Green Lantern

Green Lantern is one of the staple DC titles, in various incarnations. Several of DC’s big crossover events have revolved around the Lantern mythos, including the recent silly zombie-derived Black Lantern saga. Wise, ageless beings on the planet Oa have forged rings that allow the user’s will to manifest whatever they imagine – and eventually one chooses Hal Jordan.

The Parallax saga was what brought Green Lantern a new relevance in comics. Hal became a really interesting character when he felt responsible for the deaths of thousands, including those he loved. It was later retconned so that Parallax was an external entity so that Hal could be redeemed, but it was still a powerful story. Here, attempts to work from that…make for a messy, stupid and terminally dull story.

It’s hard to make Hal likeable, especially at the start, and Ryan Renolds does the character no favours. He’s meant to be a likeable, cocky rogue, but instead he’s just a cocky cock. Expecting an audience to sympathise with a character who has an amazing job, hot body, sleeps with lots of women and is the love interest of one who’s stunning is asking a lot – and trying to get us feeling sorry for him purely because he saw his dad die was just too contrived. When the central moral lesson of the film turns out to be ‘Hey, even if you are helped to be where you are through nepotism, you can still feel worthy and fulfilled!’ is going to resonate with a tiny minority.

And for a special effects-laden fantasy epic with magic powers limited only by the imagination, the story certainly trundles along. Every time we think the story is going to kick off, with fantastical creatures bearing rings of power, Hal goes back to earth and we get more dullness with his relationships and the inconsequential scientist infected with some of Parallax’s power. We could be seeing Killowog and Sinistro in long, breathtaking battles, but instead we have a guy with a bulging head attacking some special agent in absurd heels.

At the end, Parallax the destroyer of worlds, too powerful for numerous Green Lanterns, gets killed by a stupid trick that makes him seem totally unthreatening, awkwardly shoehorned into a recollection of a prior lesson and with much talk of it being Hal’s ‘humanity’ which saves the day – for no apparent reason. Plodding, unlikeable and overlong, Green Lantern is a real disappointment.