DARKEST NIGHT: THE LOST OPPORTUNITY OF THE GREEN LANTERN

THE LOST OPPORTUNITY OF THE GREEN LANTERN

by Rubadiri Victor rubadiri@yahoo.com

Wow, where to start! The tragedy of ‘Green Lantern’ is the visible promise of what could have been- and the movie’s consistent abandonment and betrayal of these ideals…

I was disappointed because of what the scale and scope of this movie could have meant for storytelling in movies- and how it was betrayed. Coming so soon after the success of Marvel’s ‘Thor’ this movie could have supplied the back-to-back knockout punch that could have shifted planetary mainstream audiences into another imaginative plateau… This movie had the possibility of translating the cosmic scope of comic book mythology, and in turn it could have expanded the narrow conceptual limits of mainstream audiences. Despite all the elements being there ‘Green Lantern’ failed to understand and execute this duty. I was also disappointed because it was so obvious that there were so many things that the director got right. It’s such a shame to see those elements assembled so badly and ruined by such a badly constructed narrative with cop-out dialogue and zero emotional arc.

To be fair to the director this movie looks like what happens when businessmen and committees get involved in deciding ‘Art.’ It looked like too many mediocre writers (there were 4 TV writers), too many board-led decisions of what audiences want, too many safe decisions as to what audiences can understand, and too much interfering with the singular vision of the director... I could be wrong… but it is clear that this movie suffers from that most American of sins- the terrifying dumbing down of emotion, themes, and the weight of things, because the presumption is that audiences are too dumb and must be spoken to in the most infantile of ways…

So let’s get started.

It is a rule of storytelling that you always start with humanity and the ‘normal’ first- and then expand into magic- It just is more powerful that way. You must connect emotionally with your audience before you throw them into another world… If you break the convention you must do it for the sheer shock of it- but return to ground your story. Storytelling is about revelation. So why start with the cosmic back-story of the History of the Corp? Why not start with the murder mystery on the planet that reveals Parallax? The director could have even shocked people last minute and revealed that the astronauts killed are in fact aliens and the star system is far far away… Leave the audience guessing, then go to Earth and show Hal’s life and humanity…

But instead the director gives away the whole story of the Green Lantern corp in the first 3 minutes as exposition… Telling rather than showing… Well if you’re going to do this then at least let us FEEL what that duty of the Corp means when we encounter Abin Sur patrolling the stars- and his subsequent battle with Parallax. This was a sequence- although beautifully staged- that could have been just a little longer to make us connect more with this heroic warrior, let us see the corp’s greatest warrior and the original custodian of Hal’s ring in action…

Then of course the duty of the filmmaker is to ground the whole story back on earth with the humanity of Hal Jordan. The audience needs to connect with something of human dimensions… And for the next 15 minutes I thought this was actually happening. The director actually looked like he was trying to flesh out a human scale Hal Jordan… It is probably the best sustained sequence of the movie- although it could have been a little more gritty. It would have been great to see the small town and what the aircraft industry meant to it- outside of some guys trying to beat up Hal… All of this grounding of Hal in this sequence- the flashback to his father’s death, the appearance of a family with brothers and a nephew- all is squandered as they never appear again, and never factor into any of his thoughts again…

This sequence could have been a perfect opportunity to show Hal ‘the man’ competing with his father’s legacy and his tendency to quit when things get too intense… The director never takes these possible scenarios to their climax and all the storylines the director starts here end limp… Also the writing of the dialogue was so TV show-lite that no joke ever connects with the audience, no moment of sadness ever sinks in, no agony goes more than a surface scratch… Every emotion feels dull and cheated… All in all this homebound sequence is a nice slice- but it never quite builds to any climaxes to punch home its intentions…

And then Hal is transported to the site of the alien crash and the ring…

The scene of Hal getting the ring from Aben Sur could have had a much more portentous feel to it. His reactions to the alien ship and the dying alien could have gone up a notch. The act of the handing over of the ring should have been almost religious so that we the audience could ‘know’ the enormity of what is happening- even if Hal doesn’t. There were so many lost opportunities… A lot of this mood creating could have been done with the music, and this deserves its own mention here.

