting before they figure out that they're pawns and start to Unionise arranging minimum safety standards, coffee breaks and workman's comp. The guardians don't want rational citizen soldiers, they want an obsessively obedient suicide squad, which is why they're replacing the Corps in the here and now, or a little while ago with those cyborgs.

It never sat well with me in the 70s and 80s with how the Corps treated the Guardians literally like gods, even so to potificate them as a expletive in general conversation...

"GREAT GUARDIANS!"

Although I might wonder if that's just the universal translator cleaning up some of the Lanterns gutter talk?

Although "Poozer" slipped through fine.

Kyle was about overcoming fear.

They stole his story.

[Caliburn24]

Lots of problems with the Green Lantern movie, but the main one is quite simple.

Hal's big character arc in the movie is about him taking half the movie to decide whether or not he wants to be a hero and accept the cool superpowers he has been given.

Hollywood, wake up! We don't care about people struggling with becoming a super hero. Boohoo, I'm a brilliant well paid handsome man, with his pick of women and a cool job, and now I have superpowers?! Man life is hard! That is the type of silly melodrama that made 10 years of Smallville a snooze.

When your big character arc is someone deciding whether or not to do something that we already know he is going to do, it is lazy and poor writing. But worst of all, it is boring. There is no tension, no dramatic pacing, it is just a matter of whenever the script gets around to letting the character make a decision that the audience had made an hour ago.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

FPAlpha wrote:

---

Your last sentence says it all.. there is no excuse to make mediocre superhero movies because others have proven that you can make great ones.

No.

What do you think making movies is, stamping out widgets?

[Gov Kodos]

My Name Is Legion wrote:

---

No.

What do you think making movies is, stamping out widgets?

Sure it is, look at the folks who write for Star Trek...

[Christopher]

Personally I don't get the objections to the costume. It's supposed to be a construct of pure ring energy. All other ring constructs are glowing force-field thingies, so it would've been inconsistent to make the costume out of fabric or latex or something. The movie's approach made more sense. Sure, it looked weird, but it was supposed to. It was alien technology -- why wouldn't it look weird?

Granted, the execution could've been a little better, especially where the mask was concerned. But I grew up with effects that were far more limited than what we have today, so I had to learn to see VFX in more impressionistic terms, rather than expecting or demanding them to be perfectly lifelike.

[JoeZhang]

My Name Is Legion wrote:

---

I liked Green Lantern quite a lot.

If it had faults - and it did - they were mainly in being way too faithful to the source material. Hal Jordan is not a character with a real strong arc in the comics, though Geoff Johns (and others before him) have tried valiantly to retrofit some kind of character exploration and growth on to him.

Wasn't that spun afterwards as being the fault of Johns himself? (not saying it is the reality just the way the Hollywood press played it).

[Guy Gardener]

In the 80s when they had Hal serve time for drunk driving during his origin and he escaped from his cell after lights out to fight crime and save the universe, did they chose drink driving because back then it was seen as a silly nonsense crime anyone could get done in by?

It doesn't seem fair due to the scarsity of prison economics that if he gets furlough ervery evening, that Jordan can pick up a carton of cigerettes any time he feels like from the Justice league satellite... He's totally upending the system!

Does the movie really seem that faithful?

[lurok]

Did Earth really need another menacing cloud-thing after FF?

Apart from that...