That’s putting the cart before the horse. Until their movies, Iron Man was less well-known than Green Lantern, and while most folks would have known of Thor, they wouldn’t have known he was a comic-book superhero. Iron Man and the Marvel version of Thor are now well-known precisely because their movies did well.
I don’t know. I’d have said that Iron Man and Thor were better known at the time of their movie debuts. But my main point was that Green Lantern lacked all of the stand-out characteristics I listed. Iron Man had a major star in Robert Downey. Thor was part of an existing series (the Avengers movies have been tied together). So they had things Green Lantern didn’t have, even if there’s an argument to be made for the familiarity of the character.
I would say Iron Man and GL were probably on the same tier going into their movies. The difference was Iron Man was a fantastic movie so he moved up. GL was meh so he didn’t.
I’m still not sure if it was even possible to make a good GL movie (without changing it to the point where it becomes something different), which was actually the thesis question of my OP, which after rereading it I don’t think I made clear.
It was for me. I saw the commercials and trailers with Ryan Reynolds and the really bad CGI and said “nope”.
Whereas I saw X-Men Babies :p, Thor and Captain America.
You can’t have a magic ring with extremely vague limits as the main character. That would be like having a genie or a magician who can make anything happen by saying it backwards the main character (which, come to think of it, are two other DC heroes). I never thought the Green Lantern movie had a chance.
In contrast, Iron Man is a guy who uses technology better than what we currently have, but we can still imagine the limits.
Superman is also easy to understand, but in the other direction. He’s easy to understand because he essentially has no limits. Is he strong enough to ___? Yeah. Fast enough to ____? Sure. His weaknesses are kryptonite (which puts him in a position we can relate to) and others of his species (which puts him among peers, also not hard to understand).
Ryan Reynolds can be very effective with a decent role. Sure, he’s no Robert Downey Jr., but then, Robert Downey Jr. didn’t used to be Robert Downey Jr. either. However, in Green Lantern, what the hell was he gonna do? There wasn’t much he make out of it. I would say he did quite well given the crappiness role.
Well, do this.
Imagine Ryan Reynolds in the exact same Iron Man movie.
Now imagine Robert Downey Jr. in Green Lantern.
Not saying there would be huge differences and I didn’t see GL to know if that would make any difference at all, but I’m fairly certain that IM would not have been near as good.
When I was a little kid, I thought GL was the coolest character of them all.
He was only limited by his will and (weirdly) the color yellow.
And it had a lot of SF elements to it.
So, I was looking forward to this movie.
Having seen the trailer, I will wait for the DVD.
I agree. Reynolds does quite well in light comedy and he’s established himself in that genre. And I give him credit for looking to stretch - I haven’t seen the movie but I’ve heard he did an excellent job in a dramatic role in Buried.
My personal opinion is that if you’re an established star in a genre, you can carry a weak movie - Will Smith or Bruce Willis can make a mediocre action thriller or Will Farrell or Jack Black can make a mediocre comedy and people will go see it because of them. But if you’re going into a new genre - like Reynolds is in an action thriller - you need to make sure you’ve got a good movie. You can’t carry the movie so you need to make sure the movie can carry itself.
Well you’re in luck because the DVD came out like three months ago.
Wow! I watched, or tried to watch, the DVD of this thing tonight. Five minutes in, I thought, this thing is going to be a dog. Not only that, but it turned into the Westminster Dog Show. Woof.
Having recently seen Chronicle, which much more realistically portrays superpowers I have to say GL was definitely too cartoony. If you are going to make a live action adaptation of something from the fantasy realm, it’s incumbent on you to take advantage of that format to make it feel as real as possible.
Finally saw this last week, and while I didn’t think it was bad, it really didn’t feel like they were portraying Hal Jordan. Ryan Renolds just came off as too sarcastic and stuff. I consider Hal a much more mature kind of guy.
