Movie Box Review

Another summer weekend; another superhero epic.  What used to be an extravagant event genre is now hard-pressed to muster more than a yawn.  What is there to say about GREEN LANTERN?  Well, it's better than January's sophomoric Green Hornet, so at least it's got color war going for it.  Apart from that, not much.

Green Lantern is more a consumer product than a work of creative impulse, so let's look at it from that angle.  For Warner Bros, it's a crucially important property, because their decade-long cash cow franchise Harry Potter is about to expire.  And although next year will bring the sure-thing blockbuster Dark Knight Returns, Christopher Nolan appears to be serious about it being his last Batman movie, and no franchise has ever been so dependent on its director (there's also the reboot of the Superman series, but with Zack Sucker Punch Snyder behind the camera, that's a big question mark).  So the studio desperately needs to generate some serious revenue out of its DC Comics affiliate, especially since the last 2 tries, Watchmen and Jonah Hex, were money pits.  (And competitor Marvel is kicking sand in their face.)

Possibly because of all this commercial pressure, Green Lantern is as impersonal as an adventure can be.  It offers a buffet of attitudes we've seen in other superhero pictures (a little smart-aleck wit from Iron Man, a bit of faux grandeur a la Thor, a touch of romantic fantasy as in Spiderman), without committing to any of them fully.  The result is very busy, but it doesn't arouse much interest, and when the inevitable mid-credits easter egg scene set up the sequel, no one in the audience seemed thrilled about it.

The picture doesn't get off to a bad start:  after the outer space prologue (portentous narration by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, introduction of the personification-of-evil enemy creature Parallax), we're introduced to Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a cocky test pilot who blows mechanized planes out of the sky when he's not bantering through his on-again off-again relationship with heiress Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Before long, though, since this is an origin story, we're sentenced to the land of endless exposition in the script credited to Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg.  Hal is given his magic green ring, weapon and insignia of a corps of intergalactic guardians, by an elder warrior (Temeura Morrison) who's in the process of dying from Parallax-inflicted wounds.  Then Hal has to be transported to the planet of the greenies for training by the digitized Rush and Michael Clarke Duncan, and the heavily made-up Mark Strong; Hal is told repeatedly that he's the first human ever to be honored with a ring (the lantern corps apparently isn't subject to civil rights laws).  He learns that the ring's powers are basically limitless, since a ring-bearer can bring into existence anything his will can create.  Meanwhile, a speck of Parallax has found its way into Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), an old colleague of Hal and Carol and a fairly mad professor to begin with, who's soon transformed into a nutcase with a seriously receding hairline.  Many speeches about tactics, will, fear and responsibility later, the blob that is Parallax shows up for the final confrontation, and we can all go home.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to realize all this, and even though the director is Martin Campbell, who did a sensational job with the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, there's scant excitement and more than a little dullness here.  Reynolds is a very lightweight hero--fine when he's flying planes and displaying his romantic-comedy chops, less so when being stouthearted.  Despite all the articles and interviews presenting Lively as a movie star in waiting, nothing she does in Green Lantern suggests a reach beyond Gossip Girl.  Sarsgaard mostly lets his prosthetic devices do his acting, and everyone else who shows up (Tim Robbins as Sarsgaard's senator father, Angela Bassett as a government agent) barely registers.  There are plenty of digital effects, but they have surprisingly little impact.  Partly it's because the things Hal visualizes and thus brings into being all emerge in glowing green (the color of will; if you're decorating, yellow is the color of fear), so none of it looks real, and the same goes for his digitally painted-on suit and mask.  Parallax is an animated lump with a generic "face" that's neither scary nor unique, and the expanses of the various planets we see look like the same CG backdrops that show up in other movies. 

After decades of superhero pictures, we're all a little jaded; the merely spectacular is now routine.  Kids may like this Green Lantern--there are lots of creatures, and objects get thrown about loudly--but for the rest of us, it's merely inoffensive and forgettable.  And we're not done:  a few weeks off for Pixar, Transformers 3, and the last Harry Potter, and then the next superhero to bat will be Captain America.  Be still my heart...

Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and yet there's not a moment in it as exciting--let alone as much fun--as last night's paintball episode of "Community."   Now "Community"s paintball episodes are completely awesome, so that's a fairly high standard... but still. 

