Rewatching it for the first time in at least six years, I still like the odd tonal mix of gee-whiz super heroics and Cronenbergian body horror.
Rysn renolds and green lantern 2 movie#
Whether or not their criticisms were justified, I liked the movie more than I expected to. The review embargo dropped just a day before release (I attended the Wednesday night All Media), and it was mostly torn to shreds by critics. Of course, the finished movie revealed the reasons for both marketing whiffs. Eagle-eyed viewers such as myself noticed that the marketing A) kept using the same brief money shots and B) contained not a single scene of the Green Lantern Corps.
More visually impressive trailers that launched in April and May failed to make the sell.
It never really recovered from that rushed (in order to be attached to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I) first-look teaser. Green Lantern is the origin of my occasional “no trailer > bad trailer” soapbox lecture. The Ryan Reynolds flick was first victimized by a lousy first trailer that contained rough editing and lots of unfinished effects. Fun what-if: Imagine what Hollywood (or Warner Bros.) would look like if Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns and Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern were huge hits that were eventually blended into the Chris Nolan Dark Knight continuity… Debuting two years before Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel unofficially kicked off what we now call the DC Films universe, it failed to justify itself as a stand-alone adventure or part of a broader universe. movie opened three years after Iron Man and The Dark Knight, the former of which launched the interconnected superhero movie era and the latter redefined how well-received and how financially successful a superhero movie could be. Warts and all, it deserves inclusion in the ongoing narrative especially as the DCEU becomes less interconnected. Putting aside how much money it lost and its infamous history, it actually holds up as a potentially useful piece of the so-called DC Films franchise. Moreover, the stuff that worked about the Martin Campbell movie in 2011 still holds up today.
But viewed seven years later, it remains a fascinating artifact and perhaps the first big superhero movie to fall victim to “just” being a superhero movie. The film was a colossal flop and a critical whipping boy, becoming shorthand for a worst-case-scenario for superhero origin stories.
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