Wednesday 18 July 2012

green lantern

Wow, this was terrible.

I'd heard it was bad, of course.  But then I've watched plenty of stuff that's supposed to be bad and enjoyed it.  And of course sometimes when things are properly bad you can watch them and enjoy them on that level.

There are obviously some things that you find so terrible you can't enjoy them on that level - I find bad singing / karaoke to be so horrible I can't stand it even though I know other people roll around laughing.  Well, this isn't that.  It's just bad.

Of course part of the problem here is I'm not really a fan of the green lantern comics.  Indeed, I'm not really that big a fan of DC in general.  I dunno, I've always found their stuff a bit dorky - I was always more of a Marvel kind of guy.

I mean even batman - he works, basically, but they managed to give him such a rubbish costume.  I mean, every film adaptation, the first thing they've done is re-do the costume, right?  And he usually ends up some form of black, right?  Because black's cool and grey and navy aren't.

The other part of the problem is that I find the green lantern thing particularly silly.  I mean, let's get to it - it's called the green lantern, yet they wear a ring.  And yes I know they recharge the ring from the lantern, it's just it's that kind of stupid "just because" that marks out bad comic books for me.  Well, it marks out bad story telling full stop, but it just crops up a lot in comic books.

So what's wrong with the film itself?

Well, to start with the hero is not particularly likeable.  He's a good-looking jock and behaves like a bit of a prat.  There's an attempt to make him likeable by giving him a relationship with his nephew, but this just comes across as being forced in to make him likeable.

The film also dumps you right into the mythos of the comics without any real explanation as to what's what.  Well, it has a crack at explaining it, but tbh it's all a bit naff and clichéd.  It's also confusing and a bit messy and relies on narrators and all powerful weirdy beards.  Weirdy beards who, by the way, who seem to be stand-offish and meddling all at the same time.

It was also way too long.

It looked quite pretty, though.

1 comment:

Shaun said...

Ryan Reynolds unfortunately was not a good fit for this movie, he is a brash actor who shouldn’t be in any movie that doesn’t have at least and R rating. You could see it in h is face that he was holding back through the whole movie. Maybe it was the over use of color in the movie, or like you said the fact they just dumped everyone into the middle of the mythos, and frankly I thought they hand fed the entire movie to us one spoonful at a time. I was just happy I waited until I saw it on the Cinemax page of Dish Online to watch it; if I had watched it in the theaters I think I would have demanded my money back. I don’t know what it is, but it seems that my coworkers at Dish are better movie critics then the critics themselves because they keep getting it right.