Film Review: The Green Lantern

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 18 June 2011 21:06

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong

For the image-and-effects crowd, there is every type of visual effect in this summer cooler -- digital doubles, keying, crowd-simulation scenes, CG blood, compositing, digital environments and matte paintings. Space shots and montages, wholesale destruction and multiples.

Still, Ryan Reynolds, whose eyes are small and close set, dark and mischievous, has a narrow face and head, as if he had trouble negotiating the birth canal some years ago. Nevertheless, his body is that of an anatomical chart for the ideal corpus delectable.

Not everyone will go for this comic-book invigoration; some won’t like the SFX-heavy leit-motifs. Others will be distinctly uncomfortable with the metaphorical parallel to the late-in-film "invasion" of the extremely bad-guy aliens -- the street scene, though in California, is too close to the NYC 9/11 melée of panic in the streets. It is still early in our country‛s history to evoke pillows of ash and smoke and people running in hysteria every which way.

Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a hotshot test pilot who is recruited by the Green Lantern Corps to join their crusade against evil in the universe and membership into an intergalactic squadron tasked with keeping peace within the universe.

His colleague hot-dogger pilot is the Ferris Corp. daughter, played by the luscious Blake Lively, but she has Dagny Taggert elements of management in addition to being the ace pilot just shy of Reynolds’ amazing air-climbing prowess.

With the help of a power ring, Jordan is granted a number of superpowers -- but can he overcome his fears in time to defeat a marauding army of evil?

Reynolds has a slew of impressive actors to help him mine the delight-filled and entertaining comic-translated-to-celluloid flick. Blake Lively is lissome and lovely as Carol Ferris. And Peter Sarsgaard outdoes himself in an icky but challenging role as ne’er-do-well science-guy Hector Hammond, with unfortunate integument and blood cells that do him in insofar as handsomeness is concerned. Mark Strong is eponymous in the allover crimson role of …Sinestro, an otherworldly presence in magenta.

Tim Robbins makes a blessedly short appearance as Sarsgaard’s senatorial papa. Also good are sundry animatronics fish-people and oddities with beefy no-neck bodies and what-not, voiced by Geoffrey Rush and others.

The CGI, though really amazing here as rarely before -- Avatar, sit back down!—are, to use an overused term, awesome. The special effects are as good as the  laser presentations in the Planetarium, and the protagonists have humorous, serious and bookish things to say that keep the audience leaning forward to catch lines before a Biff! Bam! Boom! scene erases the prior lines.

It’s good for 8 through 80, has eye-candy all over the place, and for fans of the comic book,.or for those agnostic of the pulp paper of decades ago, this is a swift entertainment.

Keep in mind: I never read the comic. I have no brief for conversion films from the ancient fanzine base. And I am a girl, so these things do not naturally float toward my delight index. Still, I have long loved sci-fi, and this is a satisfactory offering in the canon. Though not all my colleagues agree. (Can’t please everyone.)

If you have teens or just-pre-teens -- though this is a mite strong in the bash ‘em/trash ‘em in a few scenes -- my view is it was a lot more not-to-be-missed if you want to get into the good graces of the young for the weekend. If not, carve yourself out a cardboard tyke and go and enjoy.

Marion DS Dreyfus
© June 2011

• < Prev
• Next >