What is it about the crappy composers for these super-hero soundtracks?- Both ‘Thor’ and ‘Green Lantern’ featured very generic pitiful soundtracks and scores- Why? Music can do so much to conjure the mood of majesty and mystery that these movies deserve. Why are these soundtracks so un-ambitious, cheap, and generic? And why are directors ignoring the fact they can build suspense… Surely someone remembers something called suspense? Why are these directors spoon-feeding audiences rather than letting them want to know what happens next? Why are they choosing generic formulas and cardboard cut-out storylines when Christopher Nolan’s ‘Batman’ shows that audiences actually want to be wowed emotionally with great performances? Even in a super-hero movie!

The entire interaction between Hal and the lantern in his room actually works. It shows Ryan Reynolds getting into the skin of the character on his own terms and carrying us the audience along with him. It elicits the only genuine laugh from the audience throughout the entire movie (“By the power of Grayskull!”) and the only real deep emotional connection… This comes with the moment that the Oath “In brightest day, in darkest night…” spontaneously comes out of Hal. It is magical. It gives chills- and it is only Reynold’s slight questioning cheekiness on the last line “Beware my power Green Lantern’s Light!” that betrays his- and the team’s- discomfort with the seriousness and sacredness of the story they are telling… That entire speech should have been delivered flat-out like a mantra. It is from this point that the movie loses its way completely, possibly because of this lack of belief…

It is at this point that Hal leaves the Earth and goes through space. And here is where the director and team fail to give the movie a sense of scale and weight. As Hal is flying through space- albeit frightened for his life- where is his sense of wonder to the hugeness of the Universe around him, where is this sense of scale? Each next encounter for Hal should be an initiation into the magic hugeness and wonder of the Universe. From the time he awakens on Oa each alien species, each room, each new part of the landscape should be a journey of discovery and awe. If it is so for Hal it will be so for the audience… And this is the criminal negligence of the director and team- this is storytelling 101- and they failed. These sequences are where the adrenalin is supposed to rush- but it seems all the effort was spent in CGI environment painting and not in the storytelling… But there are some beautiful environments. Oa is beautifully rendered as are the variety of alien species that form the corp. Also the Guardians are suitably strange, distant and aloof. The entire conception of this alien world is very immersive and groundbreaking - which is why the cheapness of the storytelling pisses everyone off…

I can’t help also but feel that a lot of these failures might be because of the time factors involved in working with CGI environments and characters. A CGI scene must be measured out, storyboarded and shot months in advance so that animators have months to create the artificial characters and environments that the human actors have to interact with. This is also very expensive. This calls for a lot of precision and knowing exactly what you want to say and accomplish in each scene. It is difficult to make late decisions to shoot extra scenes, or re-shoot a sequence and add in more if that ship sailed 8 months ago and the CGI is almost finished… This is the reason why PIXAR spends 2 years just working on the final story before one image is drawn!!! And this does not count the years of pre-development. PIXAR knows that once the expensive and time-consuming CGI process starts there is no turning back…

One can see the rush in many CGI laden films recently. There were some shots in ‘Thor’ where you could tell the team did not get a chance to finish the CGI properly and had to rush to get the film to the public on time. Thankfully in ‘Thor’ there were not that many unfinished scenes- and they were mostly confined to the Destroyer sequences towards the last part of the movie. In ‘Green Lantern’ however there were a lot more uneven patches…

For instance, the scenes of Parallax in space chasing Green Lantern into the asteroid belt look like a Microsoft word document cut and pasted… as compared to the brilliance of how Parallax looked on earth in the city. All of a sudden, in space, the creature lacked weight, depth and dimension whilst moving. The sequence is obviously unfinished. But the uneven-ness of ‘Green Lantern’s’ CGI is put to shame by the uneven-ness of its storytelling. Parallax comes to Earth- a monstrous radioactive cloud- yet there are no reaction shots of people or leaders reacting to its coming. It just arrives… It is this sense of missing pieces of visual storytelling that is everywhere and the most glaring is the filmmaker’s continual failure to show the reactions of people to action. The extent of the threat of Parallax only can be felt by showing people’s reaction- and the director consistently fails to paint these scenarios of reaction.

