Haunting the Web Since 1999
Well, at least for now, Cap can breathe a little easier, because Green Lantern, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, is a bit of a dud. It’s not nearly as terrible as some of the reviews make it out to be, and I still think there’s potential here for a quality franchise. (Let’s remember, Sam Raimi’s first Spiderman had serious pacing problems and some majorly poor decisions therein as well — I’m looking at you, Willem DeFoe’s static faceplate.) But this Green Lantern is too often a rote, by-the-numbers origin story. It never establishes much of a rhythm, and too often feels like a film made by a committee. In short, a missed opportunity.
The first red flag happens in the opening moments, as Geoffrey Rush tells us in a leaden voiceover about the Green Lantern Corps — a legion of intergalactic cops, organized and headed by the Guardians of Oa, who are dispatched to guard all the sectors of the universe through judicious use of their willpower-driven rings. This sort of stage-setting exposition dump can be done well — most obviously by Cate Blanchett in Fellowship — but here it feels perfunctory and tacked-on, like somebody rushed it to the beginning of the film after a test screening or two.
The good news, tho’, is we’re in space, and here the movie actually shows some early hints of promise. We watch some alien space marines, shipwrecked on a rocky planet, accidentally awaken an trapped malevolence — the former Oan now known as Parallax. Parallax enjoys the Cheneyesque ability of growing stronger by feeding on fear, and he soon escapes this Rura Penthe to exact his revenge on the Green Lantern Corps, and especially the Lantern who put him under — Abin-Sur of Sector 2814. (This, by the way, is exactly the let-your-freak-flag-fly sort of cosmic craziness that should have animated the whole film. But it’s a tease. We ultimately spend far too much time earthbound.)
So Parallax is loose, and he soon manages to fatally wound his old nemesis Abin-Sur, who then has to find a replacement ringbearer as soon as possible. Enter Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot Air Force pilot who doesn’t play by the rules!™, but whose swagger and bravado conceals lingering doubts about his abilities™ resulting from the untimely death of his father™. (I know, I know: Green Lantern’s origin is Green Lantern’s origin, but the film doesn’t do its source material much credit by playing it so bland.) Does Hal have it in him to take the ring, face down his fears, and defeat the yellow-tinged forces of Parallax? I dunno…let’s watch him mope for forty-five minutes or so to find out!
In the reviews, Ryan Reynolds has been avoiding most of the blame for what’s wrong with Green Lantern, and I think that’s fair. He’s a likable actor with, as least as far as I can tell, not much range — but, since cocky-but-endearing is his wheelhouse, he ends up being a decent-enough fit for Hal Jordan. Blake Lively, on the other hand, has seen a lot of Haterade thrown her way for this flm. But, while she made more of an impression in The Town, she’s perfectly competent here — The problems with Green Lantern aren’t her fault either. Nor are they really Martin Campbell’s — the film feels well-made throughout.
No, the problem here is pretty clearly with the writing — which probably isn’t surprising given that Green Lantern has all of four credited screenwriters (Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldberg — I hope they saved money on the monogramming.) Most obviously, much more of this adventure should have happened in space. The film only really has a pulse when on Oa or somewhere off-planet, but instead we spend far too much time watching Hal Jordan sulk on Earth. So that was a bad decision. But, even beyond that, the film is just all over the place.
For example, we spend several minutes in the early going being introduced to the Young Nephew Who Idolizes Hal™ — and then he never shows up again. Or to take a problem in the opposite direction, for all the Basil Exposition voiceovering going on, I don’t remember the film ever explaining that the Lanterns’ rings don’t actually work against the color yellow, which is a pretty big plot point to save for a sequel. For that matter, you don’t get the sense that Hal ever uses the ring for anything more than making planes and guns in this flick. Either his or his writers’ imagination seems severely limited.
To take just one instance of the lazy writing here, consider the hamhanded way that the demise of the Big Bad is telegraphed in the middle of the film, when Hal is [spoiler]randomly instructed by a fellow Corps member about the power of gravity. Since we’ve already established that Hal is a hotshot pilot unconcerned with his own safety, why not just have him, in a fit of ring-induced euphoria, fly too close to the sun during training and have to be bailed out by Kilowogg et al? Bam, you have instant foreshadowing and character development, and an Icarus metaphor to boot. This is basically a no-brainer.
So, why do I still hold hope for a Green Lantern sequel, even amid all the general blandness here? Well, for one, the origin story is out of the way, and that’s usually what kills these sorts of movies. For another, Green Lantern is much more fun when it’s in space, so perhaps a sequel could fly in that heady direction instead. And then there’s Mark Strong’s turn as Sinestro, the (wink, wink) ostensible head of the Corps. Peter Sarsgaard is pretty solid here as weaselly dweeb Dr. Hector Hammond (tho’, here’s a game for ya: drink every time he screams like he’s in a Lynch and/or Cronenberg film), but Strong is far and away the best thing about the picture. A space-faring adventure that uses him more could be very fun indeed.
