Saw it. Liked it pretty well. I liked Thor a bit better, but GL was about on par with X-Men First Class. GL felt like it had no strong plot through-line … but X:FC had too many filler characters that were only really used in the end action sequence.
It must just not be my year for comic book movies. X-Men First Class was tolerable, Thor was awful, and Green Lantern made Thor look like a great movie.
He was there. His racist nickname wasn’t.
Green Lantern grossed a luke-warm $52.7 million in its opening weekend. This is on the very low end of the projected gross. Unless word of mouth is particularly positive (unlikely, I think) the film will have to do well overseas to make back its $200 million production budget plus the estimated $100 million spent on advertising.
I just saw it. Wasn’t the best I’ve seen but in the beginning of the silver age comic it was all about the ring. His story came in bits and pieces over the years, like establishing he had brothers. I liked Carol’s flight name was Sapphire as in Star Sapphire. I wonder if Amanda Waller will be in the continuing DC movies,as Marvel uses Nick Fury. Otherwise, it would be a waste of Angela Bassett.
I just saw it (in 2-D), and I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I expected to.
Green Lantern’s got to be a hard franchise to transfer to film successfully since it has so much Silver Age goofiness bound up with it that you can get away with in comic books but can’t so easily in film. For starters, there’s the scale of it: Green Lantern is inherently cosmic in scope, with the Guardians of the Universe, pan-galactic civilization, mystical emotional energies, et cetera. That’s not the kind of stuff that makes for good human drama. Given all that, I thought they got the feel of the movie almost perfect. The characters aren’t worthy of Shakespeare, but they aren’t cardboard cutouts either. There’s a lot of them, so no one gets a ton of development, but they all have their arcs.
My one problem is that there seemed to be a reel or two missing from the middle. (Yes, I know movies don’t come on reels anymore.) It jumps rather suddenly from Carol trying to convince Hal that he has the courage he needs to Hal giving his bold plan to the Guardians (who Sinestro, the Corps leader, previously complained wouldn’t give him an audience when he wanted one). His plan, BTW, was for him to defend Earth without any help. It wasn’t at all clear why he needed to ask the Guardians to approve it or why the Guardians thought Sinestro’s plan would work or why Hal knew it was a bad idea.
Then in the very next scene (as obfusciatrist pointed out), Hal is rescuing Carol from Hammond. Wait a minute, Hammond has Carol? When the fuck did that happen? (BTW, I agree that Hal knew where to be because the ring told him. It’s made clear in an earlier scene that the ring transfers knowledge to his mind directly as it needs to. Much better than a pop-up screen!)
That’s some pretty horrible editing there, and it comes close to ruining the movie, but I was able to overlook it. Still, if they’d taken the extra 20 minutes or so to show Hal returning to Oa, reconciling with Killowog and the fishy dude (Geoffrey Rush!), learning about Sinestro’s plan, etc., it would have been a much better film and might have gotten better reviews.
There really was no reason at all for this scene, except to make Sinestro know where Hal is going to be so he can rescue him later. I thought this was a particularly weak spot in the writing.
The one universal space opera trope: human exceptionalism. It takes a young, naive, weak human to know that Fear Power is baaaaaaad and the Guardians are being fuddy duddies.
On the whole, I thought the critics were being unduly harsh on this one. It’s not a great superhero movie by any means, and the writing is somewhat inconsistent. But I thought it was tremendous fun, the CG stuff was done quite beautifully, and it didn’t take itself too seriously. Was definitely worth the six bucks for a matinee. (2D, of course.)
Cost me eight. Eight bucks! For a matinee! What is the world coming to?
Even so, I felt like I got my money’s worth. Yeah, really great CGI. And I loved the scene where he visits Carol as GL and she recognizes him!
I won’t end up seeing this movie, but I really enjoyed this review:
Topless Robot Presents: The Best Scenes from the Green Lantern Movie
Yeah, that always bugs me too (along with the omnipresent American exceptionalism in movies). Obviously everyone thinks they’re the best. But they’re actually the same as everyone else.
