Green Lantern arrived in June 2011 with a lantern, a ring, and a mandate to launch a franchise. It left with a 39 on Metacritic, a $237 million gross against a $200 million budget, and a reputation as one of the more expensive misfires of the superhero boom. The film is now a case study in what happens when a studio buys the iconography of a comic and forgets to buy a reason to care.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A Test Pilot and a Dying Alien
The premise is sturdy enough. Billions of years ago the Guardians of the Universe used the green essence of willpower to build an intergalactic police force, dividing the universe into 3,600 sectors with one Green Lantern assigned to each. Abin Sur of Sector 2814 defeats the malevolent Parallax and imprisons him in the Lost Sector on the planet Ryut.
Years later Parallax escapes, strengthened by an encounter with crash survivors who fell into the dugout where he was held. He mortally wounds Abin Sur, who crash-lands on Earth and commands his ring to find a worthy successor.
That successor is Hal Jordan, a cocky test pilot at Ferris Aircraft, played by Ryan Reynolds. The ring chooses him, hauls him to the crash site, and Abin Sur hands over the ring and tells him to place it in the lantern and speak the oath before dying of his wounds. Hal recites the oath. The ring then teleports him across space to Oa, homeworld of the Green Lanterns.
Sinestro Says He Lacks Will
On Oa, Hal meets Tomar-Re, Kilowog, and the Corps leader Sinestro, played by Mark Strong. During training, Sinestro decides Hal cannot harness the ring because he lacks will. Hal quits and goes back to Earth, keeping the ring.
That is the spine of the movie: a man handed infinite power who spends the middle act being told he is not good enough for it, then goes home. It is not a bad idea. It is badly paced. Reynolds called it “an origin story to a certain degree, but it’s not a labored origin story, where the movie begins in the third act.” He was half right. The movie does start when it starts. The problem is that it keeps starting.
The film first entered development in 1997. Progress stalled until Greg Berlanti was hired to write and direct in October 2007. Martin Campbell took over in February 2009 after Berlanti vacated the director’s chair. Most of the live-action cast was set between July 2009 and February 2010, and shooting ran from March to August 2010 in Louisiana. Post-production converted the film to 3D.
Hector Hammond and the Parallax Problem
Back on Earth, scientist Hector Hammond, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is summoned by his father, Senator Robert Hammond, to a secret government facility. He is there to perform an autopsy on Abin Sur’s body under the supervision of Amanda Waller, played by Angela Bassett. A piece of Parallax’s DNA inside the corpse enters Hammond, giving him psychic powers at the cost of his health and sanity.
Hammond develops a resentment toward his father. That thread is the film’s most interesting material, and Sarsgaard is the only performer who seems to have been told what movie he is in. The Parallax threat, by contrast, is a cloud that eats people. It has no face, no argument, and no scene partner for Reynolds.
The supporting cast is deep on paper. Blake Lively plays Carol Ferris, vice president of Ferris Aircraft and Hal’s long-time love interest. Tim Robbins plays Senator Hammond. Taika Waititi plays Tom Kalmaku. Jay O. Sanders plays Carl Ferris. Mike Doyle, Nick Jandl, and Dylan James play Hal’s brothers Jack, Jim, and Jason, and Gattlin Griffith plays young Hal.
What Lively Was Asked to Carry
Lively trained hard for the part. She rehearsed with stunt coordinator Gary Powell, whose credits include Casino Royale, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Quantum of Solace, worked with gymnastic acrobats from Cirque du Soleil, and used aerial stunt rigs built for The Matrix. Almost none of that effort survives into a film that gives her little to do but stand near aircraft.
The casting process around Reynolds was its own saga. Michael Fassbender, Henry Cavill, Chris Pine, Sam Worthington, Jon Hamm, Sebastian Stan, Nathan Fillion, Bradley Cooper, Justin Timberlake, and Jared Leto were all considered. Brian Austin Green, a Green Lantern fan, campaigned for the role but never auditioned. Cooper auditioned and lost the part in part because he kept slipping into Christian Bale’s Batman voice despite Campbell telling him to tone it down. Fillion would later voice Hal Jordan in animated DC projects and play Guy Gardner in the DC Universe.
Reynolds himself was a genuine fan of the character once he signed on. “I’ve known about ‘Green Lantern’ my whole life, but I’ve never really followed it before,” he said. “I fell in love with the character when I met with Martin Campbell.”
Where the Money Went
| Element | What the film had | What it delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan | Praised by critics even as the film was not |
| Antagonist | Parallax, a body-hopping entity | No face, no motive, no foil for Hal |
| Second antagonist | Hector Hammond, psychic and resentful | The film’s best and least-used thread |
| Setting | Oa, homeworld of the Corps | Visited, then abandoned for Earth |
| Format | 3D conversion in post-production | A conversion, not a native shoot |
| Budget and gross | $200 million budget | $237 million worldwide |
The table is the whole review. Green Lantern spent its money on a world it barely uses and a villain it never dramatizes, then asked a likable actor to hold the center alone. Reynolds is fine. He is loose and funny in a film that does not know how to use loose or funny. Strong’s Sinestro has the right cold authority, and the film strands him. Sarsgaard is doing something strange and alive, and the film keeps cutting away to a smoke monster.
A Movie That Cannot Decide What It Wants
Green Lantern was the first DC film since Catwoman in 2004 not to involve Legendary Pictures, and it carries that isolation badly. It has no franchise scaffolding to lean on, so every failure lands on the movie itself. The oath, the ring, the Corps, the 3,600 sectors — these are good toys. The film treats them as set dressing for a story about a guy who quits and then un-quits.
The negative reviews were not wrong, but they were not the whole story either. The Reynolds performance was singled out for praise, and it deserves it. The failure here is structural. A movie about willpower cannot be made by a production that never decides what it wants to be.
Green Lantern is not the worst superhero film of its era. It is the most instructive one. It shows exactly where a $200 million budget goes when nobody agrees on the ending.
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