When the Green Lantern movie came out, I heard a whole list of things that were wrong with it. An under-developed script. A plot where surprisingly little actually happens. Oversimplifying all motivations into either the "will" or "fear" categories, as if no other emotions exist. Appearing to have no real reason to have been made other than no one else had done Green Lantern yet. When the movie showed up on HBO and I finally decided to watch it because it wasn't costing me anything and because I hate myself, I found that pretty much every terrible thing I had heard about it was true. Plus everything else in the movie they didn't mention, which was just as horrid.
And this is a problem. A big problem. Because we brought this about. We, the dorks, nerds, and geeks of the world, who for so long demanded that our sci-fi and comic books be treated not as niche entertainment for the kiddies and socially awkward adults, but as an accepted part of mainstream pop culture, caused this. Because now it is. Over the past decade we have seen once shunned genres become top grossing blockbuster fodder. Even the fantasy genre has benefitted thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies and now Game of Thrones and the Song of Ice and Fire books. Years ago you would have gotten the shit kicked out of you for talking about Westeros. But no longer. Finally, the kinds of stories we wanted to see are getting studio backing and becoming realities. Huzzah!
But that comes with a terrible price. Because now that we have proven to be a profitable market, we will be exploited. This isn't new. For every Dark Knight there will be many more Catwoman's or Daredevils's or Elektra's. Hell, for every Spider-man 2 there will be a Spider-man 3. We always knew that. But watching Green Lantern made me realize just how bad it's going to get. The crack about it only existing because it hadn't already been done was only half a joke; the whole movie seemed to have been put together with all the love and care of assembly line robots. And even with such a basic plot that offered little, they still couldn't avoid fucking things up. After all the hubub about the Guardians making a Yellow Ring (the yellow stands for fear, and fear is bad!) the whole thing is dropped never to be brought up again. Except the guardians already made the fucking thing, and according to Ryan Reynolds, that is a terrible thing to have because it's power corrupts. So yeah, let's just leave it laying around and not address it at all, because that's what good stories do.
Is that the level of quality we want marketed to us? And it's not just already established franchises that are getting mucked up. Movies like Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles drag the whole sci-fi genre down. More and more movies like that are coming out, where producers put together their best guess as to what we want to see and see what happens. Sci-fi has become as fraught with turds as romantic comedies.
Much of this is inevitable. The studios are going to do what they do, which is mostly churn out crap and hope we pay for it. But we also have to stop enabling them. There was no reason for Green Lantern to make over $200 million at the box office, but it did. Mostly because I kept hearing the excuse "But it's Green Lantern!" I hear that a lot whenever a beloved character or franchise gets a shitty adaptation (this goes double for anything Star Wars related). Perhaps it's because we've been ignored for so long we feel we have to take whatever they give us, but that has long stopped being the case. You might love the Green Lantern comics, but if you think the movie looks like garbage (which a lot of people did), you are not obligated to see it. You are giving up whatever leverage you have as a consumer.
I know I'm just ranting, and quite possibly overreacting. But goddamn, is Green Lantern a terrible movie.
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