Green Lantern: More Star Wars than Superhero

For a while, I kind of hoped that the fan community would help redeem Green Lantern. I thought it wasn't an unreasonable belief, since comic book fans have helped make the comic books themselves one of the most popular franchises in recent years, given the efforts of Geoff Johns as recently as Blackest Night, a cornerstone DC event.

Except comic book fans still flocked to Marvel films like X-Men: First Class and rejected Green Lantern as at best an irredeemable mess. I'm still surprised by this reaction.

I had dreamed about a Green Lantern film for more than a decade, envisioning how I myself would shape some of the defining stories ("Emerald Dawn," "Hard-Traveling Heroes," "Emerald Twilight") into a big screen epic, a trilogy that would take its place alongside Star Wars as a treasured experience. Fans in the 1990s had already begun to compare the two franchises, so it's not as if even now I'm proposing anything new.

The problem is that most fans today, as well as casual viewers, can only seem to think about Green Lantern as a superhero, when he's been demonstrated to be so much more, not the least by Geoff Johns, but throughout his publishing history. At best Spider-Man's "With great responsibility" line is the only true comparable superhero experience. Green Lantern is a space cop, not a superhero.

You might even think of him, of Hal Jordan, and the rest of the GL Corps, as an alternate band of Jedi knights.

Something George Lucas never got around to doing, even in his second trilogy, was exploring a Jedi who wasn't invested in some cosmic destiny. At worst, that's exactly what Hal Jordan represented, all the way back in Showcase #22, accepting the ring of the dying Abin Sur and being inducted into an intergalactic organization invested with patrolling the cosmos, one sector at a time, wielding an awesome ring capable of just about anything. On the surface, and especially on his home planet of Earth, Hal seemed to become just another superhero, except that his responsibilities often took him into space, facing threats that originated on other worlds, interacting not with other heroes but other members of the Corps.

Hal Jordan's secret origin as Green Lantern has nothing to do with some deep personal crisis or revelation, but rather his induction into something far greater than himself.

Just as Luke Skywalker stumbled into the heart of the fight between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, something that until that point had been beyond the realm of his wildest dreams, Hal learns that until he received Abin Sur's ring, humans were hardly considered noteworthy.

Luke, of course, learns that he has a far greater role to play than he imagined when he discovers that he's the son of Darth Vader, one of the most feared individuals in the galaxy, which goes well beyond training to become a Jedi. In Green Lantern, Hal struggles to overcome his personal problems, let alone figuring out what it means to be a member of the Corps, while events greater than him gradually reveal his connection to the threat of Parallax, a being representative of the fear Hal has spent his life trying to figure out.

The difference of the approaches Star Wars and Green Lantern take produce markedly different results, but they're far more similar than is at first apparent. Star Wars is an adventure experience, first and foremost, whether you talk about the first or second trilogies. The first, the original three films, is a lot more gritty, while the second represents a more slick production sense, that attempts to immerse the viewer in a sense of the scale of events. Think of it this way: Luke, Han and Leia are always running away from something, whereas Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padme are always running toward something. All the same, events play out in parallel ways, in a dawning awareness; a struggle to accept identity; and finally, fulfillment of destiny.

Green Lantern compresses these arcs into a single story, and so proceeds with breakneck speed to introduce characters and situations so that Hal's acceptance of not only his new role but of himself is intertwined with a foe (Hector Hammond) who represents a completely opposite trajectory, something Star Wars had to achieve over the course of six films (contrasting Luke with his father Anakin). Hal in essence becomes a Jedi who doesn't know the conflict between the two sides of the Force (but his theoretical pal Sinestro will), who is instead simply trying to find his way into the apparently natural order of things.

What results is a film that tries to be cosmic and human at the same time, doesn't really treat the superhero at the heart of it as a superhero, choosing to introduce the idea of the responsibility of the power ring as something that erases doubt and difference, obscures the line between good and evil, without stepping outside familiar territory, but rather embracing it.

The funny thing is, it's only confusing if you allow it to be, if you approach Green Lantern as a film about a superhero, rather than as an exploration of mankind approaching its potential, which just so happens to include aliens who would rather be our friends and companions than enemies. Even Star Wars used aliens that way, and that's what I thought would help viewers distinguish what the movie really was, versus inappropriate and misleading expectations that only obscured the worth of the actual product.

For me, Green Lantern was more expansive than I had thought it could be, and so was far more than a movie based on some of my favorite comics. Maybe it didn't hurt that I already liked the ideas, not so much that I was familiar with them but that I had already thought about them. It was easier for me to like the film because I was prepared, and since I already liked the kind of movie it ultimately proved to be. For that reason, I still hold out hope that others will eventually come to view it as the kind of success I found it to be.