Nope, the only other “major” female character was Amanda Waller, the black woman (and the actress they picked to play Waller was about 200 pounds too light…) But yeah, the female fighter pilot and the daughter of the company’s owner are the same character, Carol Ferris.
Despite GL being my all-time favorite superhero, I somehow did not manage to see the movie while it was in theaters. I finally watched it on DVD just recently. I’ll agree it just wasn’t a great movie, but I enjoyed it for what it was. A few things that bugged me:
• Ryan Reynolds just didn’t look like Hal Jordan to me. Or act like him. He and/or the director seemed to be trying to make him “jocular” like Tony Stark, and that’s not Hal Jordan. Jordan is a more “serious” character. Somebody way back in the thread mentioned Nathan Filion, and I think he would have been a better choice, in only in the looks department.
• What was Amanda Waller even doing in this movie? She has no connection to GL as far as I’ve ever seen. All I can figure is that they were trying to do the same thing with her character that Marvel has been doing with Nick Fury in their movies: be the government character tying these individual heroes together to eventually form the Justice League. Except I’m pretty sure she hasn’t had much official connection with the JLA in the comics.
• As already pointed out, Parallax was really out of place in this movie.
• Guy Gardner should have had some sort of cameo. If he did, I missed it.
For me Green Lantern didn’t succeed because it missed making the Hero and the Villain in any way interesting characters.
Hero is a cocky wise-cracking fighter pilot with success and prestige in the palm of his hand who brattily throws it away over daddy issues, only to step up when enough people grovel before him pleading “you’re so cool, please can’t you be more cool for us?”
Villain is simply a blob of cloudy “eeeeeevillll” with a big mean face, not even being granted the luxury of a curly mustache to twirl.
So much anti-superhero hostility here. I’m a huge comic book nerd (and a fan of nerdy things in general) and I like several Green Lantern comics (especially the Sinestro Corps War arc that was mentioned earlier), but I didn’t really enjoy the movie. The problem isn’t the over the top comic book nature, or it would have scored higher with fantasy and comic book nerds, even if it tanked at the box office. but the execution. As soon as I knew Reynolds was playing Hal Jordan and saw the cheesiness of the teaser trailer, I was expecting bad things. Parallax was a big mistake for this film, and the focus should have been on Hammond.
There is enough in the GL mythos to make a decent enough film, but I’m not sure that even a really tight script would have worked for the general audience (a few of the comments here pretty much confirms that some people aren’t really interested in superheroes with more “interesting” gimmicks and powers) without some really smart advertising or making some changes that would likely piss off the hardcore fans. Green Lantern seems like something that only people used to comic book tropes could actually like (though I don’t see why its that much harder to stomach than, say, Harry Potter or even Star Wars. And a magic green ring definitely isn’t worse than using “genetics” as an excuse like X-Men does). If people find the Green Lantern concept inherently and irreparably silly, I’ll never expect there to ever be a successful Flash (my second favorite superhero behind Batman) movie, as the character is even more “comicy” with even weirder concepts. As much as I love characters like Batman and The Punisher, there is always room for “sillier” and more light-hearted characters like Captain Marvel and Power Girl for me, which obviously won’t appeal to everyone no matter how strong the writing is. I’m perfectly fine with the non-acceptance of comics though. It adds to the fun, personally. At the same time, it also means that I can’t expect to see my favorites on the big screen too often, but least I can expect some decent animated adaptations.
Jordan does have his “womanizing” and showboating aspects in the comics as well. he does start out cocky in the books, so I didn’t have a problem with them trying to add a bit of it in the film, but they went so far that they might as well have made up their own character.
That’s too bad. Astro City is essential. It’s easily one of the best written comics, and not just in the superhero genre either.
I’m a *huge *Green Lantern fan, and I enjoyed the movie, though I can see where a lot of the… let’s say, dissatisfaction… comes from. It could have been better, and I can think of a lot of reasons. But I think that the major problem is that it tried to condense the convoluted, rebooted Green Lantern stories of the past ten years, rather than the simpler, cleaner, primal, general-audience-friendly tone of the first ten years (1959-1968).
