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

[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]

Green Lantern was just mediocre like so many big budget blockbusters.

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]

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.

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]

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]

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?

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]

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...

 

[Guy Gardener]

According to Johns, Paralax is the Avatar of fear, whose power they trapped in the central power battery for billions of years who looks like a giant yellow glowing stick insect.

Blue plus yellow equal green.

It's why Green lanterns need to over come great fear, or have no fear because the yellow impurity mentioned for decades or Parallax mentioned for a decade has the potential to take root and corrupt a Green Lantern turning him or her into someone not very nice.

What the cloud did, wasn't too far removed from John's vision.

What it looked like was lazy.

How they beat it was lazier.

The only training Hal got was Kilowog beating him up and Sinestro telling don't go to close to suns, because they're really dangerous. Have you Earthmen discovered Gravity yet? Too much gravity is really bad. Too much gravity can kill almost anything which most certainly includes you Hal Jordan, so don't go near them or you'll go "sploof!".

Rather than chasing Jordan, Paralax should have gone back to earth, found somewhere comfortable and streamed Back to the Future II and III from netflix where he would have learnt that he doesn't have to chase and thump every asshole who calls him a chicken.

"Sigh"

 

[Gaith]

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

Yep: as with The Phantom Menace, it begins in an era of galactic peace. Who the heck wants to see that? Start in the middle of an Imperial/evil Lantern age instead, why dontcha. We get enough stories of authorities/superheroes fighting minor crime/evil upstarts in police, spy, and cape flicks. If you're gonna go cosmic, might as well mix things up.

 

[Christopher]

^But how does that work within the context of the GL premise, where the Corps has been keeping galactic peace for millennia? Maybe the way to go would be to show that corruption has spread through the Corps, led by Sinestro. The story could be about the upstart Hal discovering that corruption in the system and struggling to expose and prove it.

 

[Gaith]

^

"For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times... before the Empire."
​

All you have to do is introduce a big bad from beyond known space (as Qui-Gon said, "there's always a bigger fish"), and mention how it/they overturned the Lanterns' order.

In other words: sucks to the GL premise-marr!

 

[Christopher]

And then tons of GL fans would be screaming because the film departed too much from the comics. "A Green Lantern movie where the Corps has been wiped out? Blasphemy! Burn the witches!"

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

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?

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

They've had successful movies and unsuccessful ones, and some better made than others.

 

[Gaith]

@ Christopher: I think that could easily have worked to the studio's advantage. It's great that so many movies are being so faithful to their source material these days, but the "we're making this movie to honor a venerable pop culture legacy" line is getting a bit stale. Saying "yeah, we're honoring and acknowledging the GL canon, but also making changes in order to craft the best possible film, and any purist who doesn't like it can make as inoffensive and safe a fan film as he likes" could have been a great way to build free publicity and gain the sympathies of the silent majority of the movie's intended audience who don't know John Stewart from the Daily Show.

This is Green Lantern, after all, the franchise The Onion tagged as "the comic-book hero everyone definitely knew about before the film was made." Not every fan base is large enough to carry a top-tier budget flick, and not every franchise deserves one.

("I've been a huge Green Lantern fan ever since I learned I'd be playing him in the movie," Ryan Reynolds gushed.)

 

[Christopher]

I'm the first to agree there's nothing wrong with making changes in an adaptation, and I hold kneejerk purism in contempt. But some changes are more appropriate than others. What you want to get right is the core essence and flavor of the property, even if you change the details of the execution. What you don't want is to turn it into something entirely different that only has a few surface trappings in common. And that's what I think your suggestion would do. You're just latching onto some arbitrary formula that you think has been effective in other works and wanting to see GL transformed into a copy of it. That's the same kind of formulaic, cookie-cutter thinking that leads so many studio executives to make so many bad adaptations of classic properties that fail because they turned them into carbon copies of whatever recent movie trends were popular, rather than doing updated or improved takes on their own core essence.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I think if the movie had a better villain and did not have Paralax it would have been bet

 

[Gaith]

@ Christopher: Well, I'm not exactly suggesting a story that espouses the virtues of ballroom dance instruction as a means of lifting disadvantaged species out of planetary poverty and dazzling the crowds of the next Green Dancers Corps Meet. Or even, for that matter, that College Humor GL pitch, which sounds a lot better than the actual movie to moi.

One could write an entirely thematically faithful Power Rang - sorry, Green Lantern story about teamwork, heroism, male-on-male ring exchanges and kicking butt in the name of law and order without setting it in an era of galactic peace.

Of course, if I'd been the Decider over at the WB, I wouldn't have funded a traditional Powe - Green Lantern story at all. But, here I am, contributing ideas anyhow. I'm trying to work with with y'all here!