Green Lantern Review

It's your average evening on one of fifty two (!) Earths. Superman scorches the sky over Metropolis as he races to rescue a tree-bound cat, while Batman lurks in an alleyway, just waiting for the right moment to leap upon a delinquent and batter them into a pulp. This is the DC that the general public know and love, but elsewhere, further fighting's afoot. The Flash is playing ping-pong with himself, the Green Arrow is busy cursing the rise of Interflora, while the Green Lantern is imagining giant boxing gloves, horse shoes and jack-in-the-boxes with the help of his magical ring. Little does Hal Jordan know that he's about to be thrust centre stage.

Finding fresh faces from DC's canon to bring to the big screen now involves trickier decisions than whether the suits should have nipples (they never, ever should). We've had Batman and Superman - each with varying degrees of success - while a Wonder Woman movie still seems to be slightly too risky (and too easily risqué) for the studios to allow themselves to explore. In a world where Batgirl is re-booted to lose her spinal injury, a high-octane movie about a woman glad to kick ass whilst being happily single is probably not going to appeal to the amorphous, grey blob so beloved focus groups.

Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan in The Green LanternWith the big three out of the way for one reason or another, slightly less-well-known characters are being given their chance to shine on the big screen. While a Flash film would consist of naught but extensive bullet time sequences and a Captain Nazi film would be really, really ill-advised, The Green Lantern has the ideal combination of being vaguely-recognisible and having a great capacity for CGI trickery.

Directed by Martin Campbell, The Green Lantern stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, a cocksure test pilot who is chosen to become a member of the intergalactic peace-keeping force that is the Green Lantern Corps. His powers stem from a special ring, which gets its power from a lantern, which gets its power from the planet Oa and so on and so forth.

The trouble with The Green Lantern, as with the previous sentence, is that it tries to fit too much information into too small a space. With heavy-hitters like Batman, the audience is already armed with the who/what/why of it all and just needs to be shown the how. In choosing a character like The Green Lantern, Campbell has given himself the challenge of compressing decades of backstory and lore into a hundred and fourteen minutes. The film rattles from exposition to exposition in (ironically) a flash; characters and motivations are introduced in a blur and forgotten in a heartbeat. It felt at times like a child was describing their favourite hero after drinking fifteen cans of coke and necking sherbert dips for an entire afternoon.

There are, however, plenty of whizzes and bangs to enjoy throughout the film. Some of the lantern's projections are really good fun and the big bad - a being made entirely of fear who looks like an octopus made of cigarette ash and mashed pork pies - is pleasantly revolting, but there seldom feels like there is any substance behind the effects. There are also moments where the CGI suit sported by Reynolds has the unfortunate effect of making him look like his head is rapidly outgrowing his body.