Green Lantern

Our reviewer has critical déjà vu after seeing the latest superhero in the summer popcorn season.

This is not an experience of déjà vu that is forcing me to decide between returning to the alternate reality from whence I came and remaining in the reality which I have to come to call home. It’s a feeling that I’ve written a review like this in my past life. As in my life of two weeks ago.

Director Mark Waters’s adaptation of the 1936 children’s story Mr. Popper’s Penguins was a story of penguin-induced chaos into which the screenwriters injected a more “relevant” story of a divorced family reunited through the recovery of Mr Popper’s lost childhood.

Director Martin Campbell’s adaptation of the DC superhero Green Lantern (or should I say, Campbell’s adaptation of Geoff Jones’s Green Lantern: Rebirth) is a comic book series into which the screenwriters have injected a different sort of “relevance,” namely the story of a man who is required to overcome his childish fears – in other words, to finally grow up.  

My déjà vu arises not only from each film’s “injection” of “modern relevance,” but from the fact that each “relevance” has a common emotional root: Both of these men suffer from the “loss” of the father in childhood (semi-abandonment in Popper, tragic death in Green Lantern). Indeed, each of these men exemplify the wounded male of our modern-day species – the child-man who has been left broken, weakened, and afraid by this modern world in which many fathers disappear (and many mothers opt out). But while Popper overcomes his dysfunction by more or less becoming a kid again, Hal Jordan (the man behind the mask of the Green Lantern) must transcend his past by leaving his childish ways behind.

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a crackerjack test pilot. Except, apparently, when he looks at that dashboard snapshot of his test-pilot dad who got burned (literally). Then he’s scared out of his wits, chokes, and crashes his plane. (It makes one wonder why he kept flying with that snapshot. Or why this has never happened before. But I digress.)

This strange narrative twist is the filmmakers’ way of asking us to accept from the start that Hal Jordan is, despite his many stars, one big walking yellow stripe – that despite the fact that he is, by reason of his flying skills and bravado, an entirely reasonable choice to succeed the fallen Green Lantern Abin Sur, he is at the same time afraid of just about everything. Afraid of committing to his girlfriend. Afraid of becoming a Green Lantern – afraid of the combat training, afraid of the possibility of failure, afraid of dying. Even afraid of flying sometimes. Afraid, afraid, afraid.

To paraphrase Hal Jordan’s long-spurned girlfriend, Carol (Blake Lively), there’s walking away and there’s walking away, and this Hal Jordan does it all.

Healing finally comes for Tom Popper when he re-connects with his kids, enabling him to pull his self, his life, his family back together. Hal Jordan is finally able to face saving the world from the one of the scariest world-eating monster-aliens I’ve ever seen when Carol, who never stopped believing in him, tells him that he really does have what it takes: “I see it. I always have. The Ring didn’t see that you were fearless. It saw you had the ability to overcome fear. It saw that you were courageous. And you are. Just like your dad.”

But there are two things about Green Lantern that leave me feeling cheated out of $11 and 90 minutes of my life. The first is that the story line is a disaster. Here’s a leading indicator: In the comic, the crash that took the life of Hal’s father is the end of his fear. In the film, it’s the origin of his fear.

Worst case in point: In Green Lantern: Rebirth (the comic), there is a single allusion to the fact that Green Lantern’s long-time arch-enemy Sinestro was like unto Lucifer, ie, was once the finest Green Lantern in the universe. But because Green Lantern (the movie) is a story of our hero’s beginnings, we can’t merely allude to Sinestro’s honorable history, but have to go from “Sinestro as Hal’s military superior” to “diametric opposite of everything Green Lantern stands for” all in 90 minutes. Which means we first meet Sinestro as he lectures Hal on how fear makes you weak, and then the very next time we see him he is advocating the use of the “yellow power of fear” as the universe’s only hope.

(And then there’s the coda in which a chastised Sinestro praises Hal for his triumph over fear, followed by the final credits in which we see a suddenly-unreformed Sinestro putting on the… oh, forget it.)

But the second, and far more egregious flaw, is the star, Ryan Reynolds. His Green Lantern is a superhero who always looks as though he has just rolled out of bed. It doesn’t help that by the end he hasn’t exactly become a larger-than-life defender of Earth. And it doesn’t help that the last we see of Green Lantern is Hal telling his girlfriend: “I’m gonna go look for trouble.” Wow. That’s really cool. Maybe that’s the relevance of Green Lantern – a super-hero who’s not quite grown up after all.

Mark Thomas Lickona is a screenwriter, critic, filmmaker and small-scale organic farmer residing in Los Angeles.

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