I hear you. Seeing the Sinestro Corps War on the big screen would've been awesome. I think one of the problems with Green Lantern is that they've got a lot of big epic story lines and a deep mythology and I wouldn't be sure where to start. You had Legion, Parallax, Manhunters, Sinestro, the Sinestro Corps, Black Hand, Hector Hammond, Atrocitus, Star Sapphire, and the Black Lanterns (not to mention the other ring corps), and the Blackest Night. Where in the world do you start? And how can you weave that into a film trilogy, at the least? I would like to see all of them in Green Lantern films. Though I do think it was a mistake to start with Parallax. I think you work up to a villain on that level. He would've been the last villain, or next to last, closing out the Lantern series with Blackest Night/Brightest Day.
The Bitter Script Reader wrote about how he thought Green Lantern had act two problems that caused it to underperform. You can read his take here and here
I've stated before in the review thread that I felt that "Green Lantern" suffered from DC Ent wanting their cake and eating it to. What I mean by that is that they chose to combine elements from the first drafts and the later drafts which were influenced and directly inspired by Geoff John's "Secret Origin" which is an excellent story. They needed to break away completely from those original drafts and just focus on the Secret Origin adaptation that they were doing. I called the film, the most rushed origin movie in history, because that is what it felt like when I watched it. It seemed like they were so eager and excited to get to the second one...they completely forgot this movie, and it hurt it big time. Ryan Reynolds was fine as Hal, but the way they portrayed him seems similar to the way he's being portrayed in the New 52 right now...as an arrogant ass hole, instead of someone who is just a charming, overly confident pilot who occasionally makes mistakes. Blake Lively impressed me more than I expected as Carol Ferris. I thought it was miscasting like most everyone else did at the time, but I thought she delivered in the role far more than I expected she would. Mark Strong was disappointing as Sinestro. They really needed to flesh out his character more, and as others have pointed out in the thread, establish his friendship with Hal instead of having be the antagonistic egotistic "mentor". We get he's gonna be the villain...but establish the best stuff from their relationship in the comic first before you get to that conflict later on in the film. They failed to do this. Instead that friendship was transferred to the Toma Re character. I really wanted to like this film...it was one of my top ten most anticipated films of last year but I was underwhelmed by it. I thought even the score was disappointing, and James Newton Howard normally impresses, but I felt it flat and uninspiring. It didn't help either that it had a million writers attached to it at any given time...and now most fans mock those writers whenever they're announced with other projects. Whatever DC Ent plans (oh there's that word again, sigh) with this franchise, either a reboot or a sequel I'll check it out because I'm a big fan of the comic.
This is actually a really good, pertinent and specific critique of the script - something you almost never see in fan reviews of these films on the Internet. Bravo.
So one point of disagreement and you term the whole article garbage? Come on, you can do better than falling into that kind of internet stereotype. I put Green Lantern and Thor about on par in creative terms, albeit they were flawed in different ways, although I can see why the latter clicked a lot better commercially. Both were a good few rungs below X-Men: First Class and Captain America.
Yeah I've noticed that too. The difference is that Reynolds still manages to be fairly likeable when he's acting arrogant and cocky. In the comics it just comes across as grating and annoying.
Really. Roger Ebert liked it better than Thor. So did I. Ebert's worth any twenty gibbering web critics, because he knows a great deal more about film, has seen about fifty times as many in all genres as the people who usually diss him and - oh yeah - actually has taste. I'll simply dismiss anyone who disagrees as posting "garbage posts" now, just to be in tune with the times and the medium.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that. I can't say I agree Green Lantern's better than Thor since I haven't seen Thor yet.
^Yeah, that was a great explanation of the problems with GL. One of the points I most agree with is the lack of epic feel when GL makes his debut on Earth. They could have killed a bunch of time with him doing a bunch of heroic stunts and show the reaction from people on the street and/or news reports. It's been done before but it still would have been fun to see him just stop a bank robbery or something. Other than providing a reason for Parallax to come to Earth, the Hector subplot was pointless.
Maybe it's because I'm not a longtime GL fan, but I thought the scale of the movie was perfectly fine. I wasn't expecting any sort of giant space epic or anything; I just wanted a fun, cheesy little superhero flick along the lines of the first Spider-Man, and I thought the movie delivered that pretty well. I mean, it's freakin Green Lantern. I don't think it's something we should really be taking THAT seriously.
It would have been more interesting to have Hal learn to use the ring and make his "debut" before being dragged away for his training and discovering the real extent of what he had been recruited into.