Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 12 July

Green Lantern (Campbell, 2011) is currently streaming on Netflix NZ

Twelve years ago today I pos­ted my review of the DC/Warner Bros com­ic book ‘epic’ Green Lantern and some­how I man­aged to find myself out of step with con­ven­tion­al crit­ic wis­dom who con­signed it to the ranks of all-time flops:

I was unaware of the Green Lantern com­ic book uni­verse before sit­ting down to enjoy the Martin Campbell’s 3D ver­sion at the Embassy the oth­er night – and I did enjoy it. Test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is giv­en a glow­ing green ring by a dying purple ali­en (Tem Morrison) and told that he’s now an inter­galactic peace­keep­er, part of an élite unit, best of the best, etc.

With the ring, and the green lan­tern that powers it, Jordan can man­u­fac­ture any­thing he ima­gines out of pure green energy giv­ing the digit­al anim­at­ors plenty of pos­sib­il­it­ies to work with dur­ing fight scenes. Whisked to the Lanterns’ base plan­et of Oa for train­ing he pikes when he thinks he’s not up to the job. Redemption comes when he is almost imme­di­ately asked to defend Earth from a plan­et sized smog mon­ster called Parallax.

Refreshingly unpre­ten­tious, Green Lantern also has a set of mod­estly decent val­ues to pro­mote: if I was about ten years old I’d think Green Lantern was pretty cool and want to see anoth­er one. Oh, what the heck! I’m not ten years old and I’d like to see anoth­er one.

I neg­lected to point out all the New Zealand con­nec­tions – and failed to see the rel­ev­ance of Taika Waititi com­pletely. Maybe I just assumed my Capital Times read­ers would know that Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) and Temuera Morrison were Kiwi.

Further Reading

That 12 July 2011 review at the old Funerals & Snakes also fea­tured Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, Stephen Sinclair’s Russian Snark, Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth and Robert Redford’s The Conspirator.