Thor isn't the worst superhero picture to come our way (remember the Fantastic Four movies?  the Joel Schumacher Batmans?  Superman:  The Quest for Peace?), but it may be the most underwhelming.  Marvel presumably hired Kenneth Branagh to direct because of his association with Shakespearean drama (it certainly wasn't because of his action movie chops), and under his helm the picture presents itself with extreme seriousness--the hero's backstory is interweaved with Norse mythology, which here takes place in an Asgard located in outer space, and Thor himself, not a mere immigrant from his planet a la Superman, is essentially a god.  The Asgard scenes take place in massive, fake-looking sets that look like they were re-lit from Cecil B DeMille's Egyptian palaces in The Ten Commandments, with equally phony CG landscapes that seem modeled after the matte paintings in David Lynch's version of Dune.  In case that wasn't enough, no less than Anthony Hopkins was brought in to roar his way through the role of the one-eyed King Odin, father of Thor (if I was hearing correctly, he's called "Allfather," although it's not clear if that's his convenient last name or a salute to his parenting skills).  

As written by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne (from a story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich), the Asgard section of the tale gives Thor (Chris Hemsworth) an evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston)--we know Loki is evil because he's made up to look like Richard E. Grant (unlike Thor's robustly Aryan good looks) and he turns out to be adopted--who plots with the nearby ice people (kinged by Colm Feore behind a lot of digital effects) to take advantage of Thor's impulsive arrogance and depose Odin, banish Thor to Earth and take over the throne.  But not to worry, Thor still has 4 warrior buddies on Asgard--a fat one, a hot babe, an inexplicably Asian one, and one who looks oddly like the young Kenneth Branagh--to protect his interests.  Meanwhile, back in banishment (specifically New Mexico), Thor crashes to Earth right in the path of spunky, lovely young scientist Jane (Natalie Portman, this having been shot before she knew Black Swan was about to change her career), her kooky sidekick Darcy (the criminally underused Kat Dennings, from Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist) and mentor Erik (Stellan Skarsgard, Hollywood's go-to professor).  This will come as a shock, but spunky scientist Jane finds herself falling for the hunky god-in-exile, while he learns a handy lesson about appreciating humanity and accepting self-sacrifice, which is useful because--did I mention?--only when Thor shows he is worthy can he regain possession of his magic hammer Mjolnir, which apparently has been watching "Camelot" on Starz and is stuck immovable in a rock until such time as a worthy god can retrieve it.  And since this is a Marvel movie and everything has to lead to their megafranchise Avengers picture next year, Clark Gregg from Iron Man (and eventually Samuel L Jackson) are lurking around, although how Thor will connect with SHIELD is left unclear in this installment.

And you know what?  All of that, as dumb and dense as it is, would be fine if the movie were just enjoyable (try talking yourself through the storyline of Batman Begins one day).  Branagh does some things right--he gets humor from Hemsworth, Portman and Dennings in the fish-out-of-water New Mexico scenes, and Hiddleston is a fine villain once you realize he's going to act like the "trusted" family friend in 1940s movies who turns out to be a Nazi spy.  There's also one genuinely cool CG moment when a giant robot Loki's sent to Earth manages to reverse itself back-to-front without turning around.  But Branagh doesn't know how to edit the action sequences--he completely muffs the big moment when Thor regains his powers--and the script, which probably went through many more writers than those credited, dribbles off at the end, so the final confrontation between Thor and Loki has so little impact you expect the real climax to follow.  (The 3D, as increasingly expected, is virtually without impact.)  Even the coda scene (you have to sit through all 10 minutes of credits to get there, unlike Fast Five, which mercifully lets the audience go after the first couple of minutes) delivers less of a set-up for the next chapter than you'd hope.

Thor's florid tone is completely different from the more sophisticated, character-based wit of the Iron Man series (not to mention those of the two failed Hulk movies), which makes one wonder just how they're planning to bind them all together for The Avengers.  But that's next summer's problem.  The good thing about summer blockbusters is that they're like buses--if the first one that stops doesn't look like a comfortable ride, just wait and there'll be another.  The buses have just started to run for Summer 2011, so let's hope the vehicles to come have better engines.

(THOR - Paramount/Marvel - 117 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Kenneth Branagh - Script: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (story by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich) - Cast:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Clark Gregg, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, Jaimie Alexander - Wide Release)