Jun 17 2011

‘Green Lantern’ Review: Flickering light

 

PCN RATING:

“In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight Let those who worship evil’s might, Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

If you are comic geek you no doubt recognize that little ditty as the oath of the Green Lantern Corps, the intergalactic peacekeepers of the classic DC comics series. If you don’t have the foggiest what a Green Lantern is (and I suspect there are more of you out there than the geek contingent wants to admit) you are probably thinking ‘Wait, superheroes still have oaths?’ And the answer is ‘well, the Green Lantern does.’

This is a movie I would have adored at around the age of 9 or 10. Some 22 years out from that date, I still found a good deal to admire in Green Lantern. Unfortunately, that troublesome adult part of me that needs things like story cohesion and dramatic weight kept getting in the way. On the production front, this is a handsomely mounted and mostly engaging affair, bold enough to discard the recent mundane palettes of most superhero sagas for something more ambitious. Employing the art designs of Jack Fisk, this Lantern doesn’t just remind of a comic-book, it could literally be the moving panels of a 60’s era pulp saga involving space cops and intergalactic monsters.  The goofy opening scene of alien astronauts discovering an ancient evil prepared me for an adventure of Flash Gordon proportions. What follows, though, is dismally earth-bound, punctuated by moments of cosmic uplift.

A quick word about the complex back story. The Lanterns are essentially a police force, bestowed their powers by the Guardians of the universe, live on the planet Oa and can harness their will through magical rings that allow them to manifest whatever their minds can imagine. The dark side of the will is fear, and its culminated in Parallax, who looks like a giant space booger with the head of one of those aliens from Mars Attacks. Parallax has a history with the Guardians and the Lanterns, and his mission is as much one of revenge as destruction.  When the alien warrior Abin Sur is wounded by Parallax, he goes to Earth looking for a replacement before he dies. He finds reckless, emotionally uncertain Hal Jordan when the ring chooses the witless human and deposits him at Sur’s crashed ship.

Like that, Hal is thrust into the scope of a grand struggle. Once he figures out how to activate the Lantern, he’s beamed up to Oa where he’s met by the Lantern force, including a strange, fish-like Tomar-Re, who sounds like Geoffrey Rush, the extraterrestrial bulldog Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Sinestro (Mark Strong), the current leader of the Corps who is gruff and unconvinced of Jordan’s worthiness. Meanwhile, on the little blue planet Parallax has infected a scientist, the lonely, stunted Hector Hammond and transformed him into something that looks like John Merrick and Peter Sarsgaard collided.

The sequences of the film that involve Hal’s trip to Oa and the final battle with Parallax on Earth are easily the strongest. They have the nimbleness and sincerity of Campbell’s previous hero film, Mask of Zorro, and they walk a slippery slope between sublime silliness and earnest drama. When Hal and Parallax take their battle to the edge of the sun, Campbell references the Donner and Lester Superman movies and then trumps them. He does the same thing earlier when Hal sails down to the balcony of his lady-love, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively).  The tapestry of Oa isn’t visually convincing as a real place but it’s been designed with the same verve and imagination as those matte paintings in Golden Age science fiction. When we see the emissaries of a thousand galaxies standing on the craggy ledges of Oa, there’s something striking about it without bringing reality into the equation.

The movie’s anchor and downside is the reliance upon the supposedly important human concerns of the plot; the origin story that needs to get Hal from being a self-absorbed schmuck who’s still reeling over his daddy’s demise, to the green-suited, masked warrior who can stand-up to the expansive fear of Parallax. These passages are the ones Campbell has the most difficulty with, trying to implant a humorous, jokey vibe that would be more at home in a 90’s superhero flick like The Mask than in a pulpy fantasy epic .

Reynolds is totally miscast as Jordan, and his character is severely underwritten. The good news is that he rises to the occasion by playing a convincing version of Ryan Reynolds, and settling the audience down into an amiable rhythm that carries us through the clunky, cliché-infested waters of the script. Blake Lively is beautiful and classy as Ferris, but again her character feels very much like an add-on that exists because it’s been determined that all superheroes need significant others. Sarsgaard and Strong as the villain and the villain-to-be are the only ones who register as characters, and maybe this is down to the fact their make-up is the most convincing and they get to internalize struggles between what they should be and who they are willing to be. Strong’s Sinestro is cheated by the franchise demands in a credits sequence, and his turn-of-character is less plausible than Magneto’s about-face at the close of First Class.

As a director I’ve always liked Martin Campbell, but here he’s a bit out of his league. There are often several competing tones going on in Green Lantern and when Campbell forces the film into a matinee kid’s movie format (which is, honestly, where it belongs) he keeps getting sidetracked and introducing more and more sideways threads until the emotional effect of the pic is diminished. This really feels like a movie that’s missing a good thirty minutes and side-characters like Tim Robbins’  Senator Hammond and Angela Bassett’s researcher are clearly supposed to have more to do. There’s also a lack of Oa and the other Lanterns in the story, and this is a shame because they are clearly the most interesting part.

Campbell doesn’t have time for that because he’s too busy making the Lanterns’ ability of creating objects out of green energy a plausible and valid power. I’m surprised he makes the scene where Jordan throws a set of cartoon wheels on a haywire helicopter and sends it through a Hot Wheels ramp work at all. When Jordan is slapping together an arsenal of make-shift war-toys to battle the tentacled, twirling Parallax, he’s totally jiving with the film’s comic namesake. The problem is this constant war between the two neutralizes the overall effectiveness.

What we are left with is a movie that doesn’t really know what it wants to be and like Jordan is afraid to commit until the stakes are fully raised. This is a fun summer distraction but it isn’t likely to resonate or build the kind of audience that will justify a sequel. Which is a pity, because I’d gladly watch a second installment if it would leave Earth in the rearview and set its sights for infinity, and beyond. Now, it’s best summed up by Robbins’ Hudsucker Proxy character, Norville Barnes, pitching his idea for the hula hoop. ‘Y’know, for kids!’

By Nathan • Featured, Films • 1 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,