Review: ‘Green Lantern: First Flight’

DC has been pumping out a decent quality animated film based on one of their hit franchises every few months for a few years now. It’s been a great way for the comic book powerhouse to supplant their characters into the minds of children all over the world without having the multitude of live action film franchises that Marvel has been able to dish out. But the quality has been starting to dip as of late and DCs characters are starting to be the blame.

Green Lantern’s story starts with test pilot Hal Jordan being summoned to a crash site where a dying alien imparts on him the Green Lantern ring. This ring gives Hal the ability to do nearly anything as one of the guardians of the universe in the Green Lantern Corps. The Lantern Corps are like intergalactic police. Each member is given a different part of the universe as their jurisdiction and their entire job is to protect it.

It’s a pretty simple premise with a lot of cool visual elements to keep the story interesting. Not long after Hal is gifted the ring he’s pulled in by The Lantern Corps to see if he has what it takes to really use the ring. Humans apparently have a bad reputation and the Guardians, the race that created the rings, are unsure that Hal is the man for the job. Sinestro, another member of the Corps steps up and vouches for Hal, saying that he’ll take him under his wing and train him to see if he can handle the responsibility.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a guy with slicked back black hair, a dastardly moustache and a name like Sinestro is obviously going to be a bad guy. It’s only a matter of time before we get the reveal that Sinestro is working for the bad guys who have a secret weapon to destroy the Green Lanterns. The worst part of the whole thing is that the secret weapon is… “the color yellow”.

The Green Lantern mythos has a lot of cool ideas behind it, and some really incredible characters, but it plays out terribly. I like the Green Lantern comics, but after seeing this movie and hearing the dialogue spoken it all just comes across as really goofy. The thing that stops the green lanterns is the color yellow? Well why? Who made that rule? And why the color yellow? Couldn’t have been another actual element that happens to be yellow? It all suffers from Poke’Mon syndrome of the simplicities of “fire beats wood, wood beats electricity, electricity beats water, and water beats fire and rock.” Only without any logic behind it at all.

I guess if I try to look past that, what I find is a pretty cool space opera full of betrayals, aliens and intergalactic war on the brink. But then I don’t relate the characters at all either. We’re never really given any time with Hal Jordan before he’s instantly thrown into the situation at hand. He’s not a well known enough character to just simply have a known back story like Bruce Wayne or Superman, so when the opening of the movie is the actual transfer of the ring from the dead alien Aben Sur to Hal Jordan, we get zero back story on who this guy is.

One of the major saving graces on this film is the incredibly well done voice acting. Hal Jordan is played by Christopher Meloni of Law and Order:SVU fame, and he brings a youth to the part that is some what surprising considering the actor’s age. My favorite character though was a member of the Lanterns called Kilowog who was voiced by very gruff and appropriate Michael Madsen. Unlike some of the previous DC films, I bought all the characters and was only bothered by one… Ch’p a talking squirrel who is also a Green Lantern, and played by David L. Lander aka Squiggy… It’s annoying as it sounds.

The animation here is the star though. It’s a cross between what was done in the previous films and a bit of the anime style from Batman: Gotham Knight. It’s a good mix and many of the characters are well designed. There’s a clean look to the entire film that’s just shy of theatrical, but better than a TV show. It’s a middle ground of quality with some pretty decent and well shaded CGI models rounding out the mix. It’s by no means ground breaking, but better than what most of the Marvel films look like. There are some great moments, but knowing that live action Green Lantern movie is on the way just makes you wish they would carry over some of the ideas.