So I decided to watch Green Lantern because I keep forgetting to cancel my Amazon Prime subscription and I thought "it can't be that bad, right"
WELL
First up - Ryan Reynolds is awful. Looks throughout the entire film like a man who fully aware that he is talking to fish people added in post and wondering where those years at drama school went.
Second - the plot is all over the place. Hal has his training montage, during which he's told how hard it is to fly through space. Immediately afterwards, he loses in a fight... and flies all the way back to Earth. Almost entirely off-screen. (The fact that we're basically never shown where Oa is in relation to Earth doesn't help here.) Hal regains his Green Lantern powers then immediately threatens to run away again. There's a baddie basically because there has to be a baddie. At the beginning the villain wants to take over Oa, at the end he wants to take over Earth. Why? Because the plot says so.
Did I mention this had four credited writers? It shows.
Third, it looks terrible. They've clearly tried to ape the look of Iron Man, bright colours and tonnes of visual effects - but it goes way, way overboard here. EVERYTHING is colour-corrected in post, and they went too far, to the extent that I swear there's a damn teal-and-orange contrast in every shot, and nothing looks like it could ever exist outside of a cosplay convention. If you thought Avengers looked over-lit, this is so bright and it's actually blinding.
The scenes on Oa are the worst of all. It looks like it came out of an episode of Doctor Who.
And do you know what the worst part is?
It was directed by Martin Campbell.
Remember how Casino Royale made such a huge deal out of every painful moment and really made you feel it? Nothing in this movie does that. The camera has no reaction to any collisions that appear on screen and the physics of most of the Green Lantern objects look absurd. It's honestly like they looked at the live-action Inspector Gadget movie and went "this is what we want to aim for".
(If you're one of the people who want Martin Campbell back to helm another Bond reboot, this movie will cure you of that hope.)
The positives: They had a good thing going through the script about fear and will and humanity at one point and some of it even survives into the final cut. The voice cast of the Corps is pretty good. Taika Waititi now knows what a bad superhero film looks like to help him do the opposite with Thor: Ragnarok
In summary: 109 minutes of superhero film and its legacy is going to be a couple of lines in Deadpool and it barely deserves that.
WELL
First up - Ryan Reynolds is awful. Looks throughout the entire film like a man who fully aware that he is talking to fish people added in post and wondering where those years at drama school went.
Second - the plot is all over the place. Hal has his training montage, during which he's told how hard it is to fly through space. Immediately afterwards, he loses in a fight... and flies all the way back to Earth. Almost entirely off-screen. (The fact that we're basically never shown where Oa is in relation to Earth doesn't help here.) Hal regains his Green Lantern powers then immediately threatens to run away again. There's a baddie basically because there has to be a baddie. At the beginning the villain wants to take over Oa, at the end he wants to take over Earth. Why? Because the plot says so.
Did I mention this had four credited writers? It shows.
Third, it looks terrible. They've clearly tried to ape the look of Iron Man, bright colours and tonnes of visual effects - but it goes way, way overboard here. EVERYTHING is colour-corrected in post, and they went too far, to the extent that I swear there's a damn teal-and-orange contrast in every shot, and nothing looks like it could ever exist outside of a cosplay convention. If you thought Avengers looked over-lit, this is so bright and it's actually blinding.
The scenes on Oa are the worst of all. It looks like it came out of an episode of Doctor Who.
And do you know what the worst part is?
It was directed by Martin Campbell.
Remember how Casino Royale made such a huge deal out of every painful moment and really made you feel it? Nothing in this movie does that. The camera has no reaction to any collisions that appear on screen and the physics of most of the Green Lantern objects look absurd. It's honestly like they looked at the live-action Inspector Gadget movie and went "this is what we want to aim for".
(If you're one of the people who want Martin Campbell back to helm another Bond reboot, this movie will cure you of that hope.)
The positives: They had a good thing going through the script about fear and will and humanity at one point and some of it even survives into the final cut. The voice cast of the Corps is pretty good. Taika Waititi now knows what a bad superhero film looks like to help him do the opposite with Thor: Ragnarok
In summary: 109 minutes of superhero film and its legacy is going to be a couple of lines in Deadpool and it barely deserves that.
If you're wondering the Sum 41 is at the beginning and here's Amanda Waller before she regenerated into Viola Davis
