Just How Close WAS Green Lantern To Its Source Material?

Ryan Reynolds said in an interview that they were pretty much using the Secret Origins storyline from the comics -- obviously, it's Green Lantern's origin story -- as the script. This turned out to be total bullcrap.

First and foremost, Origins never even mentions Parallax, not once. The villain was Atrocitus, who was captured by Abin Sur, which is a whole 'nother thing...

IF they had really done their research for this movie, the writers would have read Alan Moore's story about how Abin Sur found himself on the planet Ysmault...Ysmault was where these creatures/demons called the Empire of Tears had been imprisoned by the Oans several millenia before. Abin Sur met a demon/creature called Qull of the Five Inversions, who predicted that Abin Sur would die when his ring ran out of power at a critical moment, which made Abin Sur paranoid enough to start using a spaceship on very long voyages and start recharging his ring more than necessary. And also he mentioned something about a forthcoming "Blackest Night," whatever that is...haven't found that story arc yet.

Years later, Abin Sur found himself going to Earth and, um, his ring and his spaceship were rendered useless because apparently Earth's got this yellow radiation ring around it. The jist was that if he hadn't stopped relying solely on his ring, he might have used it to check for the radiation ring beforehand.

SO, back to Secret Origins. The reason Abin Sur was headed for Earth was because he had captured another demon/creature from Ysmault called Atrocitus of the Five Inversions, and that he'd gotten this idea in his head -- probably from his questioning of the Five Inversions back on Ysmault -- that Earth was where this "Blackest Night" would start. As you can probably guess, he's more than a bit afraid, which his friend and fellow Lantern Sinestro warns him to remedy before going any further. Before that little problem can be fixed, Atrocitus breaks free of his holding tank and fatally wounds Abin Sur and escapes as the ship crashes -- in the DESERT, not a SWAMP, I might add.

The ring finds Hal Jordan, all goes as according to the story except for the random glasses guy. What was up with him, anyway? o3o

Was Parallax mentioned at all in the above storyline? No.

Oh, and by the way, Jordan's uniform wasn't supposed to have the Green Lantern logo on it until after he completed boot camp. Which isn't one-on-one with Kilowog, anyway. Grr.

Meanwhile, Hector Hammond is going pretty much exactly as planned, except that he gets all big-headed because of a meteor fragment in Abin Sur's ship, not because of Parallax.

Um. Yeah. So you can guess how well the movie follows the book from there. >_>

They never mentioned Hal's childhood beyond his father's plane crash -- and they even got that wrong -- his family pretty much had a cameo, and the relationship between Hal and Carol was never supposed to have anything between when they were kids and just before Hal got the ring.

Sinestro was supposed to be Hal Jordan's mentor, not some random pink pointy-eared alien who hated him! Sinestro and Abin Sur were friends, so he takes it upon himself to teach Hal how to properly be a Lantern and to help him when Atrocitus attacks Earth.

Parallax isn't a Guardian that got corrupted; it's Hal Jordan's evil alter-ego. I'm not kidding; in one storyline, Jordan goes crazy and turns briefly to the Dark Side. It does turn into a parasite that affects other people.

The biggest thing, though, was that they forgot to mention that hey! the rings are powerless against the color yellow! GRR. Whenever the Lanterns are confronted with anything yellow, they have to use other resources to defeat whatever they're fighting. Kind of IMPORTANT to mention your WEAKNESSES, guys.