There’s a brand new video from JustSomeRandomGuy featuring Hal Jordan’s initial reactions to the movie reviews.
Previous ArticleCode Word: Geronimo graphic novel coming from IDW Publishing
Stephen Schleicher
Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment. You can follow him on Twitter @MajorSpoilers and tell him your darkest secrets...
10 Comments
Ha.
Just saw it last night. .
The ingredients were all very high quality (except some of the CGI and Blake Lively). The dish was well thought out but something was just missing in the execution. I had ragged a bit on Thor when it came out, but I think overall Thor hung together a little bit better than GL. I’d stick around for GL2 though.
I’ve seen the film twice and I don’t know what the hell people are complaining about. It has some slow moments, but it was faster than Thor. Critics are complaining that it’s too much origin; well this character has never been done theatrically, so it was necessary. Overall the film was a good time and just as accurate in its execution as Spider-Man, X-men, and Batman. I saw reviews that said the plot was too confusing and didn’t make any sense; these people have to be brain-dead citizens of the Idiocracy not to have been able to follow what was going on.
The only reason I can think for people to hate on this film, is that it didn’t follow the “Dark and Gritty” character model that the new Batman films popularized. We it works with Batman because of the character; it’s not going to work with other icons as well. I think this film was too comic book for people who like to have their heroes drug off the page and in to the real world. Super Heroes don’t live in our world, they live in theirs. Stop trying to make me believe how they’d live in our world and work harder to bring theirs to the screen.
I’ve said it in the past that the perfect comic book combo would be Tim Burtons design of Gotham with Christopher Nolan’s direction and story telling. In that combination you could tell the stories that honored the comic in every way. You’d also be able to bring in the entire continuity and not have to cherry pick only those characters that fit in our world.
I invite any of you to debate me on the topic of bringing comics to film, but you’d better bring your A game because I’ve seen just about every one of them out there. And, before you point fingers at Green Lantern over details, take a look at some other comic book movies and see how truly far they strayed from the path.
I have to agree with you on all accounts. This was a great comic book movie and those who cannot understand that should avoid this subgenre of film.
Agreed on all point, minus the CGI – Generally, I liked it except for the mask was distractingly odd…
One thing I may add though is I thought the movie was too edited. Scenes were too short (especially the training — victim of cost I’m sure, but I would have rather seen him part of a class than the focus of training). I actually though this suffered from the exact opposite of what happened to Superman Returns. That movie had not enough action, too much back story (who in the world doesn’t know most of the Superman story) and ran too long (needed more editing — the 2.5h movie should have been a tight 1.75hs. By the time we got some action sequences, my ass had been in the seat for two hours).
Green Lantern on the other hand leaned more on action (which I was ok with), could have spent more time on Oa training, interacting with corps members (which would cover adding to back story) and ran too short for my tastes (this is when you do a 2h + movie, when peeps don’t know the story).
But most importantly, loose Blake Lively.
People said how much The Rocketeer and the Shadow sucked.
I still watch them both.
The Phantom went WAY off the map…
Superman Returns didn’t suck until all those other people told me it did.
Maybe, what I’m looking for in a comic character on film is just pure entertainment.
I never even read the Watchmen, but people bitched because the movie was TOO much like the series.
I liked both FF movies… all three X-men movies… (And for the record, X3 opened against The De Vinci Code and made three times the opening weekend money. That doesn’t suck!)
What sucked was the way Juggernaut was “downsized” and Australian… and not Professor X’s half brother!
I have not seen the GL movie yet… but, I would expect a bit of “space opera”… hell between GL and Mar-Vell they practically invented the term! (Okay, give Adam Strange some due.)
I watched Movie Bob review on the Escapist after watching his two green lantern comics retrospective and now I am quite confuse.
I think some comic book movies get too criticized by “fanboys and girls” too much. It’s a completely different medium and there’s simply some “suspension of reality” and graphic representations in comics that simply can’t translate to a movie screen without CGI or some other technical “hocus-pocus”.
Other than the aforementioned slaughtering of the Juggernaut character in X-3 and needlessly offing Cyclops just so that it could focus on Wolverine I had no problem with X-3. I thought that the effects were great and that Kelsey Grammer was spot on perfect as Hank McCoy. I have only seen excerpts from “First Class” but the alteration of the X-Men mythos for the purposes of making that movie mesh into the first three and the Wolverine movie is something that will be very difficult for me to overlook.
Most “casual” comic book fans know very little about Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Hell, they even left him and The Flash out of the Superfriends and stuck Robin, two nerdy kids and a dog and then two nerdier aliens and a monkey in there instead. So its understandable that it would take time to relate concepts like Jordan being a test pilot, Abin Sur, Oa, etc. moreso than a rocket from Krypton and a kid with a bat fixation that are pretty much commonly known.
Hell, I even enjoyed “Electra”, which was almost universally crapped on by comic fans.
And it didn’t take anyone else complaining, criticizing or remarking on “Superman Returns” for me to think that it was one of the worst comic-based movies ever made. It was terrible on so many levels. The cheezy “JLA” TV pilot was better than that movie.
The problem, I believe, is that sometimes we comic fans “doth protest too much” and in the end we only hurt ourselves as producers shy away from making films based on comics and graphic novels.
No, “the problem” is that not everyone will hate every bad movie, and not everyone will like every good movie. The people that liked this movie were the low parts of the bell urve and maybe they aren’t satisfied with that.
I liked GL, felt it wasn’t as good as Thor but left the cinema thoroughly entertained. Don’t know why it’s attracting the hate.
I didn’t come out of the theater hating the movie but I didn’t necessarily like what I saw either. And after reading plenty of reviews I can’t help but come to the conclusion that DC screwed the pooch wit this one. This movie could have been waaaaay better than what they gave us. There were a lot of things I felt they did incorrectly and plenty of things that were missing including these examples.
Does it really make sense that Parrallax would be single-handedly beaten by a rookie Green Lantern? If Parallax is as powerful as they suggest (in the movie and comics) it would have been better to see other members of the corp join the fight and have Hal deliver the final blow.
More importantly thought is the fact that this movie did nothing in terms of developing Hal & Sinestro’s relationship. Isn’t the fact that Sinestro was Hal’s mentor in his early years oh I don’t know IMOPORTANT? It would would have been great to see more of that relationship in the movie and less of Hal and Carol. It would have made Sinestro’s change into a villain even more meaningful and have more of an impact on the story. But it’s too late for that now that he’s put the yellow ring on.
IMO outside of Kilowag, Tomar-Re and Sinestro they didn’t need the OA or the corps during the movie, they should have been saved for the ending which would lead into “Green Lantern Corps” the 2nd movie. I think audiences would have gotten a kick (a “holy crap” moment) of of a final scene where Hal goes to OA and see’s an entire planet full of intergalactic space cops.
I don’t mind that non comic readers enjoyed it, good for them. but for those who’ve read Green Lantern, especially current stuff like “Rebirth” which this film was supposed to be based on, you can’t seriously think this movie couldn’t have been better.