Was Green Lantern too "Comic Booky" for general audiences?

Cafe Society
41

I don’t know squat about comic books, don’t see most super hero movies, and only went to see it because I thought the trailer was comical and I like Ryan Reynolds. (There’s also a slight possibility I was tipsy.)

I loved it! I thought it was really fun and laughed my ass off at the climax becuse it was so deliciously over the top.

He flings the monster into the SUN! LOLOLOL!

I would love to see more superhero movies that are not so goddamn “GRRR SRS BZNSS”.

Totally didn’t buy the love interest though. Felt tacked-on.

42

Because it was a flawed movie. It had lousy writing, terrible pacing, and too many characters. All of the space stuff could’ve been tossed. We certainly didn’t need shots of every Green Lantern ever. Hector Hammond, played by Peter Sarsgaard, was by far the best character in the film and he was in a very small part of it.

I mean really. They did the whole Top Gun/Hot Shots chokes when he flies a plane bit. They did the moving speech about saving the seemingly worthless human race that’s been done to death in Star Trek. I think the only cliches they missed were the death of the aged mentor and Parallax being Hal’s father.

43

Seeing as all of the above seems to come from Geoff Johns’ directions or output. Does that mean that he will lose his position of “Geek-in-Chief” (or whatever tin medal DC saw fit to pin to his chest)?

44

I am not a huge comic book fan. I did not collect long and all I did was from the X-Men line in Marvel. That’s it. But I think people underestimate Green lantern. For one, he was a major character on the Justcie League cartoon shows, and certainly held his own there.

No, the moie was just badly done. The problem wasn’t Ryan Reynolds and it wasn’t the visuals. It was simply that the thing was badly plotted and paced like rabid dog with three legs running the Boston Marathon backwards. Even during the film, I couldn’t remember most of the character’s names, simply because the movie rushed past them so fast.

In fact, it looks an awful lot as though this script got rewritten too much. There’s the plot with the giant monster, the plot with the Green Lantern choosing his destiny, the plot with the girlfriend, the plot with Hammond, and the bits with his friend. These don’t tie together well and don’t interact much. And then the post-credits bit really makes no sense in light of the actual events of the film. In short, this thing was a mess from the beginning.

45

DC is foundering right now. About the only comics franchises they have any momentum on are from Morrison’s Batman and John’s Green Lantern. Expect them to double down with more Johns stuff, instead.

Also, John’s “Sinestro Corps War” was awesome, and a movie that could capture that would be quite good. However, it was awesome because of the large amount of groundwork that was already established for GL. An origin movie couldn’t really jump directly into the Sinestro Corps War, even though its popularity what was likely the reason that a GL movie was greenlighted.

I expect the Sinestro Corps will show up in the sequel. (“darker and edgier.” Cripes, I am so tired of “darker and edgier” comic book movies. they’d be better off throwing Carol into her cheesecaky Star Sapphire outfit and just go directly to pandering.)

46

For what it’s worth, that link is from August – before the lackluster openings in Japan and Mexico and France and Brazil and so on, where other superhero flicks cleaned up. A month and a half later, the report was that Warner, dismayed by disappointing receipts from Green Lantern, “is considering abandoning plans for a sequel”.

47

Not really, no.

The difference between Iron Man and Green Lantern is simple, in my view:

  1. Iron Man was marketed well; The Green Lantern was not.
  2. Iron Man was a really good movie; The Green Lantern was not.

Look at it from my perspective as a guy in his 30s (and therefore an action movie target market) but who isn’t into comic books. Here’s what I saw from the trailers and marketing:

IRON MAN: A guy in a battle mech suit is blowing up tanks, dropping great one-liners, and hanging with gorgeous ladies while AC/DC rocks it out.

GREEN LANTERN: What the fuck’s all that green stuff?

Seriously, that was my impression. I knew nothing about the Iron Man character prior to the movie, absolutely nothing; had you shown me a picture of him ten years ago with no caption I probably would have been able to name the character and that’s it. But the trailer told me, in thirty seconds, all the reasons I needed to see the movie; Robery Downey Jr. was an awesome playboy zillionaire who made missiles, and then he gets a battle suit and he blows up a tank is the most badass blow it up/walk away scene ever committed to film. AC/DC helps with the soundtrack? I can fill in the blanks; it’s obvious that the guy uses his access to technology to build himself a mech suit and then he goes to some Third World country and he kicks some bad guy ass.

The Green Lantern.. so, um, he gets a magic ring and then there’s green stuff all over the place? Who’s he fighting? What the hell?

Again, as a guy who had never read an Iron Man or Green Lantern comic before in his life, I wanted to see Iron Man as soon as it came out. I was in no rush to see Green Lantern.

It THEN turned out that Iron Man was a pretty good movie (I was a little disappointed at first because it had been built up to be equal to The Godfather, but while it didn’t meet that standard, it holds up really well) while Green Lantern… well, some like it but the consensus is that it’s just not very good.

48

I am a huge comics fan, and a big GL fan (when I saw Kilowog in the TV ads, I cheered a little bit inside), but I didn’t see the movie (because I don’t really watch movies that much, regardless of subject matter). It SOUNDS like the movie qua movie was a mess, rather than being a mess because it was too “comic-bookey”. Parallax? Wasn’t Hal Parallax? Sinestro AND Hector Hammond AND Parallax? What?! How long was this movie? It sounds like they compressed about 40 years of GL continuity into an hour and a half. That’s going to be a mess no matter WHO you cast as GL.