In the trailer bin of late:
As breaking over the weekend, the Coens’ next project may well be a look at the sixties folk scene in Greenwich Village, based on the life of Dave Von Ronk — above, with Dylan and Suze Rotolo — and his memoirs, The Mayor of McDougal Street. He shouldn’t overpower the story, but I do hope Jack Rollins get his due.
Abrams — who, FWIW, I run hot and cold on; I disliked Mission: Impossible III and loathed Cloverfield (which he produced), but thought Star Trek was good summer fun — has slavishly mimicked the Beard’s early aesthetic here: the overlapping, naturalistic conversations; the group of young kids on a grand adventure; the missing and/or untrusting parents; the visitor from another world; the ubiquitous Close Encounters-style lens flares; the long, anticipatory build-up of Jaws and Jurassic Park; the suburban milieu and untrustworthy government officials of ET. And it’s all glued together and coated thick with hefty dollops of industrial strength, 80’s grade, early-Spielberg schmaltz.
But, to what effect, really? The wallowing in Spielberg nostalgia is a neat gimmick for awhile, but the longer it drags on, the more it ends up feeling like a film school exercise. And, while the kids at the heart of the story are likable enough — especially Joel Courtney as our young hero and Elle Fanning as his #1 crush — the throwback style just can’t sustain the movie on its own, especially as the story falls apart in the second and third acts. And so by the end Super 8 ends up being a lot like cotton candy: It seems like a good idea at the time, but once you pull away all the wry nods to (and direct lifts from) Spielberg’s oeuvre, there’s no there there, and you’re left with just the lingering, sickly aftertaste of saccharine.
To its credit, Super 8 begins quite promisingly, with one of the more economical introductions I can remember: We see an industrial worker rolling the counter on a workplace safety sign, which reflects the numbers of days since the last fatal accident, back to 1. Clearly, something terrible has happened, and just as clearly, the widower after the accident — police deputy Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights) — thinks a local yokel named Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) is at fault. Like Lamb’s son Joe (Courtney), we see Lamb summarily escort Dainard out of the wake, cuff him, and throw him in the back of his cruiser, for reasons left unexplained until later in the film.
Cut to six months later, the deputy’s still grieving in his own way — i.e., by being a gruff and distant workaholic — and young Joe’s trying to get on with his life by helping his friends finish their Super 8 zombie movie. So one night, Joe and his friends are filming their Romero homage down by the train station, in order to garner some “production values” (not a phrase one usually associates with George Romero), and they get more than they bargained for. Much more, in fact: An epic (too epic, really — it’s like watching Looney Tunes) train derailment that they soon discover was perpetrated by none other than Mayor Royce their biology teacher. Why would he do such a thing? Therein lies the riddle…
Soon enough, things get stranger: The Air Force shows up and takes over the town, ostensibly to clean up the debris from the train wreck — which seems to consist mostly of strange metal cubes. Power outages become frequent, cars lose their engines, and all the dogs around simultaneously decide to get the heck out of Dodge. Even more frightening, townsfolk start disappearing at night, usually under violent circumstances. And even as the kids try to get to the bottom of it all, they’re hamstrung by the persistent antipathy between Deputy Lamb and Mr. Dainard that we witnessed in the opening moments. Because, when there’s a monster from outer space on the loose, there’s nothing more compelling than watching parents put up arbitrary roadblocks for the characters, for purely petulant reasons.
That may be a bit unfair, but that, unfortunately, is what Super 8 devolves into. The first hour or so of build-up shows quite a bit of promise story-wise, but it ends up being derailed in the middle by Abrams stopping everything to lay on more Spielbergian schmaltz. At one point, one of the kids explains — in reference to their zombie flick — that it’s the characters you should care about in movie-making, not the circumstances. Maybe so, but, as I said of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris back in the day: “‘Look, I know it’s weird to see your dead wife again and all, but there’s an alien intelligence trying to communicate with you outside the ship.” Super 8 makes the same mistake — it keeps putting everything on hold so these characters, who are mostly two-dimensional Spielberg composites and not-particularly interesting on their own terms — can work out their family and/or trust issues.
The schmaltziness is really the movie-killer here: To wedge in growth moments for its boring characters, the film starts taking some odd turns that don’t make much sense in terms of the story. (Why does the deputy hook up with his nemesis to find the kids? Why not, say, the director’s parents?) And this problem is complicated by the fact that Super 8 can’t seem to decide which Spielberg movie it wants to rip off the most, so it ends up going with all of them. At various points the monster acts like Jaws (the first hour), the Jurassic Park T-Rex (for which a random bus attack is shoehorned in) and ET (the end.)
Once it becomes abundantly clear this last personality will take hold at some point — for me, it was right when the creature steals Elle Fanning — the movie loses all sense of dramatic urgency, and is revealed for what it mostly is: A well-made but uninspired tribute reel to the Spielbergiana of old. In effect, Super 8 is exactly like the movie shown during the final credits (one of the best scenes in the film), except with higher production values, much more manipulative savvy, and, sadly, much less in the way of real heart.
In the trailer bin of late: