Green Lantern

This is a pretty underrated comic book movie. Yet Green Lantern has everything it should have: Fantastic visuals and top-notch special effects (on a level more bombastic than Thor, Iron Man and others), an excellent, likable and above all funny main character, action scenes, of which there are not many, but when it comes to them (major training with rocks, swords, a motorbike, rotary machine gun...), one tends to stare, Newton Howard's precisely paced soundtrack... etc. In addition to this, however, Green Lantern is also very unlucky. In competition with the more popular Marvel films, it feels like their stepbrother that no one really wants to play with (Forman's Valmont went through a battle like this with Dangerous Liaisons back in the day, and yet it's not a bad film either). And that's a great pity. The only criticism I can make of it is the slightly overstuffed plot, which shows how much the filmmakers were counting on a sequel, in which the supporting characters (and perhaps the hundreds of amazing alien Lanterns) would now get the proper space they need, and in which a proper villain would appear (hold on until halfway through the credits). I'd take the second film now. Four pure stars.__P.S. Hearing a "fish alien" speak in Geoffrey Rush's voice is a treat.__P.P.S. For the first time since Avatar, I didn't find 3D unnecessary in a feature film (Parallax’s attack!) .__P.P.P.S. I wonder how many sage, disgruntled smarties saw Green Lantern in the movie theatre, and how many at home on a 15x20 cm screen. (08/22/2011)

Nice effects are everywhere these days. And so we get an accumulation of bland films that are nice to look at but evoke almost no emotion. Apart from a bunch of gimmicks, there was nothing to get me into the plot. Blake Lively is beautiful and Ryan Reynolds is quite likable. Except that I knew that before I saw it. Where are the days when I was rooting for the main character and couldn't tear myself away from the screen? Now I'm just watching him phone it in to see what he looks like doing it. A weak 2.5 stars. (12/08/2011)

The green man has no trouble not taking himself seriously, so what ultimately kills him is rather the directorial and dramaturgical indecision. The whole problem of Green Lantern is contained in one scene: Hal flies in to see his chosen one in disguise to meander like Superman. What follows is a very good parody of similar "superhero" kitsch, which I laughed at with pleasure. But in the next scene, we find exactly the same, this time deadly serious kitsch, that feels like the scene before didn't even exist. And that's the way it is all the time. Campbell winking at the viewer for a while, but then serves us un-diluted dullness and naivety. The whole film has a similar structure to Thor, but while the guy at the "top" felt serious and the guy at the "bottom" light, Green Lantern appears like a stupid and genderless retouch on both levels. Yet its potential is undeniable - but the creators have turned a hero who can materialize anything from his fantasy into Tom Cruise from Top Gun. It’s no wonder that Warner insist on a second film. A missed chance like this hurts, especially at a time when comic book films are doing well. (08/11/2011)

Several billion years ago, a race of immortals armed themselves with the most powerful force in existence: the emerald energy of willpower. Just as hallucinatory and incomprehensible as Flash Gordon in its day. Whether this is good or bad, I am not sure; in any case, guilty pleasure par excellence. (11/07/2011)

I definitely like DC better and would rather see a Justice League than an Avengers movie. So far, however, this equation is still very much askew. So far, we have the DC cartoons and this bold Green Lantern. It doesn't matter too much that it didn't particularly succeed, as the competition's desire for Marvel-esque success is stronger than one incremental step toward it. Personally, I'm not that interested in Green Lantern as a standalone character, but he's fine as part of the Justice League. So if he manages to confuse audiences lost in comic book adaptations enough that they will one day make a Justice League movie, Hal Jordan has done his part. As such, I treat it as a standalone film. It's been loaded with a lot of stuff, but it's still just a feature-length story derived from Aladdin's magic lamp and the need to fight evil in the age of rising Nazism. Today, Green Lantern has a 72-year history and this is his first feature film. On the basis of the classic Superman scheme, he introduced us to what happens on the brightest day and the blackest night. It’s like, "The bigger you are, the faster you burn." It's a shame about Blake Lively, but maybe in the sequel, she'll come out of the shadow of her Super Gossip Girl role a lot more. (06/03/2012)