A place where the lack of understanding by the director of how it was his duty to give the audience a sense of wonder through the character of Hal (and where the uneven-ness of the CGI is acute) is with the scenes of flying. Remember what it was that got you about the ‘Spiderman’ movies- it was the sense of wonder of seeing Spidey swinging through the skyscraper canyons of New York- rendered brilliantly. That is what made you believe and be a kid again. It gave us the audience the adrenaline rush it must give Peter Parker every time…

There was never a scene in ‘Green Lantern’ with him or the Corp flying which I found beautiful and full of excitement… There was no iconic comic book pose in the sky, no frame that held the beauty of the romance of that power… There was no belief in Ryan Reynolds that to fly on his own is this beautifully awesome thing except one little scene of a cartwheel… There was no filmmaking love affair with the ring!!! And that is precisely the point of the myth and the movie. If I don’t feel I would like to own a ring like that at the end as a filmmaker you have failed!!! This cheapening of a worthy mythology must not be allowed, the wastage of $300 Million of CGI must not be allowed, this continual Hollywood abortion of storytelling and depth must be resisted and stopped!… Just as ‘Thor’ was an opportunity to bring a ‘God’ to life which the filmmakers took seriously and accomplished ‘Green Lantern’ was an opportunity to bring an infinite Universe to life and man’s possible place in it. This was an opportunity for this character to fly close to stuff that the Hubble telescope is beaming back to earth. This was an opportunity to author ‘first contact’ on an altogether different level… This director was given an infinite canvas to work on- and he was content with only painting the top right hand edge!!!…

There was continually no sense of wonder by Hal or the filmmakers to be in space… No sense of wonder to witness a star from close up… No sense of the magnitude of it all- This is what I mean by the importance of GROUNDING the character. You ground the character in his humanity so that the cosmic can feel cosmic. A Sun only makes sense in relation to a planet. A planet only makes sense if we know its cities and landscape. Cities and landscape only get a sense of scale if we get close to the lives of the people who live in them. Things must have scale and weight. And people must be seen to react for us to feel with them. It is why ‘Lord of the Rings’ towers over all these other fantasy films… One quick shot of the sun’s heat making Hal sweat as he strains not to be pulled in by its gravitational pull would have made us FEEL his struggle…

These kinds of missed judgements of how to SHOW the audience struggle and resolution rather than TELL them were obvious flaws right through the show. The absent parts were so numerous they began to get irritating… Here is the most glaring and the one which lost the team the whole movie:

Don’t comic book movies know about compressing time- showing us long periods of time passing in seconds? The weakness of ‘Thor’ was that it rushed the arc of Thor’s bonding with Jane and his appreciation of his humanity into an afternoon. What was wrong with showing us a montage of Thor’s activities done over the course of a week so we can see a growing bonding, a life being lived, lessons learnt with rituals of closeness leading up to a moment of genuine empathy?

In the same way why not show Hal’s training regime to become a Lantern that lasts a couple days- where we can see the training and failures of Hal- but also get to see some dawning strengths? Eventually he will break and quit. A sequence like that would have given an opportunity to introduce some more characters, create some funky green energy constructs. It would have deepened our empathy with his character, and made you FEEL Hal’s quitting all the more. This is about the WEIGHT of things. Giving them their due. ‘Showing’ not ‘telling’. And making us FEEL the journey…

Hal’s whole departure from Oa- like so many other moments which were supposed to be big moments in the film- was completely glossed over. One minute he says he doesn’t think he can cut it, the next moment he’s flown back to earth… How did he know the way back? What did the Lantern Corp have to say about his defection? Where is the sense of wonder in his journey back through THE FRIGGING GALAXY? WHO WRITES THIS STUFF AND DOESN’T ASK BASIC QUESTIONS LIKE THIS???!!!

