One of the greatest sins a writer can commit is to tell the story rather than show it. Never tell how heroic your protagonists are; show bravery and resilience. Don’t tell how your villain is the greatest evil the universe has ever known; show brutality and malice. Above all, don’t make a superhero movie about a character that most of the world isn’t familiar with and talk the audience to death in a theater.
Despite being in publication since 1941, Green Lantern is a superhero that never sustained a place in the top-tier of characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or any of the X-Men. The story is a mix of human drama, otherworldly politics and space opera centered on an alien technology that allows the wielder of a ring to possess nearly limitless power. That kind of eclectic jumble of story elements has been kind of a tough sell even for fans over the years and the title has not always sold well. Hal Jordan, the primary hero, has undergone several reinventions as the Green Lantern of Earth and DC has introduced several different human Green Lanterns in hopes of pushing the title to the top shelf. Naturally, Hollywood decided this uneven history is a great target for a $300 million budget.
There are a number of things the film does right. The world of Oa and the mythos of the Corps is well presented visually and the overall tone of the movie is consistent. The action set pieces are not as poorly choreographed as others have said, and when the writing doesn't force the actors to deliver lines dumb enough to make Neil DeGrasse Tyson lose a few IQ points the cast does a decent job with what they have. It's not as embarrassingly awful as X-Men Origins: Wolverine so there is no spinning severed head of laser beam hilarity. The problem is that Green Lantern tries to appease fans by staying too close to the source material but neglects any attempt at a sophisticated--or even logical--story in favor of standard, shallow, banal plot points and nonexistent character development. Green Lantern is like the first-year student in Fiction Workshop 101 who takes his Tolkein fanfic too seriously, unaware that his characters are shallow and forgettable, unaware that his tale is a string of tired cliches and unaware that the rest of the class is laughing at his villain. The movie manages to be simple summer fun, but only if you abandon any expectations of literary competence.
Obscure comic hero titles can be made into well done, clever, fun films that appease critics and general audiences; spend a couple hours with Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy for example. Unknown source material outside its fanbase, mostly b-list cast, minimalist production budget of $66 million. Also fun, clever and engaging as both a story well told and a popcorn movie that's still hard to turn off when it's on cable eight years after release. Ironic that the world of Green Lantern is full of bizarre characters that are mostly ignored in the background of the film while del Toro gave us bizarre characters that we care about because their oddities are featured in their wit and sympathetic qualities. Green Lantern's characters stand painted in the background, saying almost nothing that makes sense and doing almost nothing that matters.
Director Martin Campbell was handed a strong cast but allowed his stars too many moments of glazed-eyed vacancy or crazed-eyed villainy instead of pushing them to convey any kind of depth or genuine introspection when they have their moment as the subject of the frame. It’s as if Green Lantern were a Michael Bay movie in which every character stares numbly at nothing for several seconds and we’re supposed to interpret that as a dramatic moment. It’s not. It’s just emptiness. It’s the directorial ineptitude equivalent of pressing the pause button on your BluRay player and thinking you can heighten the situational tension by contemplating the plastic frame of your television. There are indulgent, overwrought shots of the villain screaming on his knees in the midst of exploso-chaos, poorly timed and overlong flashbacks of the hero that disrupt the pace of key scenes and even a carefully framed Yin-Yang shot of our hero and villain collapsed on their backs lying adjacent head-to-shoulder amid the debris of their battle. Campbell’s failure to handle Hal Jordan and villain Hector Hammond are shocking compared to his brilliant control of Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.
Peter Sarsgaard as Hammond is actually a strength of the movie until he is transformed into a wailing monstrosity by becoming infected by a fragment of the alien entity Parallax. He’s only given a few scenes before his transformation but still manages to convincingly portray a nerdy but well-intentioned professor trying to amount to something in the eyes of his Senator father (Tim Robbins). Sarsgaard is nicely awkward and sympathetic, and it works if for no other reason than the sheer earnestness with which Professor Hammond seems to approach his work and parts of his perceived-inadequate life. Unfortunately, his inexplicable transformation renders him nothing more than a MacGuffin for the rest of the movie and the subject of unintentional laughter in the theater.
The best performance in the film is by Mark Strong as Sinestro, a legendary member of the Green Lantern Corps until his eventual turn to the yellow power of fear and his transformation into the Corps’s greatest adversary. Strong embodies the proud, controlled-anger persona of Sinestro to the same extent that Ian McKellen brought charisma and presence to Magneto and should be mentioned alongside Heath Ledger’s Joker. Strong didn’t reinvent his character like Ledger did and the movie does not center on him the way The Dark Knight did Joker, but Strong dominates his scenes with such a forceful presence that the film should have done away with the oddly octopodic Parallax and featured the Sinestro Corps.
Hal Jordan could take a lesson in heroism from future villain Sinestro and Ryan Reynolds could take a lesson in scene presence from Strong. His portrayal of Jordan is passable and he clearly has the comedy timing for the playboy-cocky Jordan, but he lacks the harder edge for the arrogantly cocky Jordan. We’re told (over and over) that the ring chose Jordan because he is fearless, but we see time and again Jordan paralyzed by reliving his father’s death and his inexplicable walking away from being a Green Lantern. This is a failure of the script and not Reynolds, but during the brief scenes where he has an opportunity to tell his girlfriend (Blake Lively as Carol Ferris) or the Guardians that he needs to Do Something Right, he’s allowed to mug with wide-eyed puppy-dog sincerity rather than display steely resolve. The audience needs to see a confident—even arrogant—Hal Jordan in order to believe the ring chose correctly.
It doesn’t help to think about Nathan Fillion’s interest in the role before Reynolds was cast. He’s an actor with geek appeal and the looks to fit the character, but more importantly has the versatility of heroic presence and confidence to pull off the weight of dramatic scenes and yet the comic sense to deliver wit and humor. In the end however, compared to Reynolds he just wasn't a star bright enough to attach to the Green Lantern vehicle. With tighter direction and a script a little better than abysmal, Reynolds could have been a much stronger lead.
Telling isn’t believing, and that’s the biggest problem with this movie. We are told over and over how powerful and important a Green Lantern is. We are told over and over how a Green Lantern is fearless, and yet we are shown Hal Jordan is a man sometimes paralyzed with fear, insecurity and greif over his father's death. This film indulges in exposition and voiceover narration at the expense of giving key characters time to develop and does not deliver scenes that actually show how powerful, important and fearless a Green Lantern is. We are told over and over what the Corps is; ironically, even Sinestro tells the Corps that he doesn’t need to tell them who they are. The script writers—all seven of them— felt the need to tell us at length, ad nauseum, ad infinum.
Horrible writing is the rotten yellow core of the movie. Shallow dialog, brief and trite action set pieces, yawning cliche after cliche, and worst of all the most broken or completely absent logic. Plot points progress without sound reason or even common sense and scene transitions are sometimes so abrupt that it's unclear why characters are appearing at their locations. That is, until they open their mouths and tell you.
Logic failure to wit: The guardians appear completely unperturbed by Parallax’s march across the universe to the point of only reluctantly allowing their greatest warrior, Sinestro, lead an attack. When he does he inexplicably leads a small group who can think of nothing more effective than constructing glowing green chains so they can hit it with glowing green snowballs. Of course most of the Lanterns die immediately, because glowing snowballs are expensive special effects when billed by the minute and the movie had to get to the next scene. A far more effective plan would have been to lure Parallax to Oa and having the narrator exposition it to death.
Eventually the guardians allow Hal Jordan to return to Earth alone (where he just was), leaving an entire planet of Lanterns on Oa to do...whatever it is they do when a single Lantern goes off to fight something that just killed several of them about an hour ago. Jordan has no reason to need the Guardians' permission for anything other than the script needed to send him back to Oa so he could deliver a heroic speech about not giving in to fear... or fighting fear with me...something something. Jordan proceeds to defeat Parallax remarkably easily but requires a last-second rescue from Sinestro and the gang who inexplicably show up after the fighting's done. Then after watching a single human Green Lantern defeat the not-very-all-powerful yellow entity, Sinestro forges a yellow ring to become his true villainous self in the closing credits.
None of it makes any sense. At all. None.
This is a script that was killed by a committee of idiocy, overproduced, overwrought and heavy-handed. It wants desperately to be taken seriously as a dramatic action movie but instead delivered lengthy melodramatic exposition. Clearly the studio was aiming to make Green Lantern the next big-money superhero franchise and has already planned two more sequels, but those sequels are now in doubt as the movie has only grossed $102 million. Merchandising and disc sales will help offset the loss but the ring slinger's future on the big screen is not as bright as the light power he wields.
There is a tragic amount of wasted potential in Green Lantern. A mass-appeal franchise remains hidden somewhere in this material but it may have been buried with incompetent film making before it will get another chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment