I saw Green Lantern today. I expected something terrible because reviewers totally panned it. And to add insult to injury, I listened to people on Twitter who also mentioned how bad the experience was going to be. And I almost listened. I am glad that I didn't.
As far as I was concerned the scene of the the Green Lantern Corp was beautiful to see in all of its alien diversity and was the high point of the movie for me. Such a litany of differences, it gave me hope that maybe humanity could one day come together and simply be. I keep hope alive for such as day.
Was it a brilliant movie? No. But it did entertain me and was worth the price of admission. It was not literature, but a visual feast. I knew what to expect. I knew the Hal Jordan origin of Green Lantern, so I was already aware of how Hal gets his powers and the basic premise of the character.
Did they change things for the movies? Oh yes.
Did they compress 40 years of character into a two hour window, merging dozens and dozens of stories into a single tale of increasing complexity? Yes they did.
Was it too hard to follow? No. Every critic acted as if there were entirely too many things going on, detracting from the story.
Was the story too complex? No. If you have walked and had a piece of chewing gum going at the same time, you could follow the story.
But I think I found the reasons many critics did not like it. I notice it as a trend in certain science fiction movies. In the recent movie Battlefield: Los Angeles and Skyline, both of which were marginal science fiction movies but their underlying premise cannot be dismissed. Humans got their collective asses kicked. Battlefield: LA tried very hard to make it look like there was a fair fight but for most of the movie humans were losing and even as it the movie concludes, the outcome is in doubt.
In Skyline, we are barely able to muster the ability to resist the alien menace at all. They used a technology to modify our minds and make us easy to harvest for their own purposes. Both movies made one thing clear. ET came from somewhere else and Kilowog mentions it completely as a passing thought, but it strikes a nerve every time I hear it.
"Humanity likes to imagine itself as the ultimate expression of intelligence in the Universe."
"Humanity likes to imagine itself as the ultimate expression of intelligence in the Universe."
As a result, when any science fiction movie presents humanity as the flawed, imperfect, socially maladjusted and sometimes sociopathic species it can appear to be, everyone gets pissed and offended because they say "I am not like that." But you are. If you doubt it, ask yourself if an alien appeared today and compared your intelligence to that of one of his retarded children, you would certainly be offended. But he may mean no disrespect. It may simply be a truth to him. He crossed the vast gulf of space to be able to sit and talk with us and he may find us only slightly more intelligent in comparison to the intellect we find in our cats and dogs. It is galling to think there may be someone or an entire species, let alone a community of different intelligences far greater than our own.
Humans are notoriously bigoted, short-sighted, and inclined to irrational thinking. If you doubt this, ask ten people or a thousand, how they feel about global warming, world peace, who the current president is and how they feel about him, which political party is the worst one, and whose religion is most likely to be right when the apocalypse arrives. You would find the range of answers staggering from highly informed to the completely insane and you barely have to move more that fifteen meters in any direction. This is a cultural blindness caused by our isolation in the universe. We have turned into narcissistic boobs, masturbating and self-congratulating each other using our social media technologies with alarming frequency as if to remind ourselves we still matter but such desperation for acknowledgement only accents our fear of our alone-ness or worse, our inadequacy.
Green Lantern's Hal Jordan, and his nemesis of Hector Hammond are both mirrors of each other and all of us. Hal, handsome, a talented pilot, but professionally unable to achieve anything like adulthood for more than an hour at a time, spends his life avoiding anything like responsibility. Hector Hammond is a balding middle-aged, out of shape scientist, of modest ambition with an overbearing senator for a father, who constantly pushes him to have some ambition. Hal, growing up without a father, overcompensates for his father's death in a plane accident by indulging in flying to the reckless and dangerous limits. Hammond avoids everything to do with his father and teaches biology in a local community college or university. Both are underachieving, for different reasons. They both have one other thing in common, an interest in Carol Ferris, the future owner of Ferris Aircraft where Hal works and Hector's father is working with the government for a contract for Ferris Aircraft.
The movie has lots of threads, but they despite some choppy editing are able to be resolved satisfactorily. The visuals seemed a little behind the times but nothing I could not deal with. I saw it in 2D, so I suspect it may look better in 3D, but I will never know since I refuse to pay $16 for a single movie ticket.
No, this movie is not Thor. Nor is it X-Men First Class. Thor speaks to the divine spark in all men, the desire to eclipse our fathers and become as great as we can be. X-men speaks to the outsider we all have known at one point in our lives or another. Iron Man caters to our obsessions with technology and its overall cool factor. Green Lantern speaks to a completely different state of mind. Hal is an every-man, a person who has never had to put someone else before himself and has almost never done that, except perhaps with his nephew, who shares his love of planes and flight. Hal is selfish, and self-absorbed and suddenly finds himself with one of the most powerful weapons in the universe. And he is not equal to the task, and he knows it.
All of us relate to that, and that is why this movie strikes home. We hate that feeling. We hate the feeling of fear, of weakness, of coming up short. Hal, even with the ring, felt this way, particularly when he arrives at Oa and finds an entire army of beings who resent his very presence. Discrimination sits poorly for those who are used to sitting at the top of the heap. Hal Jordan receives ultimate power and the ultimate smack-down, all in the same breath. So no, this movie will not appeal to the idea of the super hero as the ultimate expression of all that humanity can be, because this movie is about humanity, not super-humanity. When all is said and done, this movie addresses that which makes us human and how we deal with that can only be improved by technology, never replaced.
Hector Hammond is a tragic figure in this film because he succumbs to the fear which has ruled his life and in doing so, commits patricide. But his tragedy is far worse than that. He is a failed archetype because he has come to believe in his own inner worthlessness, imposed on him by his father. He could have opted to use his power differently but could not get past his own hopelessness at his state. Even with incredible power, his fear consumed him, literally.
Green Lantern has its faults, it wants to merge so many things from the character's rich history that it loses its way. It is not a bad film and if you can handle the truth of our species failings, you may see Hal's slow transformation into something else, a person with whom you share many attributes with and can achieve the same levels of growth, if you could get out of your own way and believe in what you are capable of. Hal Jordan is all of us. Hector Hammond is too. You get to pick.
Humans are notoriously bigoted, short-sighted, and inclined to irrational thinking. If you doubt this, ask ten people or a thousand, how they feel about global warming, world peace, who the current president is and how they feel about him, which political party is the worst one, and whose religion is most likely to be right when the apocalypse arrives. You would find the range of answers staggering from highly informed to the completely insane and you barely have to move more that fifteen meters in any direction. This is a cultural blindness caused by our isolation in the universe. We have turned into narcissistic boobs, masturbating and self-congratulating each other using our social media technologies with alarming frequency as if to remind ourselves we still matter but such desperation for acknowledgement only accents our fear of our alone-ness or worse, our inadequacy.
Green Lantern's Hal Jordan, and his nemesis of Hector Hammond are both mirrors of each other and all of us. Hal, handsome, a talented pilot, but professionally unable to achieve anything like adulthood for more than an hour at a time, spends his life avoiding anything like responsibility. Hector Hammond is a balding middle-aged, out of shape scientist, of modest ambition with an overbearing senator for a father, who constantly pushes him to have some ambition. Hal, growing up without a father, overcompensates for his father's death in a plane accident by indulging in flying to the reckless and dangerous limits. Hammond avoids everything to do with his father and teaches biology in a local community college or university. Both are underachieving, for different reasons. They both have one other thing in common, an interest in Carol Ferris, the future owner of Ferris Aircraft where Hal works and Hector's father is working with the government for a contract for Ferris Aircraft.
The movie has lots of threads, but they despite some choppy editing are able to be resolved satisfactorily. The visuals seemed a little behind the times but nothing I could not deal with. I saw it in 2D, so I suspect it may look better in 3D, but I will never know since I refuse to pay $16 for a single movie ticket.
No, this movie is not Thor. Nor is it X-Men First Class. Thor speaks to the divine spark in all men, the desire to eclipse our fathers and become as great as we can be. X-men speaks to the outsider we all have known at one point in our lives or another. Iron Man caters to our obsessions with technology and its overall cool factor. Green Lantern speaks to a completely different state of mind. Hal is an every-man, a person who has never had to put someone else before himself and has almost never done that, except perhaps with his nephew, who shares his love of planes and flight. Hal is selfish, and self-absorbed and suddenly finds himself with one of the most powerful weapons in the universe. And he is not equal to the task, and he knows it.
All of us relate to that, and that is why this movie strikes home. We hate that feeling. We hate the feeling of fear, of weakness, of coming up short. Hal, even with the ring, felt this way, particularly when he arrives at Oa and finds an entire army of beings who resent his very presence. Discrimination sits poorly for those who are used to sitting at the top of the heap. Hal Jordan receives ultimate power and the ultimate smack-down, all in the same breath. So no, this movie will not appeal to the idea of the super hero as the ultimate expression of all that humanity can be, because this movie is about humanity, not super-humanity. When all is said and done, this movie addresses that which makes us human and how we deal with that can only be improved by technology, never replaced.
Hector Hammond is a tragic figure in this film because he succumbs to the fear which has ruled his life and in doing so, commits patricide. But his tragedy is far worse than that. He is a failed archetype because he has come to believe in his own inner worthlessness, imposed on him by his father. He could have opted to use his power differently but could not get past his own hopelessness at his state. Even with incredible power, his fear consumed him, literally.
Green Lantern has its faults, it wants to merge so many things from the character's rich history that it loses its way. It is not a bad film and if you can handle the truth of our species failings, you may see Hal's slow transformation into something else, a person with whom you share many attributes with and can achieve the same levels of growth, if you could get out of your own way and believe in what you are capable of. Hal Jordan is all of us. Hector Hammond is too. You get to pick.
© Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
Thaddeus
@ebonstorm
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