In a universe as vast as it is mysterious, a small but powerful force has existed for centuries. Protectors of peace and justice, they are called the Green Lantern Corps. A brotherhood of warriors sworn to keep intergalactic order, each Green Lantern wears a ring that grants him superpowers. But when a new enemy called Parallax threatens to destroy the balance of power in the Universe, their fate and the fate of Earth lie in the hands of their newest recruit, the first human ever selected: Hal Jordan. Hal is a gifted and cocky test pilot, but the Green Lanterns have little respect for humans, who have never harnessed the infinite powers of the ring before. But Hal is clearly the missing piece to the puzzle, and along with his determination and willpower, he has one thing no member of the Corps has ever had: humanity. With the encouragement of fellow pilot and childhood sweetheart Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), if Hal can quickly master his new powers and find the courage to overcome his fears, he may prove to be not only the key to defeating Parallax...he will become the greatest Green Lantern of all.
Yep, It took two months for the
Green Lantern to come to the Brazilian Cinemas, and as I just watched it, is time to see if it is as bad as everybody has been saying, or if it can actually be good.
The most of the reviews for the movie had been saying that the movie is quite horrible and stuff like that, but what makes it not as good as the recent
Batman movies,
Iron Man or even
Captain America?
Well one of the many problems of the movie is it taking most of time on Earth. As it is necessary to have Earth development with the characters such as Hal´s family, Carol and the villain Hector Hammond, it also gets too bad. Having such an incredible planet as Oa to explore on the movie, or even the other Green Lanterns, such as Sinestro(which didn´t had a good development on it), the movie simply goes further on going over extremely unnecessary scenes, such as Hal´s nephew Birthday, which is not fully showed and is only there to show that Hal Jordan is not a lonely person in the world.
Oa is one of the good points of the movie, the CGI really made an impressive job, with the places on the planet, and the thousands of Lanterns, but as said before, the time on Earth kills the possibilities of exploring Oa even more. Hal training was way too fast, and the whole "I´m not the one" talk just comes without even starting the training for itself.
Another thing to observe is the characters development, Hector Hammond, one of the villains, has the best character development on the movie, played by the amazing Peter Sarsgaard, the character has its story very well developed, different of characters like Carol for example, the relationship of the character with his father is a nice touch for the movie, as it shows how his father acts with him during all his life and how at some part of the movie Hector finally get to turn the table with him. As for Carol, the most part of her explored on the movie is her back-story with Hal, a necessary thing that should had been explored with her on the movie was her story with her Father, that is only there as a non important character to tell the truth. Blake Lively is not best choice to play a character like Carol Ferris, mainly because she is not known as a great actress, but her portray of the characters was good, the character was in the movie only to say that there is a romantic interest.
Lanterns such as Sinestro, Kilowog, or Tomar-Re doesn't have their personalities fully explored, Kilowog serves as a trainer for Hal and is not much explored as the angry Lantern he is in the comics, don´t get me wrong, he is an angry dude on the movie and all, but is not as we would like to see, Tomar-Re serves as the one who introduces Oa to Hal, but thats it, you can see as watching the movie that he is a guy with a smooth personality, a nice guy, but that also is not fully explored. Maybe Sinestro is the one who has best screen time, we see that he is a determined man, with no fear of doing what has to be done to save everybody, with this we can see that he is indeed the man who will in the future be corrupted by a new power.
Now what to say about the main villain Parallax, the movie writers certainly came up with a good explanation of how the villain is connected with the Guardians and why he wants to get them, but they failed at creating the villain´s personality, he is as horrible as the Cloud Galactus, simple fact is that the villain is a cartoony character, not to say the design of the character, which doesn't has much effort on it, and doesn't give the audience the fear for him, but mostly not caring about him, with no personality, but only hungry for fear, fear and more fear and of course destruction. The character is a completely waste of potential on the movie time, but if we see back again, the other villain, Hammond, which could had been better used, but instead is abandoned at the end of the movie, was so well developed. We could had some kind of fusion between the creature and the big head villain, then we could had some kind of big threat on the movie.
The CGI of the suits were not as bad as everyone were saying when first saw it on trailers and Tv Spots, of course some were very well done and other were not that great. Sinestro and Hal´s suits for example, they are equal, both good, the green on it is outstanding, and the only problem on Hal´s whole suit is the mask, as it seems to be out of a cartoon, the mask is not as well done as the rest of the suit is. Kilowog suit is the problem here, it seemed like not much effort was put on it, it was mostly like an incomplete suit. There is nothing much to complaint about Tomar-Re suit, was nicely put together, and fitted well with the character design.
Something worth commenting is the Fear subject on the movie linked with the memories of Hal´s father that we have along the movie. The memory of his father that died on an accident during a test, is what makes what Hal can become. But the conflicts with the subject doesn't makes much sense, the guy flies over all up in the sky until he loses control of the jet, but at the same time he is afraid to pull the ejection seat, I mean if he was really afraid he would not even risk going all over in to the sky. And The movie creates the conflict situations so it can be solved with talking. Just like I said earlier, Hal leaves Oa after the training in kind of an unexplained way after his brief introduction, and instead of learning how to overcome fear and have the responsibility that is required in the Oa´s trainings, he simply learns that from a talk with Carol to move forward the movie.
But of course the movie has it times, as the action scenes which are very well done, like the one on which Green Lantern makes his first public appearance, the scene with Abin Sur which has a great level of emotions, very well written and nicely worked, or the final fight with Parallax, taking him out of the planet.
All the positive things I said mixed with the amazing CGI scenes, makes Green Lantern a worth watching movie, but of course, it is not a great movie like The Dark Knight or Iron Man, with all the failures, it could had been better, but lets see if a sequel comes, maybe we have some good time on Oa, well it had a great potential!
3/5!