Green Lantern: We’re Only Human

Color me surprised. It may not be professional, but I went in expecting to despise this movie. The trailers looked ridiculous, the character profile ads around town made them seem cartoonish to the nth degree, and the effects seemed flat and lifeless. Well, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

To be sure, it’s no Batman. Or Iron Man. But if you’re looking for something on a Thor-ian level, it does considerably better. It’s a fun, if occasionally dawdling, action film which does an excellent treatment for an admittedly bizarre origin story.

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a military test pilot who succumbs to the fear he’ll die the same death as his father. One day, a dying alien plummets to Earth, and his magic ring picks Hal to fly away to an alien word, so he can team up with lots of other weird aliens, to fight space garbage. This is me being kind to the plot. Seriously, we’re back to that old Spiderman 3 “super space entity randomly picks… YOU” device.

Fortunately, the follow through does wonders. The bad guys are, at least in the case of the space garbage, kind of delightfully scary. Peter Sarsgaard turns in an eccentric Renfield-ish side-kick bad-guy, and the situations they create combine to raise the bar of the movie as a whole. Blake Lively serves as an acceptable, if lackluster, love interest. Tim Robbins as Sarsgaard’s father (at only 12 years older) is perfectly serviceable. Mark Strong plays a not entirely trustworthy character named… sigh… Sinestro. (It’s not as bad as Star Wars’ General Grievous, but still.) Sinestro, despite all the CGI and make up, just comes off looking like a sunburned Justin Theroux. Maybe that’s just me. 

Also separating this film from the rest of its superhero brethren is the fact that our Green Lantern isn’t one in a million. He’s technically one in 3,600. That’s right, 3,599 other equally powerful Lanterns, of which, twelve are used in battling the unstoppable, universe destroying monster. Poor resource management, Guardians.

So what did I love? Ryan Reynolds. 

R-Squared is my not-so-secret man crush. He captures the ironic eyebrow raise and sardonic deadpan better than any actor in this generation. Unfortunately, this also makes him less than ideal for the part. Hal Jordan’s excitement at developing super powers is rarely anything less than full on amazement, which is an honesty that doesn’t lay in Reynolds’ strengths. It’s why he’s always seemed the perfect fit for a super hero with less than super powers, like the Flash, or Ant-Man. Or more appropriately, the project he’s been circling for years (and continues to): the fourth wall breaking, wise-cracking, merc with a mouth, Deadpool, who Reynolds even portrayed in bastardized form for Wolverine: Origins. I guess it comes down to the fact that he’s much better suited to a half-dozen other suits in the comic world, but if we have to see anyone as a Green Lantern,  it might as well be someone who can do half original, half the time.

One of the major themes of the film, other than the thinly veiled Bush-era critique of never giving over to using fear as a weapon, is the dichotomy between fearlessness and humanity. Or really everyone else in the universe versus the weakness of humanity. 

In the end, Reynolds saves the day in ways no other Lantern could, because of the power his humanity gave him. At least that’s what the voice over instructs us. Truthfully, I have no idea how that played into the final action sequence in any meaningful way. If anything, he seemed to pay attention to a rudimentary lesson in gravitational forces and astro-physics. But maybe that’s all the human soul really… Nope, can’t do it.

Where this argument does shine is in the production and story elements of the film. Whenever we’re treated to sections of inhumanity, such as the sequences on the planet Oa which are almost completely CGI, it’s hard to take anything seriously. The production design and graphical approach are just not up to par; leaving everything vaguely disjointed and, quite frankly, beneath what I’d expect from the ported video game. Even Reynolds himself sports an outfit that creates an uncanny valley for skin-tight apparel. But when we return to humanity, focusing on Hal Jordan’s rescue efforts amongst civilian plight, or even on the smaller scenes setting up Sarsgaard’s backstory, it’s easy to find yourself enjoying a much better film.

It’s not a must see picture, but it does set-up a universe, and a tone, that the second film in the series can springboard off to bigger and better things. There have been many worse comic book films, and few that have dared to reach for the stars like Green Lantern, so let’s cut it some slack. 

“After all, we’re only human”… says the green alien space cop jet pilot. And so it goes…