The Narrator's Negatives: Green Lantern

Narrator's Negatives focuses on pointing out what went wrong, why something was bad, and how those mistakes could have been avoided. Today we draw our attention to the film Green Lantern.

Eyes, those haunting, haunting eyes

This past weekend Green Lantern premiered to scathing reviews and tepid box office receipts. Usually I'm not one to bash a movie I haven't already seen, but in this case I'm making an exception. I'm usually all down for the superhero fare. I went and saw Ghost Rider on opening night, and I own a copy of Daredevil. I'm also a big Ryan Reynolds fan. Remember the show Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place. I do, I watched it pretty religiously until it went off the air. (Also on that show, Nathan Fillon, who had a strong fan campaign going to star as Green Lantern before Reynolds got the job, go figure). But from the minute I heard Reynolds would be playing star role as Hal Jordan, something just didn't click. Then came news that the Lantern suit would be completely CGI'd. Then the first image of Reynolds in said suit, all glowy green, with those scary eyes that didn't seem quite connected to his body. Then the trailers started coming out, and again something failed to click, everything was too green, the jokes too lame, and the speech, just couldn't seem to have the impact it should.  Alright I'm drifting a little so let's start to structure this post a little bit, shall we?

Let's start small and work our way up, with the decision to CGI the suit. This isn't the first time this has been done, but it It might be the first time it has been completely done. a good chunk of Spiderman's action is CGI, but we also have a good handful of scenes where the audience knows Tobey Maguire is in that suit. But Chris, what about Iron Man you ask? Well Iron Man is a suit, a full suit, and that is where the advantage lies. Its a metal suit, with defined limitations, and a mask that doesn't reveal any facial expressions. It was believable because of this. The Lantern suit was glowy, why the hell was everything in that movie so glowy? And why was it veiny? I mean it was oddly veiny. Didn't we learn our lesson from rubber nipples? Now we need to CGI muscles and veins on the suit? next time around make the suit real. Yes, it'll probably take an outrageous amount of time to put on, and no the green lantern is probably one of the harder suits to bring to life because it doesn't have too many discernible breaks in the fabric, but someone in Hollywood should be able to figure it out. I recommend whoever did Gaga's meat dress.

Next we need to address the issue of choosing Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern. As one of my friends said, they should have used the black one. For those of you unfamiliar with comics, there are about a half dozen people going by Green Lantern. All with the same powers and galactic connection. The original is not even Hal Jordan. But he is arguably one of the most well known. At least that's what Warner Brothers believed. But the most prominent Green Lantern in the mainstream media in the past ten years has been John Stewart (or as my friend called him, the black one). You might know him best from the Justice League and the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series that ran on Cartoon Network in the early 2000's. This was a great version of the character, and one many of the main demographic this film was targeting, the 16-24 male (demographic may be entirely made up by me). These are the people who grew up watching these cartoons, and that is the version of the character they are most familiar with. Let's think of this another way too, this would have been the first superhero film to feature a prominent African-American as the lead since the Blade franchise died out. Perhaps the reason this film didn't perform, it couldn't stand out in a what was already a crowded summer, because it was just another superhero film with another white pretty boy in the lead.
Which brings me to my next point. One argument for Green Lantern's, at this point we'll call it lack of success rather than outright failure, is that Green Lantern is not a character audiences are familiar with. To which I call bullshit. Audiences know the Green Lantern, what they don't know is Hal Jordan. People know Batman is Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker is Spiderman, and Clark Kent is Superman. Most people couldn't tell you what the Green Lantern's alter ego is.  Now there are two arguments that can be made, first, what about Thor? True most people don't know Thor's human identity (it's something like Blake Donaldson), but the film maker's handled that nicely by simply ignoring this aspect of the character. The other argument what about Iron Man? Again prior to the film's release, I bet many people couldn't tell you that Iron Man and Tony Stark are one in the same. But that's where acting comes in. Downey Jr. took that character and made him cocky, arrogant, and immensely likable. Ryan Reynolds simply decided to be Ryan Reynolds, and not even a fun version of Ryan Reynolds. He played a toned down bland version of Ryan Reynolds who gave lame jokes. He played it without the zest that makes Ryan Reynolds so appealing.

There were other points I wanted to make, but since it took me two days I've forgotten most of the rest. I could go on about the lame supporting cast, and the cartoonish world Reynolds enter whenever he isn't on Earth. But really if you're still reading this, I'm not sure why.