One thing that GL in movie form struck me - which it never did in comics, but sometimes it just rakes the same thing in a new medium - is that it’s very reminiscent of The Mask and the constructs have that sane goofy feeling.
I’m not defending Green Lantern. I haven’t seen it and I don’t expect to see it. I’ve always liked Ryan Reynolds, but I don’t expect anything from this movie.
Having said that, I really wonder if narcolepsy isn’t much more prevalent than is typically diagnosed. From the comments I see online, it’s a wonder that anyone can actually hear any movie over the sheer volume of snoring that must be present.
-Joe
I enjoyed the movie but… I can’t say that they did a bad job summing it up.
The “this is the first alien we’ve ever seen” concept doesn’t bode well for a combined DC universe with the movies. Waller made me think maybe they’ll use her as the Nick Fury (albeit on the bad guys’ side) lynchpin for the movies. But this movie pretty much exists outside Supernan’s universe. Superman appears before GL; and the GL’s would know that Earth was home to Kal El, the last Kryptonian, a being of greater power even than them.
I’ve heard for years that a Justice League movie will be made eventually.
Yes; I’m just saying this script doesn’t mesh with DC continuity in that way. I guess they could change it and have Supes be a latecomer (like in Smallville).
Yeah…there might be a few plot holes. 
Candyman74:
It’s also possible that Superman’s alien nature is as yet unknown. In John Byrne’s “Man of Steel”, Superman operated publicly for a number of years before even he knew that his origins were extraterrestrial - he and the Kents thought his rocket was from an Earth-based space program.
It could be that at this point in DCU history (if there is such a thing, in anticipation of a JLA movie), Abin Sur was the first being that was recognizably alien. Superman looks human, and the Martian Manhunter was a shape-shifter who passed himself off as human for a long time before appearing green in public.
BTW, I saw it today, and I thought it was great. I loved where they went with the father-son bit and Hector Hammond. I thought both Reynolds and Lively were pretty true to their comic book counterparts. The beginning exposition was a bit much, but no worse than the Star Wars opening crawl. I thought the Kilowog-as-drill-sergeant bit was unnecessary and would have been better just having Sinestro break him in. And I’d rather that Parallax was closer to the comics version - not the looks so much as the “soul eater” aspect. I liked in the comics that the threat posed by a creature of pure fear is that it made the people it came in contact with paranoid and afraid of one another until they all killed one another. No reason that couldn’t have been portrayed in film.
Like someone else said in this thread, I don’t see why Sinestro put on the yellow ring at the end. He didn’t seem like he was turning bad at any point in the movie before that.
Ultimately, I came away feeling that I’d certainly see a sequel if there is one(which I assume there will be, with Sinestro and his yellow ring as the main villain). I’m betting that we’ll see Guy, John and/or Kyle somehow, maybe some of the other GLs are incapacitated on Earth, leading Hal to find other Earthmen to temporarily weild their rings. If they want to go in a totally unexpected but potentially great direction, they could introduce Green Arrow and have a Hal & Ollie road trip.
And they marry in San Francisco, of which Ollie becomes the mayor.
Saw it in 3D yesterday.
[spoiler]I suppose one thing that felt like it was missing was that GL didn’t do much heroic stuff on Earth. He stopped one helicopter crash, and took two or three jabs at The Cloudy Menace before taking it to the stars, and that was it. Just a little montage of him saving a sinking ship or stopping a mugger or something would have been nice, and made him more accessible as a hero. If you stop an asteroid 3 squillion light years away from hitting Earth, well, I appreciate it, but it’s hard to work up a cheer for a danger that far removed, ya know?
Also: The Cloudy Menace was a universe-eating evil, had killed a couple dozen Lanterns, and Hal ices it with a trick he’s taught during basic training? Really?
I give it a rating of “meh”, which is better than “fneh” or “pluh”, but not as good as “mmm” or “ooOOOOooo.”[/spoiler]