Comic Book Movie Rewatch: Green Lantern

I’ve decided to go back and watch a bunch of movies based on comic books. No real reason, just something I thought would be fun. This time it was the 2011 movie Green Lantern.

Green Lantern

IMDb Rating: 5.6/10

Rotten Tomatoes critics: 26%

Rotten Tomatoes audience: 45%

My Rating: 4/10

I like the character of the Green Lantern. I like the idea behind a character whose primary strength has to be his willpower. I like an enemy whose power is based on fear. I like a lot of the elements in the story and the characters, but they didn’t come together very well in the movie.

There were a lot of little problems in the movie. For starters, the movie had an inconsistent tone. It’s very comedic for a lot of the movie, but the climactic battles are incredibly dark. There was also too much exposition. The whole prologue and a good portion of the dialogue is all just explaining things to the audience. I also noticed some plot holes that were a little distracting (like Abin Sur having a spaceship when every other member of the corps just uses the ring for interstellar travel).

The casting in the film was mediocre. Peter Sarsgaard and Mark Strong seemed to fit their roles well, but everyone else, from Tim Robbins to Ryan Reynolds were just okay. Along with that, the dialog wasn’t great. The humor was really forced at times, and I felt like the dialog got in the way of the chemistry between Reynolds and Lively.

The last issue I’ll go into is the visual effects. There was way too much CGI in the movie. It was completely overbearing. Aside from the sheer quantity of digital effects, the quality wasn’t great either. The Green Lantern uniforms were probably the most egregious example. Hal Jordan’s mask was the most obvious. It had no depth, so it looked like part of his face was just painted green.

There were some good parts to the movie. I thought the story was actually pretty solid. It covered the origin and provided a menacing villain, both on Earth and to the entire Green Lantern Corps. I also appreciated the variety of alien life shown in the movie. The music was pretty good as well. It wasn’t a fantastic soundtrack, but it didn’t distract from the movie while enhancing some of the scenes very well.

Ultimately, this movie failed because of poor execution. It had all the elements of a good movie, but there were so many little issues that they piled up and brought the whole thing crashing down. I hope to see the character rebooted after DC gets through their initial Justice League films. The character is just too good to be stuck with this film as his only representation.