![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finally got around to watching Green Lantern: First Flight. It was...disappointing.
For what it was it was decent. But I still think Geoff Johns's rehabilitation of the Green Lantern franchise has been one of the more profound mainstream comic successes of recent years, and his contributions to the Corps have improved and enriched its mythos. The film could've capitalized on those contributions -- if they could include the Sinestro Corps outfit and symbol, they certainly had the opportunity -- to make the ground rules of the Corps more fleshed out and balanced. Say what you will about the great Parallax retcon -- turning Hal Jordan's insane slaughter of almost the entire Corps into an infection spurred by the sentient manifestation of fear, the rings' inherent weakness -- it makes the rings' vulnerability much more feasible. Otherwise it's just arbitrary, and it sticks out of plot convenience.
In fact, very little of the ring's capability or even utility was ever discussed, and that seems like a bizarre omission -- you've been handed the most powerful weapon in the galaxy. What does it do? What can't it do? How do you use it? Hell, the yellow vulnerability is mentioned relatively late in the game and only when it becomes the crux of the plot. But by the same token, why Hal Jordan? There's your chance to hook into his resistance to the Parallax infection and make him distinctive, but...eh. (And maybe delineating those ground rules would've prevented the "uhm, okay" third act twists that just got a little dramatically tedious.)
But I wonder if that's not intentional -- is there a concerted effort in this presentation to steer clear of contributions too closely associated with a specific writer? None of Alan Moore's most notable inclusions to the mythos appear (despite Mogo's fantastic appearance in BotB), and admittedly Johns's most profound contributions are harder to integrate into an origin story. I just don't get how you take the Sinestro/GLC dynamic and completely omit the fear/willpower dynamic -- maybe the film spends so much time making Sinestro's chafing against the Guardians empathetic that it becomes control/sloth instead of fear/will. But at the same time, that's the most interesting part of GL:FF -- it's not a matter of the white hat turning bad at the last moment (and being named Sinestro, for fuck's sake, like being baffled when your longtime family friend Obadiah Stane paralyzes you with his cellphone and rips your chest out), it's that by the time the enormity of Sinestro's corruption is brought to bear, it's not a revelation, it's an inevitability. Victor Garber's Sinestro I think has more voice work than Christopher Meloni's Jordan, certainly makes the best use of it to the point that Jordan the Wonder Human becomes much less interesting as a result.
It wasn't bad, and it had more of the characters I liked -- Ch'p! Tomar-Re! -- than I expected. I didn't expect the chromatic nightmare that the myriad corps have become lately ("Eight, no I'm serious, eight different corps"), and the plinking of the rings from the skies was impressively dark, but part of me was really longing for the buzzing of the rings looking for new hosts, though I probably would've whined about the lack of Mogo. Though one appearance of Dex-Starr could've redeemed the whole thing (I beg for a sequel, preferably under the working title FUCK YEAH RAGECAT).
For what it was it was decent. But I still think Geoff Johns's rehabilitation of the Green Lantern franchise has been one of the more profound mainstream comic successes of recent years, and his contributions to the Corps have improved and enriched its mythos. The film could've capitalized on those contributions -- if they could include the Sinestro Corps outfit and symbol, they certainly had the opportunity -- to make the ground rules of the Corps more fleshed out and balanced. Say what you will about the great Parallax retcon -- turning Hal Jordan's insane slaughter of almost the entire Corps into an infection spurred by the sentient manifestation of fear, the rings' inherent weakness -- it makes the rings' vulnerability much more feasible. Otherwise it's just arbitrary, and it sticks out of plot convenience.
In fact, very little of the ring's capability or even utility was ever discussed, and that seems like a bizarre omission -- you've been handed the most powerful weapon in the galaxy. What does it do? What can't it do? How do you use it? Hell, the yellow vulnerability is mentioned relatively late in the game and only when it becomes the crux of the plot. But by the same token, why Hal Jordan? There's your chance to hook into his resistance to the Parallax infection and make him distinctive, but...eh. (And maybe delineating those ground rules would've prevented the "uhm, okay" third act twists that just got a little dramatically tedious.)
But I wonder if that's not intentional -- is there a concerted effort in this presentation to steer clear of contributions too closely associated with a specific writer? None of Alan Moore's most notable inclusions to the mythos appear (despite Mogo's fantastic appearance in BotB), and admittedly Johns's most profound contributions are harder to integrate into an origin story. I just don't get how you take the Sinestro/GLC dynamic and completely omit the fear/willpower dynamic -- maybe the film spends so much time making Sinestro's chafing against the Guardians empathetic that it becomes control/sloth instead of fear/will. But at the same time, that's the most interesting part of GL:FF -- it's not a matter of the white hat turning bad at the last moment (and being named Sinestro, for fuck's sake, like being baffled when your longtime family friend Obadiah Stane paralyzes you with his cellphone and rips your chest out), it's that by the time the enormity of Sinestro's corruption is brought to bear, it's not a revelation, it's an inevitability. Victor Garber's Sinestro I think has more voice work than Christopher Meloni's Jordan, certainly makes the best use of it to the point that Jordan the Wonder Human becomes much less interesting as a result.
It wasn't bad, and it had more of the characters I liked -- Ch'p! Tomar-Re! -- than I expected. I didn't expect the chromatic nightmare that the myriad corps have become lately ("Eight, no I'm serious, eight different corps"), and the plinking of the rings from the skies was impressively dark, but part of me was really longing for the buzzing of the rings looking for new hosts, though I probably would've whined about the lack of Mogo. Though one appearance of Dex-Starr could've redeemed the whole thing (I beg for a sequel, preferably under the working title FUCK YEAH RAGECAT).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Cris has been pretty enthused about the new GLC series, but it does smack of something else, and frankly, I think Ralph and Sue Dibny have suffered enough already.
From:
no subject
Though, to be honest, there've been a dozen or so things about Johns's run that infuriated me, and now that I'm properly pissed off at everything, let me show you them:
-- Could the colors' emotional underpinnings be more cliché? Red is rage, check. Yellow fear, gotcha. Green is env...oh, wait, that's already taken. Fine, then, orange is envy. Let's go ahead and dial it up to "avarice" while we're here....
-- "Agent Orange"? Seriously? Jesus, that's stupid.
-- There is nothing magical, profound, evocative or even moderately interesting about the AABBCCDD rhyme scheme anymore, Geoff. If I'm making my own Corduroy Lantern Corps and I would like it to not be a watered-down ditto-mark version of the GLC, I dare say I would (a) eschew having an oath at all (b) probably just make an oath a random garble of obscenities (c) just scream (d) at the very least I would not use the same goddamned rhyme scheme every time. I'm going to go out on a huge limb here and say that, yes, the idea of the blood-spewing, hate-saturated Red Lanterns having an oath at all beyond WHARRGARBL is insipid. The GLC oath is tolerated because it's tradition and it's corny but we forgive the things that endure. I suffer enough abysmal poetry in the real world, I don't need to see Ragecat and Ranx the Sentient City suffering from antiquated rhymes unless they're writing for the Jonas Brothers (which would explain a great deal).
There would be more, but apparently nobody on a campus of 30K knows how to change toner.