My Green Lantern Review

GL is a case study of how a love story can drag a movie down.

Review Opinion
By 12almonds - Jun 25, 2011 04:06 PM EST
Filed Under: Fan Fic

First of all, I don't think GL was as bad as a lot of the professional reviewers thought it was. I won't go into all the plot details (you can read that in a thousand other reviews) but let me talk about one major thing that dragged this film down: The stale, cliche, and distracting love story.

For some reason (I suppose to lure in investors) almost every superhero movie comes equipped with a manufactured love story. The first Spiderman showed this plot cliche in all its glaring ridiculousness, with Mary Jane having some degree of love and/or sexual tension with Norman Osborn, Harry Osborn, Peter Parker, Spiderman, and, if I recall correctly, a random high school guy who treated her bad. Essentially, 5 love stories. Completely idiotic and distracting.

So anyway, GL continues in the tradition of unnecessary, boring love stories, with Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris.

The central plot to GL is already a little weak, but still mildly interesting. But the 4 or 5 love/romance scenes sidetrack you into boring-land. These scenes are so stale, mundane, and cliche that you're left yawning over your bag of popcorn.

There is one scene that is particularly absurd. GL brings Carol down from their little rooftop lovey-dovey scene, and they exchange some ridiculous dialog, and she walks off, ducks behind a wall and fights back tears. One problem though: There is no discernible reason for her tears. It's as if the writers said, "Well, we need a scene here where a beautiful woman is crying....y'know....to pull at the heart strings of the audience....even if it doesn't make any sense....cause....well...all films MUST have a crying, sympathetic damsel."

Hopefully, when the GL DVD comes out, there will have a version with the love scenes deleted.

Is this what we have to look forward to with the Avengers? Love stories for each and every hero? Will there be any room left for an interesting story plot?

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Dmon
Dmon - 6/25/2011, 9:26 PM
I really think it was the editing of this movie and the bad score bringing the tone down that made the movie not as good. It seemed there were scenes missing. About the romance these days you pretty much need to have one but maybe not focus on it as much. I think WB thought they would defiantly get a sequel out of this and by having the romance so dominate in the first movie they could draw in the women enough that they could focus on other things in the sequel.
Dmon
Dmon - 6/25/2011, 9:35 PM
In fact I think a lot of the problems with this movie was they tried to squeeze so much in general of Hal's life to just set it up so that in sequels they could concentrate on other things. In the comic you can jump around a lot and feature that stuff but in a movie under 2 hours you can not. I mean just read the first issue of Rebirth and see how many of his family and friends are in there or even the first part of Emerald Dawn I.
Dmon
Dmon - 6/25/2011, 9:40 PM
Also the love story for Hal and Carol is not manufactured in the comics. Hal even for years gave up the ring for Carol and that is when John Stewart took over.
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