So I saw this fan trailer for “Green Lantern” on YouTube, which is basically an “Oh, Nathan Fillion, you’re so heroic!” love letter, and to each their own, but man, oh man, please do not make “Green Lantern” as the cult of Hal Jordan’s personality.
Comic movies as origin stories are played out and boring, and I really think any Green Lantern movie should take a cue from J.J. Abrams’ rebooting of the “Star Trek” franchise, toss all eleventy-billion decades of backstory out the window — fanboys, simply knowing all this minutiae is reward enough — and make a straight-up action flick. Call it “Lantern Corps” And make it thusly:
Hal Jordan (Dennis Quaid) and Guy Gardner (Bruce Campbell, playing the comic relief for sure) are tasked with training Earth’s two newest Lanterns, Kyle Rainer (Josh Hartnett) and Jon Stewart (Tristan Wilds). Kyle is, of course, an artiste and super-sensitive and oh, how he sees Hal Jordan as a respected father figure. Jon is straight out of the stint in the Marine Corps he planned on using to pay for architecture school. He is not so jazzed to be a Lantern, and unfortunately, Hal doesn’t know how to get through to him.
Even more unfortunately, Hal doesn’t get a chance to figure it out, because Sinestro (Clive Owen) kills him. All the new recruits know is that Sinestro was the guy who trained Hal. And if Hal couldn’t take his old teacher what chance do they — incompletely trained by the perpetually hung-over Guy — stand?
And so the movie unfolds. Extraterrestrial Lanterns come in to help out (including Kilowogg, as played by Duane Johnson), Kyle keeps his girlfriend from getting stuffed in a fridge, Jon eventually comes around because he’s secretly one hell of a guy, there’s a big battle with Sinestro, and at the very end — we have two new Earth Lanterns who have managed to hold off Sinestro Corps. Perhaps there’s an Easter egg at the very end of the movie where we see both Lanterns walking into a Justice League meeting.
(The sequel gets called “Green Lantern” and it tracks Kyle and John’s falling out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
My main point here: a movie is not a comic book. It’s not a validation of years of fandom and storytelling, it’s not a multimillion-dollar valentine to the fewer than one million people who read comics in the U.S., it’s not a chance for the self-reinforcing nature of fandom to impose its taste on a wider audience. It’s not repeating the same old story over and over again. A movie is a chance to pick up some of the best beloved aspects of a story from another medium, and to make them dance within the confines of a finite running time, gilded by the sheer gigantic scope of special effects.
So let go of the past. You have nothing to lose but your inherently contradictory continuity.
So in this hypothetical movie of yours, you would find a way to make Kyle something other than a douche the audience wants to kick in the spot where his man parts ain't?
Okay, I'm all for tossing out the scads of backstory, especially on Green Lantern, who's been going around the block since before there was a block. And, you know, death to fanboys and all that.
But isn't there a point where you lose what made the original special? It seems to me that any remake/reboot/adaptation needs to find what made the original so compelling and maintain that in order to make the remake worthwhile. So while I really liked Abrams' Star Trek I still feel, a little, that his team forgot the very essence of Trek. Which, admittedly, had been pretty much forgotten since Trek made the leap to the big screen. And that's that Star Trek was once about ideas. Big ideas. Sometimes dopey ideas, often mawkish. Recently I saw the climax of the original series episode "The Omega Glory" where Shatner goes batshit reading the Preamble to the Constitution. It's hokey and contrived and ole Bill doesn't help matters, but, damn, the episode is striving for something. It's got ideas and feelings it wants to get across.
None of that has survived into the new film, which is all flash-bang and in-jokes. Done really well, and it's a great movie, especially when compared to the other entries in the franchise. But, you know, I missed the heart.
So what's the heart of Green Lantern? I have no idea, not being a Green Lantern fanboy myself. Sacrifice in service of the greater good? Fear of the color yellow? No idea. But that's what an adaptation needs to do to be fully successful, if you ask me -- not just exist as a straight-up action flick.
I don't think any introductory franchise movie does itself any favors by unpacking the big ideas in the first go-round. Consider: Star Wars episode IV worked because you get the allusions to the Force and how it can be misused, and then V and VI provided really satisfying payoffs with gradual reveals. It wasn't until the idiocy in I-III with the stupid midichlorians and the cultural "and here's how we roll in the temple, and the council ..." tedium that the whole franchise lost its sails.
So in the first movie, it's just a cool story about being conscripted into the Lantern Corps and learning that there are freaky galactic-scale enemies and a pretty darn cool Corps out there. Also, there are some whacked cats on Oa who are, unbelievably, running things. It IS an action movie, albeit one with real character and the hint of bigger forces. And then you can explore the tension in the GL franchise -- sublimation to the Corps compared to individual interest -- in later movies. If it works for a plot.
Chris, Star Trek wasn't just about ideas, it was about action-adventure. And let me just say, using "The Omega Glory" as your example doesn't help your case. Lots of "Trek's" most idea-laden plots were among its worst!
Or was "The Trouble With Tribbles" really a plea to have your pets spayed or neutered?
Or was "A Piece of the Action" really an anti-gangster message?
I think, actually, that Trek's ideas were both bad and good. Some idea-laden plots were great. "City on the Edge of Forever", of course.
I mentioned "The Omega Glory" (which title I had to look up, so take my geek card away) specifically because it was bad. Even at its worst, Trek was about ideas. Allegory. Sometimes cheap, sometimes poor, but it always had something to say. "Black women can have positions of responsibility," or "Russians and Americans can be friends," also. It was dopey and campy, but that's what was good about it.
There was action also, but at best in service to the ideas. Not always. There was that one with Kirk and the lizard guy. Even that had some ideas in it, although the one I remember most clearly was "Watch out for Shatner's double axe-handle".
Then sometimes there were tribbles. Hard to imagine that was the late 1960s and not a more naive time, like 10,000 BC.
Incidentally, I wrote all that before watching the trailer. I have to say, I'm really impressed at the quality. I actually had to check and make sure there wasn't a real Green Lantern movie in the works. Aside from a couple of shots clearly cribbed from the new Trek movie, I didn't recognize a lot of the raw material, and, damn, the guy put it together well.
Reminds me of this joke that went around years ago. It was a written trailer for the "new" Die Hard movie and the author had John McClane going to Disney World. It was really funny. A friend of mine and I were going to make our own digital video version of the trailer using a laserdisc player and an SGI workstation, but we couldn't find a CAV copy of Die Hard and eventually the plan fell apart. Every so often I realize the technology is easily within my grasp now, but for me to learn it all....
Oh, look, the text is online. It's, um, not as funny as I remembered.