Spoilers below:



It was meh.

Would have been so much better if they hadn't harped so goddamn much of fear and willpower. No fan is coming to see pseudo-philosophical debates in a super-hero movie. Most of the actors in this movie did all right, but barely. No one stood out or gave an incredible performance (except Mark Strong, who was Sinestro), and that hurt it a lot, especially since the genre calls for this sort of incredible performance. CGI was good for the most part, but the fight with Parrallax wasn't as good as it could have been and had a bit too much talking and not enough fighting, and the addition of Hector Hammond dragged down the pacing and didn't help the quality of the story.




Spoilers above:

 

(spoilers) The main problem is there's no real tension or danger in this movie. Parallax is built up as the biggest bad in the whole damn universe, and Hal kills him in 90 seconds flat with the awesome power of gravity. The evil scientist accomplishes exactly zilch. The fear ring is mentioned once and then forgotten. Roll credits. It's the most anticlimactic ending I've seen in a while.

That said, the first half of the movie was better than I expected it to be. There were some good jokes. The CG is good. And Blake Lively is nice on the eyes. So, not a complete waste of $8.

 

I really, really enjoyed this. I already did a full review in my blog (link in my sig if anyone cares), so I'll just give a cliffnotes version.

Ryan Reynolds was awesome. Really nailed who Hal Jordan was.

Parallax? Meh. He'll be back.

The Fear/Will thing? Geoff Jones, who wrote the whole Green Lantern emotional spectrum thing was a producer. Kind of expected it to be, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

The CGI was great. Much better then I thought it was going to be from the trailer.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It's no Dark Knight, but I can't really handle another dark gritty comic movie now. This one was just fun, and I can live with that.

Oh, and I loved the scene was Jordan was talking to Carol and trying to do the much mocked Batman voice. Great stuff.

 

I don't know anything about the Green Lantern franchise, so I can't say if it was good for a Green Lantern movie, but it kind of sucked as just a movie.

It was really boring. There were some funny one-liners, but they were kind of just there.

I agree with the person who said that there didn't seem to be any real stakes or consequences.

The training bit (idk what Hal was supposed to have gotten out of it - seemed like nothing) made me cringe a bit, and all the major scenes came off as being taped together without much regard for coherency.

Call me stupid, but I'm still not sure what Hal's conflict is supposed to be, either, other than the fact it concerns his dad.

The first half was amusing. The second half wasn't fun at all. However, +1 Ryan Reynolds. He's great

 

So yeah, just got back from the film. Short version: it's a 'So Bad It's Good' superhero movie, endlessly riffable in every way. Hope it makes money, so we get to see other DC superhero flicks. For me, it's about on par with Spider-Man 3 (which I still hold as a good movie, but an extremely disappointing Spider-Man movie) and Batman Forever (which I just can't like as much I want to). And yeah, internet backdraft got out of control with this movie - it's not nearly as awful as most of the rage suggests.

Long version... well, see below. Tl, dr; ahead...

You know, for every good superhero movie, like The Dark Knight or Watchmen or X-Men: First Class, there are bad superhero movies. Some are infamous, like Batman & Robin or the Fantastic Four movies or the Hulk movie from 2003 directed by Ang Lee. Some you've probably never seen, like the first Captain America movie with Reb Brown from the seventies.

And some fall into a very peculiar category - the category widely known as 'So Bad It's Good'. This is the category for movies like Daredevil (seriously, the R-rated Director's Cut of this movie must be seen to be believed) or the second Captain America movie with Reb Brown and Christopher Lee (no, I'm not kidding - it's so bad, it's hilarious).

Short version of my review: Green Lantern is one of those movies in the third category. Which really can suck for several different reasons which I'll talk about, but still manage to be an enjoyable movie. The internet backdraft against this flick has really blown the awfulness of Green Lantern out of proportion.

But make no mistake, Green Lantern is NOT a good movie. The special effects range from okay to godawful. The score is poorly put together and not particularly well structured. The script is downright terrible, and the acting... well, I'll get to that in a second. But all of these seriously flawed pieces come together into a movie that is actually pretty enjoyable to watch. I don't know how - I certainly can't explain it - but I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I expected to.

The story? Well, it's a very basic Green Lantern origin story, and while I and thousands of other geeks could rage at the canon discontinuities or silliness, this movie works on having a sense of perspective - because make no mistake, Green Lantern is one hell of a silly character, with one of the most outlandishly silly backstories in mainstream comics. Those who want to know details, go look things up on Wikipedia or see the movie, because they really, really try to be faithful where it counts.

But here's the first big problem - for as much as they tried, the script of this movie is awful. Rife with easy-to-see plot holes, bad characterization, and horrendous dialogue, this script shouldn't have gotten past Geoff Johns (one of the producers, and the leading writer behing the good Green Lantern comics), let alone hit the big screen. Part of this is the editing of the film - this movie was chopped down a lot, and you can tell exposition and some scenes of importance were lost in the shuffle, but nothing excuses some of the dialogue in this movie. Most of it is just obscenely corny and it just doesn't work - and I'm talking about the dialogue that takes place on Earth, not the Green Lantern HQ of Oa.

In fact, let me talk about this for a second, because the script seemed to get significantly sharper when on that Green Lantern planet compared to Earth, and I wasn't entirely sure why until near the end of the movie. And then I picked it up - when this movie is on Oa, it feels original and different. When it's on Earth, on the other hand, it either feels like a bad Top Gun knockoff (complete with the fucking daddy issues) blended with a teetering pile of poorly chosen superhero cliches (with one big exception, but I'll get to that when I talk about the acting). Frankly, everything on Oa, between the actors and the setting, was just so much more interesting than whatever was happening on Earth, and strangely, despite all of the silly, out-there concepts, it was easier to follow.

But here comes the crippling blow to the scenes on Oa: the CGI. And here, I hate to be the confirmer of bad news, but it just doesn't work well. Granted, some of the shots and effects are decent, but most of them just look awkward or unfinished or just plain BAD, belonging more in a video game or a television show. And while I won't rail on the costume changes that much, I will say they don't nearly look as good as they should, and they really should have just given Ryan Reynolds an actual costume for this movie.

So onto the acting, and here, I have to confirm more bad news. Ryan Reynolds is a great actor, and you can tell he's working his ass off to make his role convincing, but really, he's not a good Hal Jordan (he's a far better Wade Wilson, which makes me excited because odds are, with X-Men Wolverine retconned out by First Class, WE'RE GOING TO GET A DEADPOOL MOVIE!). He doesn't look the part, he doesn't really act the part either (though I can blame that more on the script shamelessly ripping off Top Gun), and the sad part is that he's trying so damn hard - which is more than I can say for his co-lead Blake Lively, who is utterly awful in this movie. Just to give some scope here, January Jones has been heavily criticized for having no range in the new X-Men movie (although I'd argue that might have been part of the point), and yet I'd say that she acts whole volumes better than Blake Lively in this film - which really fucking sucks, because anyone who knows anything about Green Lantern continuity knows how her character eventually turns out (and if that's not depressing, I dunno what is).

As for the supporting cast, Mark Strong tries his hardest as Sinestro, and since Mark Strong is awesome in everything he's ever in, it's pretty good, and he lights up the screen whenever he's on. Geoffrey Rush and Michael Clarke Duncan lend their voices as Tomas-Re and Kilowog, but really, they aren't given enough to do in this film. But the real stand-out, I've got to say, is Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond. Of all the cast, he looks like he's having the most fun in his role, and his scenes and character arc are far more compelling than anything Hal Jordan's going through, mostly because it involves mostly practical effects and some marginally better writing. I'll stand by the common consensus on his character: he deserves a more epic movie than Green Lantern was able to provide. And as for Parallax... eh, it didn't belong in this movie, that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

But really, the problems with this movie both begin and end with the script, and the fact that nobody working on this movie has a damn clue what they want this movie to be. The jarring shifts in tone and style, combined with the outrageous mythos of Green Lantern, make this movie like a haphazard disappointing mess. In parts of the movie, it wants to be big and epic, and with the Green Lantern mythos, I can respect that ambition - one that completely falls flat on its face when you realize that the writers and editors don't care about that and want to make a Top Gun meets Superman knockoff to be 'relatable to the audience' - uh, Warner Brothers, we know you have no standards or expectations for mainstream audiences, but you could have at least tried to make this feel alien and spectacular and outrageous - some the of the epic will just come with the territory there. Nobody feels like they're on the same page with this movie, or have a coherent idea what they want it to be.

But then you run into the biggest problems of adapting this franchise - to make the special effects look anywhere near decent and still capture the epic scope of Green Lantern, you'd need to spend a hell of a lot more money and a lot more time in development, and with Marvel Studios hitting two home runs out of the damn park already this summer, DC needed to get something out, regardless of quality. And frankly, to do the Green Lantern mythos justice, I'm not convinced Warner Brothers has either the time or money to invest in such a project, or are willing to try for any other DC franchise besides Batman (and maybe Superman, but I'm not getting my hopes up there, even with both Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan on board).

