It's Not Easy Seein' Green

At some point, I'm going to have to just accept that subscribing to HBO to watch Game of Thrones is enough for me to "get my money's worth." I keep surfing for movies to watch to theoretically defray the monthly cost or something, and I keep watching some true crap. The latest (and I truly hope, last) example of this: Green Lantern.

I'd heard the critics say the movie wasn't very good. I'd heard a lot of my comic book loving friends say that even they aren't fans of the story of Green Lantern. But I thought, I've seen Ryan Reynolds make some otherwise poor movies watchable (like the remake of The Amityville Horror). Can it really be that bad?

Yes. It can.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly what is wrong with the movie... in part because so much is wrong with the movie. But to pick out a few particularly egregious problems from the whole:

The movie suffers for having so little reality in it. There's barely a single frame of it untouched by the hand of some CG artist; huge stretches of the film exist only on a hard drive somewhere. The movie never really seems to have meaningful stakes, as neither the heroes nor the menace ever seems real.

For a hero and plot that revolves around the power of imagination, the story shows surprisingly little of it. The characters are stock, the dialogue cliche, and the arc of plot a predictable paint-by-numbers hero origin story. Plot holes abound, from gaps in logic to what comes off like missing scenes that would have stitched parts of the action together. ("Wait... how did the bad guy get away there?" and "When did he go capture the damsel-in-distress?")

About the kindest thing I can think of to say about the movie is that you can't really call it "boring." It's such a relentless, noisy assault on the eyes and ears that you can't ignore it -- even if everything you're seeing and hearing is half-baked at best. But I hope that comes off as sufficiently faint praise. I would think that even those with short attention spans and low action-movie standards could still find something more suited to their tastes than this mess.

No, wait -- there is one good element of the film, a solid score from James Newton Howard that is intense and powerful like the work he did with Hans Zimmer on Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. But it's only on the strength of that music that I feel I can rate this movie anything other than an F. Call it a very weak D- instead. Call it nothing worth anyone's time.