Green Lantern Movie Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NWGl_A3b60&feature=player_embedded

It appears that although there is some good casting in this film, the first film with the DC comics character that has been in their arsenal for about 70 years, the script appears to hurt the charachters.
The new movie has some promising sci-fi elements and a pair of normally appealing stars. But the picture is slathered with so much CGI goop that at several points it’s indistinguishable from a Saturday morning episode of "Superfriends." Gives the same feeling after seeing Ang Lee's version of "The Hulk."
Spoiler alert:
The movie begins in deep space with a riot of CGI-digital hubbub (pricelessly silly in big-deal 3D). We meet the Guardians of the Universe, a council of wizened Yodas ensconced on very high stools (which amusingly recalled to the author the much more amusing Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension).
The Guardians have divided the galactic vastness into thousands of separate sectors, all patrolled by an interstellar police force called the Green Lantern Corps, each member of which is armed with a super-powerful green ring and a glowing green lantern with which to recharge it when the super-power runs low. The film makers kept the storyline to the comic series (thank God!) We also make the acquaintance of a rather amorphous evil entity called Parallax—a destroyer of worlds and so forth. When Parallax attacks a Green Lantern patrol ship, the captain is forced to crash land on the nearest reachable planet, Earth. Wounded and dying, he recruits a local human, Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), to take up his ring and lantern and join the Corps.
Hal is a brave but headstrong test pilot in the employ of Ferris Aviation, where he’s maintained a years-long touch-and-go relationship with the boss’s daughter, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively)—a test pilot herself. Here's where they writers miss the mark: Since considerable time is devoted to this underpowered romance, it’s unfortunate that Reynolds and Lively—such engaging actors in other films—never really warm to each other here. But then they’re given little assistance by the dialogue. Carol laments that proud loner Hal has always been “scared I was getting too close.” Changing into his flight suit, Hal says to her, “Let’s get these pants off and fly some planes.” Ummmm...
The story ping-pongs back and forth between the Earth-bound love dawdling and the Guardians’ heavily computerized home planet, where Hal undergoes Green Lantern training under the gimlet eye of a harsh taskmaster named Sinestro (an unrecognizable Mark Strong-of Sherlock Holmes fame whom you might remember him as Lord Blackworth). As with every other off-planet actor in the movie, Strong’s bulb-headed alien makeup forcefully recalls the cornball days of early Star Trek cranial prosthetics. No matter how dire the doings in this film, inducements to giggling are usually close at hand.
Reynolds is too mild a presence to make Hal very compelling. A couple of personality doodles have been sketched in—Hal is haunted by the death of his test-pilot dad, and hobbled by a vague feeling of unworthiness—but when a guy looks like Ryan Reynolds, and has Blake Lively making love eyes at him, it’s hard to accept that his life could be all that tormented. This leaves the field clear for Peter Saarsgard to move in and make up the live-wire deficit. Saarsgard appears to be having a ton of fun as Hector Hammond, a brainiac science professor who becomes infected by the universal Force of Evil (which turns out to be yellow). Before long, the mutating Hector and the increasingly fearless Hal are engaged in super-being smackdowns of an elaborate but not especially thrilling sort—even when Parallax weighs in (as a sort of humongous smoke bomb) to make it a threesome. Despite the movie’s super-budget (officially $150 million, rumored to be twice that), it’s undone by digital cheesiness at every turn. There’s a possibly delusional promise of a sequel at the end—a notion dependent on whether this rather limp opening installment covers its outsized expenses. Big bets are not recommended.
The oddest aspect of Green Lantern—and I wonder if the filmmakers were even aware of it—is its frankly fascist sci-fi philosophy. The green rings and lanterns are charged with the Power of Will, the various counterpoised yellow thingies with the Power of Fear. At one point, Sinestro (who would trust a guy with a name like that?) says, “Fear is the enemy of Will. Fear is what stops you and makes you weak.” At which point I wondered what kind of movie Leni Riefenstahl might have made from this material. Possibly a more interesting one.
Courtesy of: "Green Lantern - Reason Magazine"