Green Lantern: A Reappraisal

Readers of this blog will already know that I loved this past summer's Green Lantern, now released on home video. The reappraisal in the title of this post isn't intended to suggest I've changed this opinion, but that I continually hope others might change theirs.

I've suggested previously that Green Lantern may have suffered because of its ambition, to introduce a whole franchise to mass audiences and be expansive about it, and that is a statement I will stand by. I think another problem is that it's such a hard property to reconcile with the other big screen superhero adventures audiences have enjoyed to date, a little more context is needed to understand it and what it was meant to accomplish.

The movie is similar in many ways to The Departed, the Martin Scorsese gangster flick about a dualogy centered on Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon working opposite ends of a case that hopes to bring down Jack Nicholson. DiCaprio is the good cop who is disguised as a bad thug; Damon is the bad thug disguised as a good cop. The parallel structure of the storytelling continues throughout the film; as Damon grows in confidence and unfluence, DiCaprio unravels to a breaking point. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) and Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) are set about a similar trajectory.

Hal is the privileged son who keeps screwing up his life because he lacks full confidence in himself. Hector is the privileged son whose life keeps getting screwed up because he has failed to earn any respect in his life. Both pivot their emotional lives around absent fathers and Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), a potential love interst neither truly deserves, because they themselves won't allow the possibility.

Hal of course becomes a hero, and Hector a villain. The difference truly comes when Hector embraces his new role, and Hal doesn't.

Green Lantern is a different hero from what audiences have traditionally been presented in that he is thrust into a tradition and alliance. It's his ability to understand this that sets Hal apart, and the failure of the audience to do the same that spoils the film's chances of being considered a success. Hal's real allies are Carol and Tom (Taika Waititi, who deserves a shoutout for his scene-stealing role), not his GL Corpsmen Sinestro (Mark Strong), Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush) or Kilowog (Michael Clarek Duncan), but that's just for now (but don't tell anyone!), and his relationships with them are as important as anything else in the story.

His relationship with fear is also why the villain is the "big gas cloud" Parallax, why the climax involves willpower more than anything, because that's what Green Lantern is all about, both the concept and the film (wisely).

If The Departed is about identity, then Green Lantern is about self-knowledge. It's a superhero film but it's also a comedy and a drama and a sci-fi epic. And it handles all these aspects so well it's confusing to anyone who thought superheroes were only one-dimensional (even after The Dark Knight), who counted on them to be flashy action flicks with colorfully-dressed individuals colliding in big explosions.

So, I beg for further consideration of one of the year's best films.