And on that note, this movie does two things that I would almost consider cheap shots at Marvel's attempts for universe-continuity in their films, namely a certain scene between Sinestro and Hal, and the introduction of mainstay DC character Amanda Waller, played in a pretty good turn by Amanda Bassett. The first scene just comes off as mean-spiritied and not particularly attractive (you'll know what I mean when you see it), but the second just raises a lot of questions at who the hell thought her presence was a good idea, particularly once you realize that DC doesn't have nearly the guts or desire to make something as ambitious as Marvel's movie-verse continuity (yeah, watch how awesome Captain America and eventually The Avengers will turn out and tell me Warner Brothers won't rethink that decision).

And here's the saddest part of this whole movie experience: this movie has ripe opportunities for sequels, and probably pretty damn good ones too - the Green Lantern mythos has a ton of potential. But this movie has been critically panned by pretty much everyone, and if it doesn't make money, we're not going to see any more out-there comic book franchises reach the big screen from DC.

But here's the last thing: even despite everything that went wrong in this movie and how bad parts of it are, there are still moments that genuinely work and work very well. And there are moments that are actually pretty damn funny, even if the film is not trying to be funny. But that's some of the charm with movies like this: they're so bad, they're actually a lot of fun to watch. Watch this movie like you watch The Room or Manos: The Hands of Fate or Troll 2 - with absolutely no expectations, making fun of the movie or just wanting to have a good time. Don't treat this movie like X-Men: First Class, and don't be disappointed that it's not nearly as good as that. Yeah, it does suck that it's not as good as most other comic book movies, but it doesn't disrespect its origin story, and you can tell people are genuinely trying.

So here's what I'm saying: go see Green Lantern. See it with no expectations. Laugh at the bad CGI and corny dialogue and terrible cliches or the legitimately funny moments. Have fun with it. Don't try to take Green Lantern super seriously - because with this mythos, you're just asking for trouble. And maybe, if it manages to make money (and the Transformers movies made money, just think of that), we'll see some better movies that have the benefit of less outrageous plotlines, and maybe - just maybe - we might see Ryan Reynolds recite the Green Lantern Oath one more time.

 

While Silens has pretty much covered everything in his massive review, I just saw it today with my dad and had a comment or two. The movie was alright and I never got bored as I often do in theaters, but I did really enjoy one thing. I saw it in 3D, and there are scenes in space. It was fantastic, just fantastic. I'm glad that I saw it in 3D, as without the 3D the movie probably wouldn't have been as good as it was. (I wouldn't even call it good, though, really.)

Moar 3D space stuff is needed.

 

I forgot to add this in my last post I think - did anyone else think the introduction of Amanda Waller was to make sure people know who she is for the JL movie they want to make? It seemed a lot like the way Fury was introduced in IR2 to me... Although... I was expecting someone... larger?

 

She will under go what we call the Thats so Ravin metamorphosis.

It happens when producers least expect it.

/douche

 

I was in cinema today watching two films for my nephew's birthday. He wanted this and x-men so I got to rewatch it.

I found on this when rewatching it a scene I overlooked what I liked was when the female said to Hal "I've known you for years, you think I wouldn't recognize you because of an eye-mask?" it seemed like it was mocking the stupidness of Superman...

 

Make some goddamned sense.

Plus, I find it a really bad sign when a superhero movie has someone finally grow a brain and realize that: "dude, that hero totally looks like this guy I know, without that tiny part of his face covered in black". Because this raises the question of why every single person who's seen both the hero and his alter ego hasn't recognized him. That is especially true if the alter ego is high profile.
Also, dunno about you guys, but I would totally pay to go watch this. Oh well.

 

Finally Saw the movie...

Nothing Different to say.

Movie was better than critics claimed it was.
Worth a go see.
Blake lively still hot.
Not setting new ground or anything but had its moments.

Don't bother waiting till the end for a special scene.
Only one and it comes less than half way through the credits.

Also Just realised the human villain was the guy from 3rd rock from the sun... not bad but he screams a lot.

 

Saw this the other day; distinctly average, but not as bad as some have made out. Some bizarre effects - excellent in some scenes, poor in others - Parallax was just awful, and the story was far too bloated, but it still entertained me well enough. I won't be that disappointed if there isn't a sequel, but I'll probably see it if it's made.

 

Double post, but Warner Bros have mentioned the possibility of a sequel. Happily, they seem to have identified the core problems of the film, and are well on the way to correcting them.

:facepalm

 

Well, usually I don't agree with this type of thinking, but this time I have three words for producers - Sinestro Corps War. Should be enough to make it edgier, darker and just more awesome.