I got the impression that that was just the beginning of his training but he cut it short by quitting. In a total fanwank I imagine that at the end of the movie he returned to the alien planet to complete his training which is probably a weeks or months long military or police style experience (what are the Green Lanterns except cops with magic rings and not guns?).
In the real world what he did would probably have killed them but in comic-book physics they probably woke up and walked away later with nothing more than a mildly sore head.
But yeah, I agree, that was an eyebrow raising scene for me as well.
Well I’m not a comic book fan and just picked up the Green Lantern story world by cultural osmosis but the power ring always seemed to me to be a very cool idea, unlike the others its uses are virtually unlimited just depending on if you have the imagination and willpower to put them into effect.
And unlike the others its a power anyone can use, Green Lanterns are nothing more than ordinary people gifted with an extraordinary device and opportunity, they aren’t inherently special like most of the other superheros.
My first experience of the GL character was Jon Stewart in the Justice League cartoon, I found him interesting and ‘believeable’ as a superhero and as a person, but he would probably not be over the top enough to carry a GL movie based around him. He was quite straight-laced, somber and military minded and played off well against the irreverent and cocky Flash in the cartoon. But people would probably just consider him to be boring…
Yeah, I like the GL concept, you can tell.
edited to add I thought the Jon Stewart GL in the Justice League cartoon had a believable relationship with the Hawkgirl character as well, you could really see those pair falling in love.
That attack by the three guys against a lone Hal, besides being a bit contrived, was bad enough I thought the guys got what they deserved and I don’t remember thinking they were killed. Very roughly tossed aside, but not killed.
They deserved what they got. Hal didn’t know how the ring worked yet at that point, did he?
That is pretty over the top but I meant more as in he’s fairly subdued in personality. I do remember reading somewhere how he managed to exceed his rings power limits when he tried to put a planet back together, are the two events related?
Not sure who Ryan Reynolds’ fan base is. I’ve always been a little put off by his oozing manner, conspicuously plucked eyebrows and enormous forehead; I’ve never looked at him and thought “I bet he’d make a great superhero!” Also, they threw too much of the character’s history and baggage into the movie.
Iron Man, by contrast, let us discover the character gradually and see his world the way Tony Stark saw it. Iron Man !! got bogged down by too much, and the film hurt for it. But rarely are a character and an actor as well-matched as Tony Stark and Robert Downey, Jr., or as poorly matched as Hal Jordan and Ryan Reynolds.
In retrospect, they shoulda gone the Men in Black route (I have not yet seen the third film). Will Smith is the stereotypical movie cool character in the first MiB - he’s sassy and too cool for authority and such - but he’s also ridiculously out of his depth when all the alien stuff hits. Hal Jordan could have been like that, the mavericky womanizing pilot and a big fish in what he’ll discover is a very small pond, suddenly getting roped into an organization where he’s just the fucking new guy and everyone around him (especially his K-like trainer, Sinestro) has a much better handle on what’s going on, leaving Jordan to just sort of bumble through.
It needed more recurring bits of sneering contempt (“You’re the replacement for Abin Sur?”) and while Jordan does okay dealing with petty Earth thugs, it’s obvious that it’ll be years before he can handle anything cosmic.
Overall, the animated Green Lantern: First Flight was a better movie, in large part, I think, because
Sinestro is the putative “bad guy”, but his motives are understandable, if not sympathetic, at least at first.
Cosmic Odyssey. The Justice League is forced to cooperate with Darkseid to prevent a string of planets from being destroyed, since if any two of these particular planets go, it’s game over for the universe. John (NOT Jon!) Stewart and Martian Manhunter are charged with protecting a planet we’d never heard of. Stewart charges in on his own, preventing Manhunter from participating, and the bad guy defeats him by painting the world-destroying bomb yellow, a tactic that wouldn’t have worked on Manhunter.
Not sure what the second planet was, but he subsequently administered a planet called Mosaic, a patchwork of hundreds of diverse planets, each piece retaining the characteristics of its home planet. Maybe it blew up, too.
That does sound like an interesting way to approach it. I kind of got the impression that they threw everything into the Green Lantern movie because they thought they might not got the opportunity to make another one. Unfortunately it may have been a self-fufilling prophecy.
Is the animated film worth picking up? Its been years since I watched the cartoons.
Pfffttt, so I spelled his name wrong, what’s he going to do about it?
Huh, I’d never actually read the story, I’ve only heard back-references to it. So he basically destroyed the planet through negligence rather than intent.
The second planet was Mogo itself, the sentient planet who was also a Green Lantern. He’d been corrupted by the big bad guy, and with him on the bad guy’s side the GL home planet of Oa and the entire Corps was going to be destroyed. Stewart made the call, and before anybody could stop him he harnessed the available power and blew Mogo to smithereens. Quite deliberately.
Oh, absolutely. The DC Universe Animated Original series is pretty hit-or-miss, but they’re generally better, I’ve found, than any of DC’s live-action movies.
Sonuvacrap, after clicking your link I realized I had read the story, and it was in my collection (well, it was until my entire collection was stolen a couple months ago). I guess it was just long ago enough that I’d forgotten. I collected comics from 1987 to '91, and then picked it up again in 2004, so I had that long gap where I never saw references to that event, and when I started collecting again and saw John talking about it, I assumed it was something that happened during the gap.
But it doesn’t have to be. GL can be summed up pretty easy for someone unfamiliar with the comics: Space Cop. Had they played this angle up more they could have made a better, albeit possibly less faithful movie.
What I danced around in my OP all those months ago was while GL looks fine on a comic page and in a cartoon, he looks silly in live action. They would have made a better movie if they stuck with the core of the character but made the necessary changes to make the movie better.
The lack of a true villain really hurt this movie. Heroes need to do heroic things, like stop a murdering carjacker (Spider-Man) or save some poor villagers from terrorists (Iron Man). When you scale the enemy up too much, it becomes less personal and less identifiable. Sure, you can say that a big black cloud is going to destroy the world, and go fight it in space or whatever, but that doesn’t make people care on an individual basis.
What heroic things did GL do? He punched out some normal guys who were beating him up for being a jackass (which he was), and he made a magic hot rod to rescue like four people from a helicopter crash. Yay. Even the freakin’ Ghost Rider at least stopped a mugging.
And I think the green hot rod scene was way overdone as well, which is an unfortunate side effect of having CGI so easily available now. I think there could have been a nice dramatic moment where the helicopter is falling and the passengers are screaming and then they realize they’re OK, then pull back to see that a giant baseball mitt caught them. Instead we watch the wild ride which caused way more damage than it ever needed to, even if Jordan was still learning how to use the ring. Movies need big action set pieces to offset all the boring standing around and talking, but now we have these bigger wilder things that you can do with computers but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it.
And I think you’re right about the spacecloud, too – it may have been a good idea to save Paralax for the sequel. Have GL win something close to home for the movie’s denouement and become the hero. Then he can prove he’s a hero the next time when he saves all of Earth from the giant terror that only he can stop.
I think Green Lantern doesn’t really work well in any medium. A man with a magic ring that materializes whatever he wants? Really?
Some of the old Corps shorts were pretty cool, and Kyle Rayner (who was supposed to be a comic book artist in continuity) was all right, as the things the ring produced were sort of an extension of his artistness somehow. But in general Green Lantern is dumb on its face.
Please, folks, the ring isn’t “magic”. It’s a highly-advanced piece of technology. And when it comes down to it, the ring and its capabilities are just like every other can’t-exist-in-real-life “super power”: they exist solely as a storytelling tool, to tell stories about people. Ultimately, the powers don’t matter. No superhero becomes popular because of their powers. They become popular because they’re interesting characters with interesting stories.
The rings work like that for every GL. Hal Jordan isn’t all that imaginative, so his ring constructs tend to take the form of everyday objects. John Stewart is an architect and former soldier, and his constructs tend to be carefully (though instantly) engineered/designed, functional pieces of “equipment”. Guy Gardner is an arrogant, macho showboat and half the time he doesn’t bother with constructs, he just fires blasts that make a bunch of noise (where GL ring constructs typically don’t make any sound).
I also didn’t enjoy the Green Lantern movie, and agree with what others have said in this thread: The Green Lantern’s powers just aren’t compelling. In my opinion, for superheroes to be effective (especially within the context of a movie), they need to have easy-to-understand advantages balanced with just as easy-to-understand vulnerabilities. Iron Man has his intelligence and armor, but his armor can break and malfunction. Thor has his strength and lighting-summoning hammer, but he can be overpowered and outwitted by his enemies, many of whom have similar godly status. When we get to Green Lantern, his advantage is too vast and vague (make anything out of thin air by using a ring) and his vulnerabilities are too, well, silly. (Running out of energy I can understand, but exposure to the color yellow? Really?) I haven’t read the comic, where I imagine that the GL’s abilities and limitations are more fleshed out, but as presented in the movie they were too hard to grasp. I found myself asking, “If he can make a minigun, why not a nuke? If he can make a car, why not a time machine?” There doesn’t seem to be any limit to his power, and therefore no drama.
The ring is only magic in the Clarke ‘any sufficiently advanced technology’ sense. Personally I think it makes more sense than most of the other DC superpowers, its a piece of equipment that can take a persons thoughts and turn them into physical reality, but to wield it you need a powerful will and imagination. It really wouldn’t take that many more advances in technology to build something that can read the mind of its user, turning those thoughts into physical reality would be more difficult but nothing beyond possibility. The ring is merely a weapon, a tool, a piece of hardware. If I recall correctly the ring itself has some level of sentience, its more like an advanced AI than anything else, but I may be mistaken regarding that.
You dislike the concept but personally I think its really interesting, unlike most of the other superheroes the Green Lanterns are just ordinary human beings (or aliens) given an impressive piece of technology, the strength of will needed to wield it is purely internal.
I remember when I stopped watching the Justice League cartoon, it was the story regarding the superheros dealing with an alternate WW2, Wonder Woman, Superman and so on were shrugging off even the most advanced Nazi superweapons, where’s the sense of danger and excitement if they can’t even be injured? Unlike them Green Lantern was always depicted as pretty much an intergalactic cop, an ordinary man with an extraordinary ‘gun’, he was mortal and he could be killed.
btw Wonder Woman, now theres an uninteresting and ridiculous character, at least in my opinion.
This is a good question, what are the rings upper power limits? I recall reading that earlier in the GL universe the ring wouldn’t allow you to kill someone but I think thats been rescinded. There is also the example above were GL John Stewart attempted to rebuild a planet but his willpower exceeded the ability of the ring to do so, which you have to admit is pretty impressive.
btw just to add my knowledge of Green Lantern is taken from the Justice League cartoon which I haven’t watched for a long time and some snippets picked up here and there in the internets, just to clarify.
I liked the movie well enough that I bought it. My main problem is that they are trying to do at least three* movies in one. It seems like they tried to do an origin movie, a Parallax movie and a Hector Hammond movie all in one. Way too much going on.
*I never really read the comics but I am aware of the characters.
The vulnerability to the color yellow was removed a few years ago; I think the current batch of writers came to the same conclusion readers probably came to a long time ago: “What a silly vulnerability”. Granted, it was plausibly explained in the lore, but still silly. They also worked within the established lore to go about getting rid of it, rather than just handwaving it away. I had a book that collected the first few years of GL comics (from the 1960s), and yeah, it was silly. Every single issue presented Hal with some new threat that just happened to be colored yellow — Giant space alien menacing Earth? It’s yellow. Malfunctioning, runaway military experimental missile headed for Coast City? The Army painted it yellow — and Hal had to come up with some creative, indirect way to stop it, since his ring couldn’t take direct action against the threat.
So they removed the yellow vulnerability and replaced it with a new one by changing the primary qualification for becoming a GL. Now, instead of a candidate being “without fear”, a candidate is rather “capable of overcoming great fear”. According to GL lore, fear is the antithesis of will. So in order to wield a ring, the bearer must be able to overcome his/her fear. Succumbing to fear overrides the bearer’s will, leaving him/her unable to use the ring effectively. Additionally, the ring is not all-powerful. A GL can be defeated by a superior opponent, whether by simple overwhelming force, or by a better fighter. And as you already mentioned, running out of energy (the ring’s equivalent of running out of bullets). Oh yeah, and an opponent with a stronger will than the Green Lantern can resist the ring’s effects.
As for “if he can make X, why not Y?”, the key here is that the ring constructs are not functional in and of themselves. All the power comes from the ring; the constructs are basically visualization tools to help the GL direct the ring’s power. So Hal Jordan creates a giant boxing glove, John Stewart creates a rifle, and Guy Gardner shoots a “laser beam” from his ring, and they’re all effectively performing the same action: hit the other guy. They each just do it in a manner that suits their personalities. During the movie’s climax, Hal created a pair of fighter jets to pull against the sun’s gravity, because as a fighter test pilot, that was something familiar to him. He could have created a team of horses, and they would have been equally effective. The point is, it wasn’t the jets (or the horses) doing the work, it was the ring generating an opposing force/anchor at a certain spot and tethering Hal to that opposing force.
Green Lanterns fly through the vacuum of space, and the ring protects them. If they’re bringing somebody else with them, the ring will protect the other person the same way. But that other person might freak out over being in space without so much as a spacesuit, so the GL can project a suit around them, or even a small spaceship. But the projection is just that: a projection. It offers no additional protection, it simply eases the mind of their companion.
Essentially, ring constructs are simply visual metaphors for whatever is actually taking place.
Currently, GL rings will allow the use of lethal force against members of the Sinestro Corps, and only members of the Sinestro Corps. And for that to happen, the Guardians (the big bosses/creators of the GL Corps) had to specifically pass a law to allow it and then program the rings to allow lethal force against those specific targets.