One of the things that’s always made GL a favorite of mine is that he’s a major superhero (a B-list superhero, perhaps, but contrary to what some have been saying, he’s hardly a minor one – like, for example, the Red Bee or the Music Master) whose primary power isn’t strength. He doesn’t have to punch through walls or smash up cars. His power is creative, not destructive. I think that’s an exciting difference that’s rarely been played up, even in the comics – except, arguably, in the short period in the early 1980s when John Stewart was Earth’s *only *GL.
Yeah. The Green Lantern books have been DCs top sellers in recent years (which isn’t much in the comic book market, but still). Definitely not minor.
I doubt that they’d go to the tone of the Silver Age stories, but I think a straight up adaptation of the relatively recent GL: Secret Origin, with a few changes to make it less “in-mainstream continuity” would have seen better results.
I agree with you about the rings, which should have been used more creatively.
Not in the sense that “superheroes suck”, but more “these costumes and powers are lame, and you’d never get me watch it”. Maybe, “hostility” was a poor choice of a word, but it does seem that some people here aren’t willing to go past Superman.
But a good movie would do a good job of introducing you to the character.
(Had you ever heard of Jack Sparrow…?)
ps: Just to shake things up a bit here, I liked the movie. But then I’d seen the trailer and knew it was going to suck. So I went in just to have some fun at a shallow, sucky comic book movie. Ditto for Daredevil.
The reason people didn’t like this movie isn’t that they don’t like superheroes. Nor is it that they don’t like variety in their superheroes, or even that they don’t like Green Lantern or his powers specifically. The reason people didn’t like this movie is that it just wasn’t a very good movie.
There’s a 10 or 12 year old kid’s film critic on our local news station, and he called it The Worst Movie of the Year. If a little kid doesn’t like it, why are older kids and grown adults, for that matter, expected to like it? And why all the angst over this thing? It’s not like it was the last great hope for comic book movies, and if it failed, we are all doomed to endless movies starring Meryl Streep taking care of Alzheimers patients. I loved X-Men, comics and movies, liked Iron Man and Superman, and I’m completely out of the demographic, so it’s not I’m against super-heroes. Green Lantern just looked stupid from the get-go. (I would like to see a movie about Aquaman. I think it should be a comedy or satire!)
Rotten Tomatoes says “Noisy, overproduced, and thinly written, Green Lantern squanders an impressive budget and decades of comics mythology.”
Gives it at 27%.
Gotta agree. I’m not a comic books person. I do like SF and fantasy, and so I’m at least somewhat attracted to superhero movies - really liked Superman (the original with Christopher Reeve) when it came out, am fond of Batman Begins. I really didn’t know anything about Iron Man when it came out - didn’t even know his friggin name. Iron Man had attention getting promos, it looked fun, and I could grasp the concept - arrogant guy with a robot combat suit.
The Green Lantern promos just screamed WTF is this, and I was at least aware of the name Green Lantern and the idea of the magic ring. I honestly didn’t know much more than that and glimmers picked up from comments here and the like. The commercial just looked too all over the place, I just didn’t get interested, didn’t hear good reviews recommendations.
Sounds like they tried to do way too much in one movie.
Who played her in GL? On Smallville she was Pam Grier :dubious:
Also, I don’t know about her connection to Hal, but she’s got connections to Checkmate which in turn has connections to the original GL, Alan Scott. Not that it makes her belong in a Hal movie, just saying maybe that’s where the scriptwriters came up with including her.
I haven’t actually seen GL yet, so maybe it makes more sense after seeing it but not judging by your posts.
In the movie she’s working for a unnamed (at least I didn’t notice a name) government agency, and is basically in charge of supervising Hector Hammond’s autopsy of Abin Sur. Later he knocks her out and we never see her again.
The market has become saturated with superhero movies. There was nothing about Green Lantern to make it stand out so the other superhero movies got the box office.
Green Lantern is a relatively obscure character. He’s not as well known to the non-comic-book-reading public as Superman, Batman, or even Spiderman. He doesn’t really rank with Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America.
He’s not a major cult figure among comic book readers, which gave X-Men and Watchmen a built-in audience.
Ryan Reynolds isn’t a major draw as an action star.
This wasn’t an established series. Thor and Captain America could draw on the people who’ve been following the Avengers series. X-Men: First Class was obviously part of the X-Men series.
By most accounts, it wasn’t an interesting enough movie to draw viewers in on its own merits.