Green Lantern (2011)

It’s all about weight. I’m not talking about metaphorical or emotional weight; I’m talking about literal, gravitational weight. As in how heavy things are. For an action sequence in a film to have any impact, there must be a feeling that things actually weigh something. It’s hard to buy in to a film when the audience doesn’t believe that what goes up must eventually come down. If there is no such weight to be found, then the film doesn’t seem to exist in an actual physical space. It becomes little more than a Saturday morning cartoon. Green Lantern is unconvincing and silly because the abundance of cartoonish CGI removes any sense that the action is really happening in any actual world worth caring about. It’s difficult to become invested in what we cannot believe.

The protagonist of the film is Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a cocky fighter pilot whose father died in a plane crash many years before. One day he is picked up by a magical ball of green light and taken to the wrecked ship of a purple alien. It is there he is given a (green) ring and a (green) lantern, and soon he discovers that he has been chosen to join a legion of (green) warriors whose sole mission is to fight evil across the universe and stuff. Meanwhile, a large alien that feeds on fear is running amok across the universe, and it eventually sets its sights on Earth because it’s more dramatic that way. Oh, and Peter Sarsgaard plays a mentally unbalanced scientist who gets infected by… something, and his head starts to become all kinds of unpleasant shapes. Then there’s fighting and lots of (green) colors and explosions and stuff, and then—of course—a sequel is teased at film’s end. Remember when movies were meant to be self-contained pieces of entertainment? Like Thor, this film exists merely to make some money so they can move on to the next one. (Though early box office receipts suggest we may never see Green Lantern 2.)

The problem with the Green Lantern hero presented here is that his near-limitless power renders him uninteresting. The only restraints that are set are those that exist solely within Reynolds’ mind. He is able to generate literally anything in order to save the day, and that would suggest there’s no real excuse for him to lose any confrontation. It’s the weaknesses that make superheroes fascinating. The Green Lantern, theoretically, should have none. At any moment, Hal has an infinite number of ways he could get out of a jam. That doesn’t make for much suspense. If he ever finds himself thirsty in the middle of a desert, he could generate green water out of thin air. The film tries to sell that Hal has a plethora of psychological problems holding him back, but come on.

Yet it’s the aforementioned weightlessness that completely takes the viewer out of the Green Lantern experience. Like Thor, it attempts to balance a large CGI fantasy world with the reality of Earth. While each world is relatively engaging on its own, when they combine it all seems visually false. Computer-generated effects are not inherently evil, but they are most effective when used around the edges. Too often in Green Lantern, the strange, otherworldly CGI becomes the entire show, and as such there’s no urgency to the proceedings. It doesn’t look real; it simply looks like CGI. At least in the alien universe it looked consistent—not unlike Avatar, and that is high praise—but few things have looked stranger on film than Ryan Reynolds walking the Earth in his Green Lantern get-up. It looks far too artificial to be believed.

All these aesthetic flaws are only made worse by the pedestrian origin story that surrounds them. I’ll admit that I thought the first act of Green Lantern wasn’t all that bad. The actors are all compelling—Sarsgaard in particular, whose character deserves his own movie—but as soon as the film kicks in to Green Lantern mode it goes downhill fast. The film is entertaining at first, but then it becomes boring and ultimately downright silly. Green Lantern is all the more disappointing as it was directed by Martin Campbell, who has made two strong James Bond movies (GoldenEye and Casino Royale) among other things. I would prefer he sticks with earthly thrillers in the future, as giving him a film as inherently goofy as this is like putting a round peg in a square hole. However, it’d be wrong of me to place the entirety of the blame on him. Green Lantern was never meant to be the work of an artist. It is nothing more than a product. (Perhaps they could get Subway on board for some cross-promotion. I hear they make a mean avocado sandwich. And that’s green, right? The ads write themselves!)

GRADE: C-

P.S. - I will add that the 3-D in this film is actually quite good. So that’s nice, I guess.