49

Comic Book heresy: I never liked Hal Jordan. He’s an arrogant jock jerk. Not someone I want to learn more about or watch for 2 hours. Keep the central idea simple: Space Cop. Use Kyle Rayner if you want a more everyman hero, or John Stewart for a more action-y movie.

Hell, make it a trilogy: First is he gets the ring, fights someone on earth with luck and imagination, seat of his pants. Sinestro shows up at the end as a hook and it ends on Oa. Second: Space movie, where he learns more about the Corps and that they NEED warm bodies, even if they’re Earthmen. He fights some cosmic-y menace in a buddy-cop film, training on the fly. Think Training Day in space. Hook: The whole Corps. Third, Big Evil and Sinestro shows up as the baddy behind the first two. Giant Space Fight.

The movie was crap, badly written and cast and done all in all. Worse than Superman Returns, which is saying something.

50

That is… not really heresy. It’s more like Comic Book orthodoxy. Geoff Johns is apparently the only person who ever liked Hal Jordan.

Given how whitebread all of DC’s (and Marvel’s, for that matter) heroes are, I don’t understand why they didn’t keep John Stewart as GL from his tenure in the JLU cartoon.

51

Right. We need to see some ordinary bad-guy ass-kicking first, not go all galactic right off the bat.

52

Don’t forget Kurt Busiek.

53

I really liked “Up, Up, and Away!” on Superman, but then couldn’t stand Busiek’s run after that. So… I’d kind of like to forget Busiek.

54

Well the reason I didnt see Green Lantern is because we went out to see Thor and found it a well made movie with great special effects, but the characters and the plot were kind of … shallow. Did not care about them much at any point in the movie. And that was the one that got the best reviews. So we held back from the rest of the comic book movies. Catch em when they hit cable and we can ignore them if they are dull.

55

One thing I do actually like about GL as a concept, and they they even kind of opened with in the movie, is that members of the Corps are mortal and they do die. Unlike your typical comic book hero, who is well-nigh unkillable, I always get a legitimate sense of jeopardy from Green Lantern – if there is a sequel, they could really make things interesting by having Hal Jordan die in the line of duty and the ring be passed on to the next guy, such as John Stewart. Yes, I know that’s not part of the comic book canon, but it could make the movies more interesting. Just a thought…

56

There are many things that go into making a good movie. Green Lantern was subpar on all of them. I don’t think there’s any single category where it was truly horrid, but it was just so consistently subpar. The plot had too many cases of people doing stupid things for no good reason. Many of the special effects looked like they weren’t finished, and then deliberately blurred to cover the flaws. The actors just didn’t seem right for the parts. The science errors were just too glaring. Heck, they apparently don’t even know what the Sun looks like, despite having seen it nearly every day of their lives.

They could have made a good Green Lantern movie. They didn’t.

57

My thoughts exactly.

58

Sorry for resurrecting this thread but had to comment on this movie.

I’d heard a lot of bad things about Green Lantern but I have to say I enjoyed the movie and was pleasantly surprised, though that may be more low expectations than anything else, I picked it up in a three-movie deal along with Battle Los Angeles (which was pretty much the opposite, heard a lot of good stuff with it and while I certainly enjoyed it it wasn’t as interesting as I expected) and Source Code otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching it.

I’m not a comic-book fan but did have a vague idea of who Green Lantern was and his powers before watching the film so it wasn’t completely unfamiliar.

From the first introduction of Hal Jordan I expected to dislike him as the typical arrogant fighter-pilot jock character but as the story progressed I warmed to him, not that bright and kind of a goofball but basically a good guy. And I thought he had an interestingly human flaw, how many superheroes would admit to being scared? I have to say I laughed out loud when the whole Spiderman secret identity scene with his girlfriend went wrong.

Plus points - Likable main character, good sense of humour, some good action scenes (who wouldn’t like to be able to materialise a working minigun at whim!), cool concept for a superpower and impressively over the top climax.

Negative points - The plot was a bit of a mess, they tried to cram too many characters and story-elements into much to short a space of time

The movie overall was far too dark, at some points it was hard to see what was going on

Female leads looked too similar, took me a while to realise they were two different characters!

Special effects were a bit threw-together in places.

So, in summary, a good-natured and likable, but flawed film, just like the protaganist. I’d give it 6 or 7 out of 10.

I for one am looking forward to the sequel, now all the origin stuff is out of the way they can concentrate on the action.

59

I like the Green Lantern as a hero, and I like Ryan Reynolds.

(But I would have preferred a John Stewart Green Lantern).

The chemistry between him and Blake Lively sucked monkey balls. The movie was both poorly plotted and poorly scripted, the CGI wasn’t great and there was too much of it.

It was a fun romp - I liked it better than Green Hornet (which was another problem - bad timing with two “Green” superhero movies out and the first one wasn’t very good either), but if I had to pick two superhero movies this summer. - the Avengers franchise is really shaping up to be well acted and well scripted. (With the exception of the Hulk - maybe we should just stay away from green superheros).

60

Wait, I don’t remember there being multiple female leads… I thought the female fighter pilot was the heir to the airplane manufacturer was the love interest. Was there another one I’m not remembering?