The Green Lantern


With my flight delayed 6 hours in Hong Kong and my colleague's phone dead and thus not contactable, I decided to spend a couple of hours in the cinema - the choices were several, but I chose well enough with this lite faire, the latest in the comic book superhero films that finally delivers a reasonable reason to wear those 3D glasses.

The Plot: Test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a young man scarred by the death of his father in an x-plane crash before his eyes. He's young and extremely talented, but emotionally crippled by his fears. Bestowed in a flash of green light by a dying alien with a mysterious green ring and lantern, he is set to battle evil (played, in part by Peter Sarsgaard) using the force - literally - of his will, as translated by the ring.

In Summary: Worth seeing to pass just under two hours, and not at all a waste of time - particularly at HK movie prices equivalent to A$10. The muted love story with Blake Lively's character is very poorly done - so much so that I think the editor accidentally left a few minutes on the cutting room floor.

The Casablanca connection: Hal Jordan and Rick Blaine share different paths to the one goal, the triumph of their wills (with not alusion to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi epic) - both were governed by and hiding from their fears of attachment due to tremendous loss in their lives (Hal's father and, of course, for Rick it was Ilsa). Hal seemingly easily jetisoned his fear as he is confronted with the epic disaster about to befall his planet and assumed the physical manifestation of the power of his will through the ring; yet Rick never lets go of his regrets, but overcomes them through a cold, dark determination as he too confronts the great evil of Nazism and the need as part of that struggle to let go of his lost love into the arms of another.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Sidenote: I heard a movie review of this on At The Movies with Margaret Pomerantz and David Stratton. One of them made the point that the Marvel and DC comic superheros are different, with the latter being light version (or words to that effect, at least in terms of the emotion struggles and thus deepness of the movie renditions). I haven't been a comic book fan, so can't comment there, but tend to agree that the films of the Marvel characters have generally had a deeper emotional footing.

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