Green Lantern and X-Men: The Search for More Money

[transemacabre]

Since everyone and their dog have weighed in on Green Lantern and X-Men Colon First Class already, I figured I might as well throw my cheap two cents in. No real spoilers, so I'm not hiding it behind a cut.

GL is way too derivative of every other comic book movie. There's a scene early on that's reminiscent of the Iron Man/Iron Monger fight in the first Iron Man movie, and the scene where Hal is trying to activate the titular lantern is a rip-off of Peter Parker's attempts to learn to use his web-shooters in the first Spider-Man movie, down to the cutesy catch phrases. The romantic Hal/Carol scenes reminded me of the Clark/Lois stuff from the '70s Superman flicks. Hal's daddy issues could've been lifted from the Daredevil movie, replacing boxing with fighter planes. It's like they put every other comic book movie into a blender, colored the resulting concoction green, and hoped we would be too distracted by Ryan Reynolds' beautiful eyes to notice.

And I agree with mike_smith when he says that the movie really stumbled in not leading with its A-material, which in this case is Hal vs. Sinestro. Instead, we get Hector Hammond awkwardly shoehorned in halfway through the movie, but nobody wants to watch a Green Lantern movie where GL fights Hector Hammond. It's like if the X-Men franchise had saved Magneto for movie three, and the first movie had been the X-Men fighting, I dunno, Arcade or some crap.

The real standout of the movie is Mark Strong as Sinestro, because HOLY CRAP, he looks like Sinestro walked off a comic book page and became flesh and blood before your eyes. It's a shame that Strong's Sinestro wasn't in a better movie.
It's a little like Liev Shrieber as Sabretooth in Wolverine, in that you know the movie is gonna be a turd, but the actor looks like the comic book character come to life and not an actor pretending to be the comic book character.

Mark Strong as Sinestro looked so amazing that I found myself wishing they had cut out a lot of the CGI characters and just used real actors with makeup. GL is filled with cartoony CGI characters, and bizarrely, even though they spent like 300 million on this movie, it looks really cheap. Thor cost half that and looks way better and more professional. I'm not really sure where all that money went. To keep Ryan Reynolds' hair styled just so?

As for X-Men: X Harder, they really should just have called it Xavier and Magneto and cut the titular X-Men out completely, because they barely did anything. You could've removed all the X-Men from the movie and barely affected the plot. For that matter, the collection of characters for the X-Men is so random (Banshee? Angel Salvadore? Darwin? Havok?) that it's obvious they were selected purely for their powers and not for character purposes. That is also the only explanation for the otherwise inexplicable inclusion of Riptide, a Marauder so obscure I at first thought he was the Avengers villain Whirlwind, as a lackey of the Hellfire Club. For that matter, the Hellfire Club is sort of pathetic, as it only has two members, Kevin Bacon and Fake Emma Frost, plus two third-string supervillains as lackeys.

And I don't care what they say, that is NOT Emma Frost. She is not cutting, seductive, or nefarious. January Jones just looks bored and a little awkward prancing around in her underwear and doing whatever Kevin Bacon tells her to do. They slapped a name on her and called her Emma Frost, but she's no more Emma Frost than Cillian Murphy was the Scarecrow in Batman Begins.

The only reason to see this movie is because Charles and Erik are so, so married. I'm not even kidding. I seriously thought for a moment there that Magneto was going to ask Xavier to marry him at the end. It should've had a kiss. I think they both kinda wanted it (then again, it IS 1962; they may not even know two men CAN kiss each other).

If GL looks cheap. X-Men: Electric Boogaloo looks rushed. It seems like the movie was pumped out in very little time and honestly it's all Bacon, Fassbender, and Macavoy can do to keep it from fraying around the edges. If you're gonna see it, see it for the epic Xavier/Magneto manlove.

Comments

[miss-bushido.livejournal.com]

GL is filled with cartoony CGI characters, and bizarrely, even though they spent like 300 million on this movie, it looks really cheap. Thor cost half that and looks way better and more professional. I'm not really sure where all that money went. To keep Ryan Reynolds' hair styled just so?



I thought so too! I'm glad it wasn't just me. And that was just from the trailer.