Friday, June 17, 2011

Cool VS Stool - Green Lantern

Green Lantern - $300 Million of Green!

Today, Warner Bros. releases its first super hero film since last summers colossal flop, Jonah Hex. But unlike Jonah Hex, Green Lantern is actually worth seeing.  

Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) plays Hal Jordan, the overly confident test pilot who is ironically reluctant to take on the mantel of the super hero, Green Lantern.  Reynold's performance is what you would expect: sarcastically funny, endearing, and... well... heroic. With rock-hard abs, a defined chin, and perfect line delivery, Reynolds is the ideal comic book hero.


The special effects in Green Lantern are well done. Compared to the rushed CG effects in X-Men: First Class, it is obvious that Lantern benefited from longer production time and multiple screen tests (but I'm not sure who approved some of the campy choices of ring projections). As great as the SFXs are, they are not enhanced by 3-D (don't waste the extra money if you don't have to). Though with a $300 million budget one would expect eye popping SFXs and maybe even some equally fantastic writing.

The film spends 2/3s of it's time developing Hal Jordan's character and setting the stage for a conflict that is disappointingly quick to be resolved. A fellow critic came into the film 45 minutes late and didn't miss a thing having watched the trailers. But the film is obviously setting the stage for another comic book movie franchise, so it spends extra time spoon feeding the audience for the next film's conflict (and if you aren't sharp enough to see what that is, just stick around for the credits).

It's a fun film worth seeing. But I eat the words from my review of Super 8, when I told viewers who if pressed for cash should just see Green Lantern. See this film if you liked Super Man Returns, I Am Number Four, or Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Cool VS Stool Rating = Cool

4 comments:

  1. Even more ironic is the fact that the fourty five minutes of back story was more than adequately addressed in slightly less than 5 minutes of preview. Should the movie have been shorter? Maybe, but personally, rather than shorten it, I would have liked to have seen that time re-allocated to enhancing the depth of the conflict...get us more emotionally involved. Where Xmen first class succeded overwhelmingly over Green Lantern was in creating a conflict where we cared a whole bunch about the outcome (even if it did contain a few more superfluous characters than I am comfortable with).

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  2. I definitely agree. While X-Men suffered from throw away characters (e.g., the tornado mutant who is never named in the film), a great job was done developing sympathy for the characters that mattered. Green Lantern suffers from only really developing Hal Jordan and setting the stage for a future film.

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  3. Also, I wish Hal had imagined a light sabre instead of a sword because I doubt he would have been condescended to but red face guy had he done it.

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  4. I saw it today, and thought it was awesome! What do critics know anyway?

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