My seven-year-old grandson is in town and I therefore have an excuse to see lots of movies. If you’re familiar with the comic book, the Green Lantern is a fabulous story. Basically, the ring chooses this guy because this guy has incredible courage in the face of danger. He uses the ring to fight evil. Nice basic premise. Hollywood seems to have a problem turning a simple basic premise into a movie. They feel they need to go into long, elaborate explanations. The movie spends way too much time telling us how our hero got the ring and then there’s the bizarre sequence as our hero is sent to the home base, an alien planet, where he meets his fellow Green Lanterns. The sequence really reminded me of the movie Star Trek (the first one which came out in the late 1970s), where it seems like half the movie focused on special effects.
The rest of the movie is pretty formulaic. The bad guy isn’t really all that bad. The good guy wins the beautiful and talented girlfriend. The movie also sets us up for a sequel. The Green Lantern is better than Thor but not as good as Kung Fu Panda 2 (which is by far the best movie that I have seen this summer).
So far, I’m kind of disappointed in the summer movies.
