It's Not Easy, Being Green

I think I'm never going to understand something about super-hero movies. See, I was a DC guy as a kid nerd: I mostly read the comics printed by DC Publications, home of Superman, Batman, etc. I read a few Marvel titles, but I just didn't get into them as much.

And yet, in this era of big-budget super-hero flicks, in which I see the capes-and-tights crowd of my geeky youth make the big time, I am regularly disappointed by the way my preferred group of characters actually hit the silver screen. Sure, Marvel's thrown out Daredevil and Elektra, but DC heroes have given us Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,  Batman and Robin, Jonah Hex, Steel and Catwoman.

And nothing since the original pair of Superman movies has been as good as the first pair of Spider-Man movies, the original two X-Men movies or the two Iron Man movies we've seen so far. Tim Burton's Batman was three-quarters of a good movie inside a whole one; Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins was a promising start but just doesn't reach the Marvel pics' level. The Dark Knight, all hype aside, is above average but no better (All of this, of course, refers to live-action releases. In the direct-to-DVD animated arena, DC is kicking major tuckus).

And now comes Green Lantern, a murky CGI-laden mess that trades on some silly retconning done to the character in the 1994 Emerald Twilight and the 2004-5 Green Lantern: Rebirth, Ryan Reynolds' Downey-lite snarky charisma and Blake Lively's name recognition amongst the fans of the teen drama Gossip Girl.

It's not as bad as Catwoman.

But that's where the upside stops. Hal Jordan originally becomes the Green Lantern, a member of the galaxy-wide Green Lantern Corps, when the previous Green Lantern of Sector 2814 dies in a spaceship crash in the southwestern U.S. That Green Lantern, Abin Sur, directs his power ring to select an Earthman to pass itself along to; he must be without fear and completely honest. The ring finds Jordan, a test pilot, and brings him to Abin Sur with just enough time to explain the situation. Sur gives Jordan the ring and battery, explains their use and his new responsibilities, and bequeaths the human his distinctive green, black and white uniform. He notes that an impurity in the special metal which makes up the power ring means that none of the fantastic things Jordan will be able to do with it will work against anything colored yellow.

The movie immediately sets out to make this rather complex story even twistier, laying the "yellow impurity" at the door of a fear-being called Parallax whose return to consciousness after a long-ago defeat results in an attack on Abin Sur. Parallax was the name Jordan gave to himself when he abandoned his Green Lantern role following the destruction of his home city, killing his fellow Green Lanterns and their guides, the Guardians of the Universe, and absorbing all the Green Lantern energy. He wanted to recreate his home and revise the entire history of the world to correct all its wrongs; this was the setup for the 1994 DC miniseries crossover event Zero Hour.

In Green Lantern: Rebirth, the idea of an emotional spectrum that involves rings and power batteries of all kinds of different colors comes into play, and the movie draws on this silly idea to pit the green of the will, signified by the Lanterns, against the yellow of fear signified by Parallax.

But super-hero movies are often driven by silly stories. Green Lantern could still work if it wasn't saddled by Reynolds, who simply doesn't bring any weight at all to Jordan and isn't believable as a serious hero in the way that Downey and Michael Keaton were as Iron Man and the first Batman. And if it wasn't saddled by Lively, whose Carol Ferris is not as bad as Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane but ranks near the bottom of the "super-hero girlfriend" pool. And if it wasn't saddled by computer-generated imagery that visibly detracts from the story going on around it -- Ray Harryhausen would have done better with clay and wood (and, for that matter, frequently did).

The third super-hero movie of the summer of 2011 following Thor and X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern is easily the tail-end Charlie in terms of quality. It should hold that third-place spot until July 22, when Captain America: The First Avenger is released, when it will drop to fourth. It'll hold that until the release of Spy Kids 4 on August 19th. Right now, the best possible outcome is a box-office shellacking so profound it sparks a complete shake-up at DC Comics and rids the company of those who "greenlit" this movie and the upcoming universe-wide re-boot discussed here.