Review Rating: 7

Ace pilot and bad boy Hal Jordan is the first human selected to join the Green Lantern corp, an organization of all aliens dedicated to serving justice in the galaxy!

I had high hopes, I really did. And while they weren’t entirely dashed, they certainly weren’t fulfilled either. Ryan Reynolds does a perfectly serviceable job as Hal Jordan, but he lacks…something. I’ve seen some of the GL cartoons and of course heard nonstop about Jordan from die-hard GL fans, and it seems to me that the character Jordan they gave Reynolds to act is a far cry from the legend of Hal Jordan that lots of people are fans of. I still think the movie gods could have done a lot better with John Stewart as the first major Green Lantern character, played by Will Smith or perhaps Denzel Washington. I kept having visions of Reynolds from Blade Trinity, and that’s not the feel they wanted to come off for Hal Jordan I don’t think.

So Hal Jordan is an ace pilot who makes his own rules and gets hisself into trouble all the time with crazy stunts he barely pulls off, along with angsting about his father dying in a plane crash, where gee, he also took a stupid risk and died from it. Fear, and Will, are the big cornerstones of this movie. The power of Will fuels the green lanterns that give the Core it’s power, and the power of Fear (which is yellow for some reason) is the enemy against it. Okay, I’m with you, it is after all a comic book movie. Hal, after yet another stunt where he gets himself fired for it, discovers a dying purple alien on a beachfront somewhere, inherits the ring and gets shunted off to another planet to join the Core. Over on Oa, the alien home planet where the GL Core is, Hal gets to meet all sorts of interesting alien folk, including my favorite pig-boy Kilowog, and Sinestro, a GL commander who’s obviously ambitious from the start and really doesn’t care for humans and Hal in particular. Thus we commence training. Meanwhile back on earth, the dead alien is taken in for study and of course infects the guy studying him, leading to a nasty threat on earth to go with the huge nasty threat coming to eat Oa. The Guardians on Oa, urged on by Sinestro, make a huge yellow lantern thingie, the idea being to combat fear with Fear. Any human can tell you that is so not a hot idea, by none of the Lanterns asked any of us humans. The barely-human avatar of the big nasty coming to eat everything is certainly using as much yellow Fear as he possibly can to create havoc. And so it becomes a race against time for Hal to discover the true Will within him, and to be accepted by the rest of the Green Lantern Core so they can stop all the bad guys before it’s too late!

The costumes are really great, I do love those GL suits. The aliens are sincerely nifty looking, both alien and humanoid enough to still be believeable. And planet Oa itself, plus all the other CGI GL effects with the rings and everything, are all totally awesome. But that still didn’t make the movie huge and blockbuster-y. And yes there is an easter egg of sorts at the end, but…for those die-hard GL fans out there, it seems a cheap ploy to set up the next movie, and any new budding Green Lantern fans won’t quite understand the full impact of that little scene. Green Lantern gets a rating of 7 Lanterns, to hopefully light the way to a better sequel.