I thought Thor was quite good. Much better than I expected from a middling comic book character that I never much liked. Kenneth Branagh directed, and did a fine job. Definitely worth the ticket price.
So for me it was better than Thor and not as good as X-Men. Also, IMO, the 3D didn’t add to it and you might as well see it in 2D.
There is a brief scene after the first credits, and nothing after the rest of the credits.
Green Lantern (3D) was OK. It was very pretty. The effects were generally good, although it was pretty obvious when it was just his head in front of a green screen. The aliens were done well. Although I couldnt figure out why the Guardians had bubbles on their heads Acting was good for the most part, especially Sinestro. Blake Lively was sufficiently separated from her TV role. They made Hal whine a little bit too much, and there were some muddled bits of plot and pacing. But over all a fun occasionally funny movie with lots of pretty
Quoth Khadaji:
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are arguably the two best superhero movies yet to come out, and Iron Man and the first two Spider-Mans are also widely considered great, so it’s not exactly damning to say of another movie that it wasn’t as good as those.
Well we (me, Mrs. Evil Captor and Evil Captor Jr.) went to see Thor and found it visually entertaining but plot and characterwise it was just kinda … thin. Unsubstantive. We wished we had waited to see it on cable. I’d say the most substantive comic book adaptation I’ve seen was “Watchmen.” So how does GL rank in those terms?
I apologize for giving the impression that I was damning it. I *meant *to say I didn’t hate it, but that I was confused by the great reviews - and I meant to add that here is a fine example of where RT and I didn’t agree. It is now at 77 but at the time was in the high 80s. I had fun with it, but didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
I found it well done for the most part and interesting but lacking somehow. It was missing something that I can’t really put my finger on. Also I found the climax to be a little underwhelming but I did like it.
While they are different universes, I enjoyed X-Men a lot more.
It’s definitely third of this year’s quartet of comic book movies. And if Captain America is any good it’ll fall to fourth.
It did seem flat. The writing was, in all honesty, lazy. Much exposition and little in the way of character or pacing and a LOT of time spent on big flashy scenes of the Green Lantern Corps and such. It would have been a better movie if they trimmed some of that and concentrated on the way Hal Jordan had to develop as a person to earn the right to wear the ring. Instead it just sort of happened so we could get to the good stuff.
Also, the choice of villain was a mistake. There’s just no way to personalize the big bad. That worked against it.
Honestly, other than Batman DC just hasn’t got it together with their movies whereas Marvel gets it, continues to get it, and looks to be building a real universe. I swear, when the sidekick in Green Lantern said ‘You’re a superhero!’ he should have added ‘Like Superman in Metropolis!’ or something to tie it together.
Oh, and quoth HubZilla:
It’s a common misconception that the folks who nitpick about movie adaptations missing something from page 587, or whatever, actually disliked the movie. In fact, such folks are often quite appreciative of it. It’s just that picking minor nits like that is actually one of the ways in which we appreciate a movie.
Note, of course, that this applies only to minor nitpicks. It’s not a nitpick, for instance, to complain about the movie Starship Troopers lacking powered armor, since that was the single biggest thing that made the book what it was. But the really minor things, we wouldn’t even notice in the first place unless we were fans.
Oh, I fully agree. You just didn’t care about any of the characters, about their relationships. And was I the only one who thought of “Hot Shots” when he was crashing and had flashbacks? Also, where did he learn swordfighting? Does the Air Force teach that?
Wow. It is a good thing I saw Sucker Punch earlier this year or Green Lantern would have absolutely no competition for worst movie I’ve seen this year. I actually dozed off a couple times.
One thing that confused me just as a plot point. I thought it might have been a case of me closing my eyes for longer than I thought but my wife insists she was fully awake at this point (she also dozed off at other points) and that it just didn’t make any sense. So, out of curiosity was this explained:
[spoiler]After he’s turned into the baddie thug, Angela Bassett takes Peter Sarsgaard back to the secret facility where they’re holding the alien body. Tim Robbins is there. Things get violent. And suddenly Green Lantern is kicking his way through the wall and the big fight is on.
How did Green Lantern know to go there (he’d never been there before) and how did he know to go there at that moment in time?[/spoiler]
The ring is supposed to warn him of threats. Why it just blinks and doesn’t, say, pop up a screen locating said threat is a mystery.
OK, saw it. Not horrible, just mediocre. Definitely a distant third among the three comic book hero movies released so far this year.
Memo to makers: villains must be scarier. Oversized craniums incline me more to laughter than to horror.
I did like:
when GL’s GF laughed at the idea of Hal concealing his identity from her with what amounts to a Lone Ranger mask. Meta-funny.
GL would have benefited from the return of PIEFACE!
I can’t logically disagree with anything you said here whatsoever. Despite that, I enjoyed the movie. It was muddled and messy and made many mistakes, but I had a lot of fun with it. Not sure if that says something awful about me.
To be honest, the movie, err… leans on Ryan Reynolds. A lot. It does more or less fall down in the other characters. It can’t decide what it wants to do - outside Green Lantern himself. But he’s great within the limits of the script.
I think this is a good example of a movie where RT’s binary grading system doesn’t work well. It’s very mediocre. Such movies often get the “just slightly subpar” rating which RT translates to ‘rotten’, even though there is usually, in general, little disagreement between those who would rate it just below the line and those who put it just above the line.
I wasn’t entirely disappointed with the movie, although I wasn’t expecting much. The acting was probably the best part. Blake Lively was good, and I thought her relationship with Reynolds worked well. But as someone told me afterwards, if the romance is the best part of your superhero film, you know you haven’t done well. This movie’s just competent enough that a probably unnecessary sequel will be made.
It seems that fans of Green Lantern do seem to like it, so at least for once it’s worth watching if you liked the original character.
I really didn’t care for the movie. I normally like Ryan Reynolds- but he seemed just kind of wasted in GL.
There were even a few scenes that didn’t make much sense. For example, and I don’t think this is really much of a spoiler, but I’ll spoilbox it anyway:
Abin Sur sends some ring energy to go pick his successor- it’s dusk, and since we can see the sun setting, it’s on a western coast (presumably of the US). Hal is at his nephew’s party, and it’s daytime. Suddenly a green bubble grabs him and flies him to Abin Sur’s crash site- it’s nighttime, so clearly Hal was flown quite a ways. After talking to him, Hal calls his buddy to pick him up. When his buddy shows up, they barely clear out before the military comes roaring in to investigate the crash.
None of this make sense. The military got there, obviously, a long time after the crash. Hal’s buddy drove to pick him up, so he was obviously within driving distance- but Hal was grabbed in daylight and taken to Abin Sur at night.
This is the sort of thing that bugs me.
And, of course, Sinestro’s little scene during the credits made even less sense- he’d seen firsthand what happens when the yellow energy corrupts someone, and had seen that Hal was able to use will to defeat the yellow energy- so why the hell did he put the yellow ring on at the end? :dubious:
So… how long 'til Captain America, anyhoo?
You know, Lightnin’, if you’re going to label something as not “really much of a spoiler” you probably shouldn’t in the same spoiler box add as an afterthought what seems to be a MAJOR spoiler from the very last scene.
I thought Thor was pretty good, but as far as I can tell Ebert thought it sucked. So it’s not exactly great praise that he’s saying it was better than Thor.
Oh true. Ebert was not sprinkling rose petals over GL.