Oh dear...
That's really the first thing that came to mind regarding seeing the finished product. I'm a huge fan of the Green Lantern, yes I may have only discovered his stuff a few years ago. But I've since had Hal Jordan as one of my favourite fictional characters to read about.
When the film was announced I thought it was brilliant, I thought it would be DC's equivalent of Iron Man. One of their second tier titles getting a big billing and a (hopeful) trilogy! What went wrong? The trailers were pretty good, they showed the audience the main gist of the character and the plot. And they showed some good action scenes. Unfortunately, that was it. All the action hinted at in the trailer was about the same length in time in the film! And that was it!
Alright, here's the blow-by-blow:
Starting in Deep Space, we spend the first two-three minutes of the film learning about who and what the Green Lantern Corps is. Now, while I can understand the need to bring the non-comic readers up to speed, to me this felt rushed. At the same time, we learn about Parallax and witness three alien astronauts get killed by him. This again, while a compact intro to the character feels rushed. The best example I've seen of a character being quickly and economically introduced well was The Joker in The Dark Knight. But that was a different sort of character, Parallax is the embodiment of fear, so show him as fear! Make it feel like the opening of a horror film, not like Galactus' pet smoke octopus.
Hal Jordan's intro is much better in execution. It shows him as arrogant, immature and reckless, not only almost causing several car crashes and shutting down his place of work. He endangers himself in a test-flight against some robotic jets and breaks the prototypes! This is one of the better action-sequences in the film, simply because it wasn't shown to death in the trailers and it felt very realistic. Compared to later scenes involving flight, this is by far the best. When Hal is using the ring to fly, it doesn't feel right. We hardly see it and there's very little of the camera following him close up and it suffers for it.
Out of the characters present some don't get enough time to be properly developed. On Earth, Tom Kalmaku is introduced as Hal's best mate, then vanishes half-way through the film! On Oa, we meet Tomar-Re, Kilowog and Sinestro and the Guardians. Other lanterns are seen in the crowd scenes, but unless you're a fan, you wouldn't know one from the other, which is a shame. I would like to have spent more time on Oa, seeing Hal interact with the others Lanterns instead of just them three.
Overall, the film felt like it was trying to do too much in too little time. It tried fitting two villains and three or four different plots into it, instead of sensibly spreading them out over the inevitable sequels. The effects feel like they were specifically made for 3D, now while this is fine. I still personally think it's not all it's cracked up to be. The Ring's constructs were well-developed and about as accurate as you could ask for, the costume did grow on me. IMO, it made sense that it would look a bit odd, it is an alien costume after all. And Oa was very pretty. I do wish they'd kept Hector Hammond alive, if anything just to see him with a head as big as the one from the comics. Really, it were huge! It was an okay film in the end, it tried but it really tried to cram everything in and it failed in that regard. Hopefully a sequel will improve on the low points but we never know.
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