It is by now a creaky and tedious truism that our summer blockbusters express some ineffable truth about our national character. So let’s start by giving a loud and sustained round of applause to Martin Campbell’s “Green Lantern,” a movie so totally incomprehensible, pointlessly byzantine, and poorly told that it cannot possibly be a reflection of anything but good old-fashioned Hollywood ineptitude and cynicism. There is no lesson to be learned here, no dark night of the covertly fascist American soul — just a pulsing green torso attached to the head of Ryan Reynolds. And pretty colors. And planes. Up in the sky.
We begin deep in the cosmos amid green swirls — “the emerald energy of willpower” — which is the stuff of life, except for when it’s yellow, in which case it is “the power of fear.” For centuries, a group of Guardians — a band of tiny aliens who wear red robes and sit around facing each other in solemn counsel — have enlisted a Green Lantern Corps of slightly more diverse aliens to wield the emerald stuff (via rings and lanterns, for some reason) against the yellow stuff. Lately, this job has become difficult: A cloud of smoke named Parallax has freebased so much stray fear that he’s now become too powerful for the Lanterns to defeat.
Enter Reynolds’ Hal Jordan, a fighter pilot who channels both the please-love-me-dad cockiness of “Top Gun”-era Tom Cruise and the casual misogyny of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. (“There’s water in the tap!” Jordan helpfully tells a nameless blonde as he heads out the door). Chosen as an unlikely successor for a dying Lantern who had the bad fortune of crash-landing his craft in our hero’s vicinity, Jordan is promptly whisked up in space to the Lantern’s home base, the planet Oa. There, Jordan is trained in his new powers, briefed on his new job and, finally, mocked for being a human, the youngest and most weak of all Lantern species, including the ones that look like bugs and fish.
Chastened, Hal quits, taking his ring and lantern paraphernalia back to Earth, where Blake Lively’s Carol, a fellow fighter pilot and the scion of a government-favored ballistics company, awaits. Heady with his new abilities, he flies over to Carol’s blood mansion, where he gently settles on her balcony and uses his ring, which allows the wearer to turn “thought into reality,” to make her a pretty green necklace. (Later, given the chance to create literally anything, Hal — who seems to have been studying a textbook on the history of military technology — will use his powers to craft a big fist, a catapult, a sword, a drill bit, a Gatling gun, and a clutch of fighter jets.) In a moment cribbed straight from a summer after senior year, Carol says the she like the new jewelry, but can’t stand the fact that Hal doesn’t have a steady job. He is sent away. The fading green light of his leaving, unfulfilled, looks like nothing so much as a car in the suburbs, pulling out of a driveway and rolling wistfully back over to mom’s place.
Meanwhile, across town, Hector (a magnificent Peter Sarsgaard) has been called in to perform an autopsy on Hal’s dead predecessor. He makes the mistake of reaching deep into the alien’s mortal wounds, where yellow fear lurks. As fear will, the yellow muck inflates Hector’s head to hydrocephalic proportions and renders him evil. Sarsgaard, whose job it is to grow ever more misshapen and to squeal with increasing fervor as Parallax’s yellow goo takes over his body, is the only one here to recognize that he’s acting in a bad B-movie. When Hector eventually makes a few sweaty attempts on Carol’s virtue, the results are authentically creepy and genuinely comic.
Other than that, all that passes for humor in “Green Lantern” are the degraded references of the film’s four screenwriters, who have Hal recite wedding vows, repeat Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase (“To infinity, and beyond!”), and use stray bits of dialogue from “He-Man” to coax his lantern back into working order. This last bit of schtick could be a metaphor for the inauthenticity and impotence of modern man in society, or a wink at bygone summer blockbusters, or both — mostly it’s evidence of a big movie with a remarkably small imagination.
Needless to say, with his lady at risk, and his lantern at last powered up, Hal has a change of heart about work. He dons the skintight suit of international peacekeeping and vengeance in order to do battle with Hector, Parallax, and all the mean Green Lanterns who questioned his suitability for the gig in the first place. Humankind, doubted as weak, triumphs despite its intimate acquaintance with the yellow power of fear. (“You’re afraid to admit that you’re afraid!” Hal tells his Lantern boss.) In the end, “Green Lantern“ deploys the hidden message we fervently hoped it didn’t have: it is OK, after all, to be a man, or even a woman, as long as you breathe oxygen on this planet.
”Green Lantern" is affirmative propaganda aimed at the entire species, conjuring up a thousand other alien heroes so that People’s Sexiest Man Alive might alight in their midst and, equipped with a camping lantern and the love of Blake Lively, show all 3600 imaginary sectors of the universe how much better we are.
Should the day ever come when we must prove our dubious worth to the assembled green masses, let’s make sure they never see a print of this film.
We begin deep in the cosmos amid green swirls — “the emerald energy of willpower” — which is the stuff of life, except for when it’s yellow, in which case it is “the power of fear.” For centuries, a group of Guardians — a band of tiny aliens who wear red robes and sit around facing each other in solemn counsel — have enlisted a Green Lantern Corps of slightly more diverse aliens to wield the emerald stuff (via rings and lanterns, for some reason) against the yellow stuff. Lately, this job has become difficult: A cloud of smoke named Parallax has freebased so much stray fear that he’s now become too powerful for the Lanterns to defeat.
Enter Reynolds’ Hal Jordan, a fighter pilot who channels both the please-love-me-dad cockiness of “Top Gun”-era Tom Cruise and the casual misogyny of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. (“There’s water in the tap!” Jordan helpfully tells a nameless blonde as he heads out the door). Chosen as an unlikely successor for a dying Lantern who had the bad fortune of crash-landing his craft in our hero’s vicinity, Jordan is promptly whisked up in space to the Lantern’s home base, the planet Oa. There, Jordan is trained in his new powers, briefed on his new job and, finally, mocked for being a human, the youngest and most weak of all Lantern species, including the ones that look like bugs and fish.
Chastened, Hal quits, taking his ring and lantern paraphernalia back to Earth, where Blake Lively’s Carol, a fellow fighter pilot and the scion of a government-favored ballistics company, awaits. Heady with his new abilities, he flies over to Carol’s blood mansion, where he gently settles on her balcony and uses his ring, which allows the wearer to turn “thought into reality,” to make her a pretty green necklace. (Later, given the chance to create literally anything, Hal — who seems to have been studying a textbook on the history of military technology — will use his powers to craft a big fist, a catapult, a sword, a drill bit, a Gatling gun, and a clutch of fighter jets.) In a moment cribbed straight from a summer after senior year, Carol says the she like the new jewelry, but can’t stand the fact that Hal doesn’t have a steady job. He is sent away. The fading green light of his leaving, unfulfilled, looks like nothing so much as a car in the suburbs, pulling out of a driveway and rolling wistfully back over to mom’s place.
Meanwhile, across town, Hector (a magnificent Peter Sarsgaard) has been called in to perform an autopsy on Hal’s dead predecessor. He makes the mistake of reaching deep into the alien’s mortal wounds, where yellow fear lurks. As fear will, the yellow muck inflates Hector’s head to hydrocephalic proportions and renders him evil. Sarsgaard, whose job it is to grow ever more misshapen and to squeal with increasing fervor as Parallax’s yellow goo takes over his body, is the only one here to recognize that he’s acting in a bad B-movie. When Hector eventually makes a few sweaty attempts on Carol’s virtue, the results are authentically creepy and genuinely comic.
Other than that, all that passes for humor in “Green Lantern” are the degraded references of the film’s four screenwriters, who have Hal recite wedding vows, repeat Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase (“To infinity, and beyond!”), and use stray bits of dialogue from “He-Man” to coax his lantern back into working order. This last bit of schtick could be a metaphor for the inauthenticity and impotence of modern man in society, or a wink at bygone summer blockbusters, or both — mostly it’s evidence of a big movie with a remarkably small imagination.
Needless to say, with his lady at risk, and his lantern at last powered up, Hal has a change of heart about work. He dons the skintight suit of international peacekeeping and vengeance in order to do battle with Hector, Parallax, and all the mean Green Lanterns who questioned his suitability for the gig in the first place. Humankind, doubted as weak, triumphs despite its intimate acquaintance with the yellow power of fear. (“You’re afraid to admit that you’re afraid!” Hal tells his Lantern boss.) In the end, “Green Lantern“ deploys the hidden message we fervently hoped it didn’t have: it is OK, after all, to be a man, or even a woman, as long as you breathe oxygen on this planet.
”Green Lantern" is affirmative propaganda aimed at the entire species, conjuring up a thousand other alien heroes so that People’s Sexiest Man Alive might alight in their midst and, equipped with a camping lantern and the love of Blake Lively, show all 3600 imaginary sectors of the universe how much better we are.
Should the day ever come when we must prove our dubious worth to the assembled green masses, let’s make sure they never see a print of this film.
