In the film Green Lantern, a reckless, irresponsible, fighter pilot named Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) receives a ring from a dying alien that lets him create any kind of object that he can think up, with the apparent caveat that it has to be green and semi-transparent. In the film’s climax, Hal, who has been fighting in outer space, struggles not to be sucked into the sun’s gravitational field; the best idea he comes up with is two green fighter jets with a rope in between them that he holds onto. It works. To finish off the primary supervillain (which looks, seriously, like an avalanche of poop that is on fire), Hal summons up all his creativity to dream up a large green fist, to punch with.
The stuff Hal makes is pretty dumb. But that his imagination is limited to racecars, fighter planes, really big guns, and other things that might appear on posters in garages that also have beer fridges and TVs (I’m surprised he doesn’t fight evil with a green bikini model) saves him, I guess, from the terror of infinite possibility while keeping his newfound abilities comprehensible, both to us and him. The ring, after all, gives its wearer (and there are thousands of them, each from different planets, comprising the Lantern Corps, which is like a cosmic UN Peacekeeping Force but without the women) power that’s only checked by his will and creativity. Imagine trying to follow the film if, say, Stephen Hawking wore that thing.
Director Martin Campbell and the film’s five-person writing team don’t have Hal’s excuse for squandering the possibilities granted to them by their own magic green ring of a $150 million budget. With that kind of wad, you’d think they’d at least blow it spectacularly; instead, it dribbles out weakly, with effects limited, mostly, to screensaver-like green bursts of light and 3D like a pop-up book through blurry glasses.
Martin et al. do create a lot of stuff: two and a half villains, thousands of aliens, a government conspiracy, a romance, father issues. But they only managed to make one three-dimensional (ha!) character. Given the cosmic scope of Green Lantern, it feels a little lonely, but Reynolds does such an admirable job of lightening the mood that he almost convinces us his lines are witty. In fact, Green Lantern is filled with good performances. Peter Sarsgaard has one of his more impressive moments — an unlikely amalgamation of John Malkovich’s flamboyant menace and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s poetic pathetic-ness — as Hector Hammond, a professor who becomes infected with a temper and telekinetic powers after he performs an autopsy on a crashed alien.
Sarsgaard’s talented enough to communicate Hammond’s inner evil all by himself, but just to make sure we get it, the filmmakers give him a grotesque appearance, too, to contrast with Hal’s abs and chin. It’s typical for the film. When Hal learns how to fight with his ring, the alien that trains him is as big as a tank, but just to make sure we realize how intimidating he is, the filmmakers pepper his speech with faux black vernacular. Characters constantly explain their motives outright. When that’s not enough, an unidentified voiceover explains more stuff.
Hal at one point explains to the more advanced aliens, in a moment that’s supposed to feel weighty, that we earthlings have this saying, “I’m only human.” At the end of the film, the unidentified voiceover mentions something about Hal’s humanity making him triumph despite humankind’s physical and mental weakness. For a film so concerned with the redeeming power of human imperfection, Green Lantern sure doesn’t put much faith in actors or audiences.
