Movie Review: Green Lantern

This is what I love about this era of successful comic book/superhero movies. They finally start using the ones that never quite make it to screen. Batman and Superman, Hulk and Spiderman, these are the first string heroes that can be hard to screw up. I'm not saying it can't be done. Only when talking about Batman can Michael Keaton beat George Clooney. And while we're still waiting for the heads of Warner Brothers to stop fucking around with the actually talented people who keep writing Wonder Woman scripts Green Lantern somehow made it to the big screen.

While you might expect Sinestro to be the bad guy in this movie you'd be wrong. As Yummy said while watching a Green Lantern cartoon "with a name like Sinestro of COURSE he's gonna be the bad guy". Not using him as the initial villain is like not using the Joker in the first Batman movie. Oh, wait. They did that and it kicked ass. No, they're saving him for later, but this movie does show how he starts down the dark path.

In this movie they start with somebody much worse. Some years back DC comics had Hal Jordan's (Green Lantern's real name) home town of Coast City destroyed. This introduced fear into Hal and made him vulnerable to a flaw in the lantern from which all Green Lantern power rings get their powers. The flaw was what made the members of the Green Lantern Corps vulnerable to (sigh) the color yellow. The flaw was really the imprisoned monster called Parallax. Hal's fear made him a conduit for Parallax to escape. Hal became evil and was eventually killed. Naturally he came back later free of the Parallax influence.

Obviously you can't start a movie series like this. Hal gets the ring and immediately becomes evil. You're never gonna see an other Human as a Lantern after that and certainly not Hal.

If they changed the story just to change the story then the movie would deserve the scorn that it would bring. Instead they had good reasons to change the story. The movie became not just the story of a pilot with some abandonment issues learning to wield new super powers, but a story about will overcoming fear on multiple levels.

Do not bring your small children to this movie. Babies: out. Toddlers: out. Really, anyone under the age of 10 should be with a baby sitter. This movie had some scary parts. Parallax is kinda terrifying to watch, and that's before he starts ripping people's spectral skeletons from their bodies. I wish someone had explained that to the people sitting off to our left.

We're all a bit sad that it's not this Green Lantern movie.


But it's still a good movie well told. I'll be getting it on DVD.
Be sure to sit through at least part of the credits.