It is with no small amount of lamentation or fury that I deliver this review. My anticipation for this movie was great. My wings of hope carried me too high: once those wings were melted by the scalding steam arising from this incandescent green turd, I was unprepared for the fall.
This movie could aptly be described as the antithesis to The Dark Knight. Where that movie transcended the traditional limitations of its genre and opened the door to a new dimension of Oscar-worthy comic book films, Green Lantern has cast the genre back into the maligned and farcical hell of the Schumacher-verse. Where the performances in the The Dark Knight elevated an already strong script, Peter Sarsgaard's performance in Green Lantern makes the movie even stupider than the script already dictated.
Things happen with an arbitrariness in Green Lantern that is utterly inexplicable. What we have is an outline of major events with nothing there to tie any of it together. There's no sense of driving motivation behind a single scene in the film. The amateurish sketches the film provides for each of its characters are so shallow they make a petri dish look deep. Not a single reason is given to become emotionally invested in any part of the experience. Events are portrayed with a cold and clinical approach which saps the life out of a character that has been delighting fans for fifty years. I've read every issue of Green Lantern published in the last ten years, and somehow they even failed to make me care about these characters. How can this be?
Comic book scribe Mark Millar wrote an amusing tweet about the film in which he described it as seeming like "it traveled here from a parallel universe where they made a Green Lantern movie in 1995." He's spot on. Remember The Shadow with Alec Baldwin? How about The Phantom with Billy Zane? That's the quality of script with which the film has squandered its $300 million budget. Like Batman and Robin before it, we're given a two-hour long toy commercial. That film killed Warner Brothers' comic book film ambitions for eight years. I fear what this may do.
Perhaps most frustrating is the amount of talent that was involved in making this movie. We have a tried a true director who is no stranger to the superhero scene: he's rebooted the James Bond franchise twice (Casino Royale and Goldeneye before it) and managed to make the fantastic The Mask of Zorro in an era when audiences were much less charitable to the superhero genre than they are today. Furthermore, comic book writer Geoff Johns, the very man who has revitalized the Green Lantern comic book from middling obscurity to one of the premiere books in DC's arsenal, served as co-producer on the film. It seemed like they were doing everything right. Hal Jordan was supposed to be in good hands. Instead, those hands pressed on Hal Jordan's spinal cord until it snapped, rendering him and the potential franchise paralyzed and impotent.
Though the special effects are fantastic and the 3-D is just about the best I've seen since Avatar, there is no denying that Green Lantern is an abject failure. Warner Brothers really rolled the dice with this project. This was a property untested in the mainstream market, heavily reliant on science fiction tropes generally reserved for the likes of the SyFy channel and the funny books. They tried to stack the deck in their favor as much as possible (if you'll excuse my mixing of gambling metaphors) by hiring a good director and the comic book's architect for the project. Yet, for whatever reason, WB lost and lost big. It's a film so filled with malignant ineptitude that its casualties won't be limited to its potential sequels. No, its wake of destruction will likely include film versions of the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman.
Green Lantern may well have turned what was the superhero genre's Brightest Day into its Blackest Night.