And the editing was so amateurish it felt as if all these scenes were subtracted from the movie and cheapened it fatally…

After all these omissions it gets easy for the movie to break down. Without powerful scenes of Hal’s wonder, then training, struggle and abandonment of the corp on Oa, none of his subsequent angst feels real to us. Without ever showing us where Hal quit before in his life in the sequences on Earth how can we get a sense of the fact that he’s a perpetual quitter?… Hal’s character is then really a non-character- with people telling us how he feels and should not feel- the character himself feels and shows us nothing. He is never placed in any situations to show us it! From this moment of Hal’s premature leaving of his training he just seems like a whiner for no reason- and nobody wants a whiner as a hero…

The entire mirror plot of Hector Hammond and his mutation by Parallax had all the ingredients to ground the plot beautifully. Here we had two men- Hal and Hector- with different relationships with their fathers, loving the same woman, one embraces life and the other hides from it. Their eventual choosing by entities from outer space for different missions is the cherry on top of a brilliant set-up with a lot of emotional overtones and possibilities. However the director never seems to know how to frame these contrasts and the eventual battles…

The first mistakes were in the casting. Whilst actor Peter Saarsgard seems to be working hard to make Hector Hammond a believable and 3 dimensional character you can’t help but feel that he is indeed ‘working’ and has been miscast. The worst miscasting however would have to be Tim Robbins as the slimy father Senator Hammond. Robbins never seems to truly inhabit the role. One can’t help but feel that if there were actors more suited to the grittiness and griminess of these 2 characters you would have felt their arcs much much more.

A super hero’s ‘love interest’ is probably the worst written role in all of moviedom- and Blake Lively’s ‘Carol Ferris’ is no different. However Lively is strikingly beautiful and does seem to be channeling something into the character- even with the crap lines and zero storytelling character arc she was given.

The stand-out performer is Mark Strong who excelled as Sinestro- although again his arcs of motives are not given the time and weight they require. But Strong invests Sinestro with weight, depth, and complexity. From the way he walks and talks he already communicates with the audience. Geoffrey Rush and Michael Clarke Duncan as Tomar Re and Killowog are both typically typecast -but they are perfect for their voice over roles. This makes it more the shame that a week-long training sequence was never scripted which could have given these characters a little more dimension…

So Hal battles Parallax by himself and in the end- when the end comes- it feels cheap and rushed. I felt that there was still half an hour more of movie that was hiding…. Throughout it felt like it was the Trinidad and Tobago Board of Censors had edited the movie and not a top multi-million dollar Hollywood team… I felt that the battle with Parallax by the Sun could have been more cosmic, it could have been more epic. I wanted to see Green Lantern stretched, I wanted to see him sweat, I wanted to feel the power of Parallax and the weight of its defeat. I wanted to feel Hal’s exhaustion on defeating it. I wanted to feel the sense of scale of the sun and feel his body’s slow plummet more. Just a couple more seconds- and some inspired movie making- and it could have been perfect. What was the rush?!!...

Green Lantern was so ambitious in its elements and so un-ambitious in the way they were assembled and put together that it’s upsetting on a profound level. It is about waste and a missed opportunity. My greatest hope is that I am right about the businessmen of Warner Studio and DC’s interference and that the director can go back in and salvage something with a ‘Director’s Cut’. Hopefully there actually are scenes shot that can be inserted that can actually make this mess work. As it stands the movie feels like an okay TV movie… but this is not what it was meant to be.

The ‘Green Lantern’ is a $300 million investment that currently finds itself with only a 24% approval rating on critics and audience polls. It is the worst reviewed movie of the year so far! It is a film which has seen its audience dwindle by 75% after one week!!! It is also the lynchpin of DC Comics’ attempt to diversify its movie hero roster away from the staples of ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman’. Green Lantern was supposed to open the way for movies about other ‘second tier’ DC heroes like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. ‘Green Lantern’ was supposed to prepare the way for a ‘Justice League of America’ movie to compete with Marvel Comic’s ‘Avengers’ movie. However a movie that loses tens of millions and is universally hated is not going to fulfill these ambitions. This movie has sabotaged many, many agendas… Yet still it came so close… It will be interesting to see how everyone maneuvers from here…