It’s no big secret that I’m a big comic book fan. I brought 12 graphic novels with me to college. I have an enormous collection of the Teen Titans series back home on my bookshelves. And yet, it’s very easy for me to say, “I didn’t expect much of this movie—it was a comic book movie,” as though there are no alternatives. But there are. We have Spiderman. We have The Dark Knight. These movies are excellent films that shattered expectations about the genre. And then we have stagnant films like Green Lantern, movies that, sadly, fulfill the expectations the general public has about comic book movies: they’re fine for what they are, but they’ll never amount to anything important.

Green Lantern is a perfect description of the “average” superhero movie. We have our cocky, wise-cracking protagonist Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), our generic, attractive love interest Carol (Blake Lively), and a universe that needs saving. The hero must overcome personal struggles with the emotional help of Little Miss Eye Candy (who’s totally deep, too) in order to access the hidden power within himself and save the universe from random villain #47, this incarnation in the form of Parallax, a representation of fear incarnate with a particular fondness for sunflowers and taxi cabs (he likes yellow). As you can see, the story isn’t exactly winning any awards for innovation. Neither is any other aspect of the film, but hey, what can you do.

It’s hard to think of more description for the movie, because honestly, it’s already fading fast into my memory. It’s not that it’s an incredibly bad story—in fact, it could be a lot worse, when it comes down to it—it’s just so very… done before. There’s absolutely no doubt that Hal Jordan will vanquish the evil, and that it’ll be a bumpy ride getting there, but he’ll ultimately pull it off without so much as smudging his perfectly-applied screen makeup. This, incidentally, brings me to another point.

The big lauding point for this film was the sheer amount of CGI that the director was shoving into it—the actual Green Lantern suit, for instance, was pure CGI, as were the whole worlds of alien species that Reynolds encounters throughout the movie. It could have been a lot worse, to be honest, and the suit actually looks very cool and lifelike, but the whole diagetic world just looks… off, somehow. Like, everything is animated. At certain points, this gets so intense that Reynolds starts looking like a Ken doll, or like the projected images of Harry and Hermione conjured by Slytherin’s locket in last year’s Harry Potter 7 Part 1: the reason that scene was so good was because all the imperfections of the characters were stripped away, but it wasn’t attractive—in fact, it was more scary and disturbing. The problem is, the entirety of Green Lantern feels

almost uncannily like that—too much color-correction, not enough substance. The world does not feel real.

Some might argue that the world is not supposed to feel real, that especially at the Green Lantern headquarters on the planet Oa, there should be an otherworldly quality, and while I agree, I don’t concur that “otherworldly” and “perfect” should go together. The reason movies like Alien and District 9 are so compelling is that there is this element of dark, gritty realism to them (especially the latter) so that the audience is, at least subconsciously, momentarily confused as to whether the events are actually happening. Bringing the argument back to comic book movies, that is an element that The Dark Knight pulls off tremendously, that air that each of these characters lives in a universe that the viewer can insert themselves into without much difficulty, for that stroke of realism is present. The visuals are just far too bright and colorful for there to be any sort of realism to the film, and while that might be an intentional stylistic choice, attempting to recreate the atmosphere of reading a comic book, that’s what comic books are for. A comic book movie should take the source material and make it more adapted for the screen, because direct adaptations don’t work. Watchmen proved that to us all.

However, while the movie might be entirely run-of-the-mill, I was very pleasantly surprised by the Bluray special features. My personal favorite was the 15-minute short (or so) concerning the inception of the Green Lantern character and an explanation of the various twists and turns the story has taken over the years, really delving into the mythos. It’s a good stroke, because comic nerds are probably the core demographic for this film, and the additional material really caters to them. As a fan of the medium, I very much appreciated the backstory explanation. It was a lot of fun.

It’s average. It looks pretty. And it has one of the best memorable phrases (In Brightest Day…) in all of comic book lore. If you’re into that stuff, go for it. If not, you probably wouldn’t buy it anyways.