Super-Cember Day #12: Green Lantern (2011)

(Originally posted December 12th, 2017)

What is it about the colour green that seems to kill any comic-book movie? You may recall that prior to today, Hulk was the worst movie I'd seen so far this month. Nope. That distinction now goes to Green Lantern (2011), a movie so awful it almost killed Ryan Reynolds' career. Thank God for Deadpool. Starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Blake Lively as Carol Ferris, Peter Sarsgaard as Dr. Hector Hammond, Mark Strong as Thaal Sinestro, Angela Bassett as Dr. Amanda Waller and Clancy Brown as Parallax.

Green Lantern (2011)

Where to begin here? The first and most obvious problem here are the visuals. This movie looks disgusting. Don't get me wrong, it's shot well-ish, but the CGI is ugly as hell. Parallax, our main villain who's supposed to be the threatening one, looks unrendered. In fact, that entire movie looks like the unpolished cutscenes of a PS2 game. These look like placeholder effects; ones you put in place before the proper visual effects artists step in to do their f***ing job. One or two effects look decent, but the rest is inexcusable, even down to the costumes. I get why they animated the costume on: it's meant to look like part of his skin. Emphasis on the 'meant to'. Instead of looking like a seamless blend of human skin and Green Lantern costume, it just looks like they couldn't be bothered making a suit so decided to digitally impose one in afterwards. For a movie and a character like this, the CGI was something they couldn't afford to get wrong, and they got it so very, very wrong.

Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern

This movie is cliched as anything. This review could just be a bulletpoint list of all the cliche plot points and elements that made up this movie and it would probably be one of the longer reviews of the month. Even within 3 minutes, I noticed 3 distinct cliches that aren't even specifically superhero cliches:
- billiards shot to open a bar scene
- accidentally ironic dialogue ("Did you get replaced by an alien?")
- character saying no repeatedly, then cutting to them doing that thing
That was just one scene in the middle of the movie, and that's not even including all of the genre-specific tropes that litter this movie. Every single line about fear I felt I'd heard a million times before, and that's the whole point of the film; that's the message they're trying to get across. The whole story is about fear, and it's so done-to-death at this point that it just bored me.

Bill Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond and Angela Bassett as Amanda Waller

In fact, this entire movie is boring as hell. I've never been less invested in a movie in my life. Even the action scenes were clunky and poorly shot and just boring. Hal doesn't do anything heroic as the Green Lantern until over an hour into the movie, and that's over half the film gone. Then it takes roughly another 20 minutes for another scene like it, then another 15, then the movie's over. The pacing is so slow and dull that it made the movie seem roughly 8 hours longer than it actually was. All the expository lines stick out like a sore thumb, to the point where it made the entire film feel like a 'paint-by-numbers' of comic book movies, again going back to how cliche it is.

Parallax

Not even the acting interested me. Ryan Reynolds is clearly not having a good time here. In fact, the only time I actually found myself enjoying the movie is when Reynolds delivers a line where his character is questioning what's going on, because you could tell that Reynolds himself is genuinely bewildered and fed up by the whole thing. It doesn't help that he and Blake Lively have zero chemistry with each other, which is the weirdest thing, because they're married now. They met on set, started dating once production wrapped up and got married a year later. I'm so confused as to why they don't have any chemistry on camera here, and the only thing I can think of is that they know what we also know: their characters are completely incompatible, yet the script requires them to be in love. This romance was so forced, and was by far one of the most boring things about the movie, and that's saying something.

Blake Lively as Carol Ferris

Believe me, guys, I could continue to write paragraphs upon paragraphs on the things wrong with Green Lantern (2011), but I'd only be wasting my (and your) valuable time. Don't watch this movie. It's not even bad enough to make fun of with a group of friends. It's not 'so bad it's good'. It's just bad. I wasn't sure if Hulk was the worst movie I'd ever seen when i saw it last week, but I can confidently say that Green Lantern is. 1/10.

Tomorrow: Spidey returns again in Spider-Man 3.