Even his ring constructs didn’t seem quite right, yeah, he got a giant fist in there once, but most of what he did seemed way too complex and detailed, more like something Kyle would’ve done.
It’s also quite silly that they wasted GCI resources on the GL costume instead of just making a costume, but hey, that’s Hollywood for you.
I would say more like John Stewart’s constructs. Stewart is an architect/engineer, and his constructs are usually “designed” in great detail (though at the speed of thought), and would likely be functional if they were turned into actual physical matter.
Kyle is an artist, and his constructs reflect that.
And Guy Gardner is supposedly the only GL whose ring constructs actually make noise* (cuz you know Guy wouldn’t be satisfied with a cannon construct that didn’t go “BOOM!”
Hal’s constructs have always seemed to be more "instinctive’, usually mimicking everyday objects.
*Disregarding the GL known as “F# Bell”, who comes from a sightless race that has no concept of color. His constructs are formed of sound.
Yeah, but Blade was a successful comic book movie trilogy. And he was way, way more obscure than Green Lantern.
And Wesley Snipes is?! Oh, wait…
Well, we agree they weren’t particularly Hal like, which is the important part of my nitpick. 
Yes 
So I’ve never read a single comic involving the Green Lantern and I just watched the movie.
It was about what I expected based upon the trailer: sub-mediocre.
24 hours ago, the guy has no clue that aliens exist and now he’s inducted into the Lantern Corps. The entirety of his training consists of
- One guy teaching him to fly
- One drill sergeant throwing rocks at him for two minutes
- the leader berating him because he’s a stupid human and not worthy of the suit.
Well that was an hour of his life well spent. I’m sure he’ll be well equipped to deal with any threat that comes his way. Oh speaking of which, then the Parallax threatens Earth, a creature apparently created at least in part because of the Green Lantern Corps, and they can’t be bothered to go help the new guy with an hour’s worth of training?
At this point, I, the viewer, believe the whole Green Lantern group to be an evil organization. Seriously.
Then you’ve got Hector Hammond who I found to be completely confusing. First, the way that he related to Hal Jordan led me to believe they’d been really good friends, but there’s absolutely nothing establishing that in the movie before he turns evil. Second, I had assumed that he’d been infected by the Parallax and was turning into one. That’s why the creature was heading to Earth. But in the end, he just got consumed by the Parallax and so…well, what was his point anyway?
Speaking of “what’s the point?” there’s the entire family that shows up for the Birthday party that’s never heard from again. There’s a scientist working with Hal that does nothing but act amazed at all the cool things Hal can do, but that’s pretty much the role that Blake Lively played. Oh and were we supposed to have forgotten that the Green Lantern killed three guys just because they were pissed for losing their jobs, which really was completely Hal’s fault anyway? I mean, he killed them. But it’s cool because the Green Lantern’s a good guy, right? Except…they’re totally not.
Again, I, as the viewer, think this is one fucked up organization supposedly there to “protect” the universe.
The writing and plot were not very good especially considering the large amount of money they had to work with. It was ham handed hack work from beginning to end. I love me some superhero movies and I stopped watching it halfway through it was that terrible.
There are some obvious challenges inherent in making GL interesting or relevant to people unfamiliar with the character. In that respect I think GL is probably one of the harder characters to get people to wrap their heads around in a short form drama like a movie.
Also, I think there is the issue that the GL power set (ie willpower mediated light based ring constructs) is about the least emotionally involving superpower for a layman non-comic fan to relate to. Eyebeams, super strength, super speed, flight etc. all of these have an emotional physical immediacy to them vs “design stuff with a magic ring”.
I saw the trailer but not the movie; the trailer made it look like it was going to be a Galaxy Quest knock-off.
No, really!
Looking at the writing credits for the two main writers, I see that they have mostly experience writing a lot of episodes of popular TV shows. I’ve heard that that doesn’t necessarily prepare one for writing a movie screenplay.