It’s already hard to swallow that 39-year-old Sarsgaard was in school with Reynolds (aged 34) and Lively (aged 23!) without it being dumped on us this late in the story, when Hector has otherwise been kept separate up to this point. Read more: The Justice League Movie You Never Saw However, they don’t actually interact with each other until a party scene at the midpoint of the film… where it turns out they’ve known each other since childhood. He’s introduced as Hal first swears the Green Lantern oath and the film goes on to inter-cut scenes in their respective arcs from there on out, including their respective superpowered origins. This is all the set-up that the theatrical cut of the film gives us for a daddy issues arc involving a father that we never meet properly, but they keep right on referring back to Martin Jordan.Īside from Hal’s jumbled family life (didn’t he have a nephew at one point in this movie?), there’s the villainous Hector Hammond, whose story literally runs parallel to Hal’s. Stalled and falling to Earth, he catches sight of a Polaroid of his father and has a PTSD flashback to his father’s traumatic death at the controls of an experimental aircraft. It breaks the “show, don’t tell” rule right at the very beginning, but then, worse still, reiterates all of this information to Hal, our natural audience viewpoint character, later on in the plot.Īn especially clumsy instance of this comes early on, when Hal is in the cockpit of his F-16 jet. See, the universe is divided into 3600 sectors, policed by chosen representatives who utilize the green power of will, drawn from everyone alive, to fight against the yellow impurity that represents fear, and so on and so forth.

But in contrast to Cate Blanchett’s introduction to Middle Earth from The Fellowship Of The Ring, Geoffrey Rush’s Tomar-Re gets this movie off to exactly the wrong start.

The opening of Green Lantern might just constitute a trend in movies about magic rings, for having Australian actors deliver exposition right at the top. I mean, er, let’s look at what went wrong. With all of that out of the way, so let’s get these pants off and fly some planes. This is the story of how the masterminds behind what would become DC’s extended universe on television, the director of GoldenEyeand Casino Royale, and the top minds at Warner Bros all clashed into one another in the process of trying to bring the Green Lanterns to the big screen. This isn’t going to be a comparison of the film to the comics – with a couple of key exceptions, this is about how the film does or doesn’t work on its own. It was edited to the point of inscrutability and it still boasts some of the worst CGI ever seen in a mainstream studio movie.

When it finally made it to the screen, they ended up converting the richly textured sci-fi cop story of the comics into a smug and ironic superhero origin movie. had been trying to get the Green Lantern movie going for a long time, having previously offered the property to the likes of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino in the 1990s. Despite skepticism from veteran Lantern Sinestro (Mark Strong) and his old flame Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), Hal must overcome his own fear in order to confront Hector Hammond, (Peter Sarsgaard) a telekinetic scientist who has been corrupted by Parallax, a fear-based abomination from the Green Lanterns’ past. In the film, test pilot Hal Jordan ( Ryan Reynolds) is chosen by a dying alien named Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) to become the new guardian of the solar system, complete with a power ring and lantern battery through which he can harness willpower to create constructs and fight evil.

Green lantern movie 2011