Green Lantern

In Brightest Day,
In Nightest Black,
This Movie Sucks,
I Want My $10 Back

Okay, whatever, I took liberties with the oath. But it was surprisingly difficult to rhyme a word with "night" that fit my angry fanboy agenda.

Spoilers follow...

The Good:

-- Amanda Waller. This was the one and only nerdgasm I had throughout the entire film. What a great, unexpected character to just pop up out of nowhere. They even threw in her origin! There was no reason to show the flashback of her husband being killed; that was just meat thrown to the fanboys. And it was appreciated. (Joy almost turned to outrage when it looked like they'd killed her off, but based on her exit, she seemed to be okay. Given that they cast an actress like Angela Bassett in the role, I'm guessing she's going to be the Samuel L. Jackson of the DC film universe.)

-- Blake Lively. Hot. Also, not nearly as unbelievable as the world's youngest test pilot/aerospace company executive as I'd expected going in. Don't get me wrong, she was still horribly miscast, but she's the least of the film's problems.

-- The post-credits sequence. At least, in the sense that unlike with Marvel films, I didn't have to sit through the entire closing credits to see it. As for the actual scene, it sets up the sequel nicely and all, but it seems to come out of nowhere. I know why Sinestro puts on the yellow ring, but most of the audience probably didn't.

The Bad:

-- Ryan Reynolds. I'm not sure why an actor who specializes in playing cocky guys was cast as a character who's mostly straight-laced. To his credit, though, his brief attempt at a superhero voice was a hell of a lot better than Christian Bale's Batman voice.

-- The ring constructs. Some were good. I enjoyed the race track. But on the whole, they exhibited a surprisingly lack of imagination on the filmmakers' part. I mean, it's a movie about a ring that can literally create anything the user thinks of. This should have been two hours of pure CGI eye candy. Instead, we got machine guns and flamethrowers and other assorted crap.

Speaking of--and this is like, Green Lantern 101, not something that should have been overlooked, especially with so many DC Comics people consulting--a flamethrower made from a Green Lantern ring should have been shooting green flames, not orange. Ditto for the machine guns and its bullets. Green, guys. Green. You know, like the name of the character? Come on.

-- The costume. Way too busy. You had the weird thing going on with the chest emblem, the suit crackling with green electricity or whatever, etc. The classic GL costume is one of the best to ever appear in comics. It didn't need to be improved for the movie. I'm also confused why it has an indentation for Hal's navel. How tight is that thing?

The mask also looked really bad. When Carol immediately realizes it's Hal underneath it, it was a cute moment, but it sort of seemed like one of those scenes where the writer thought, "The idea of a domino mask protecting someone's identity is absurd. Stupid comics! I'm going to deconstruct it, thus proving how much smarter I am."

-- Too many villains. Parallax sucked. (A cloud with a face? Jesus.) Hector Hammond was okay, but his whole arc seemed largely pointless. Sinestro spent most of the film being heroic. Rather than make this film into a mash-up of Geoff Johns storylines, they should have adapted the two Emerald Dawn mini-series from the early '90s, which was a great GL origin story that would have focused mostly on Sinestro and his penchant for fascism.

-- The Guardians. A lot of the CGI through the film was noticeably weak, but the Guardians were almost laughably bad. They should have used real actors with painted blue faces, instead of going for all CGI.

-- The ring. I was mostly fine with the changes to the lantern, but the ring was perfect the way it is in the comics and didn't need to be "improved upon."

The Ugly

-- The voice-over at the beginning. Has there ever been a good movie that began with an expository voice-over? I realize the audience needed to be caught up to speed on a lot of stuff, but how about letting them discover what was going on along with Hal, instead of just having Geoffrey Rush dump everything in their laps at once?

-- The Green Lantern oath. I can't put all the blame on the movie, here. It's an element from the comics, after all. But I've always thought it was corny, and the bit at the end where Hal recites it just before he defeats Parallax, was corny times a thousand.