At da hiatus! And the DCNU!

So now we've knocked out 3 out of the 4 superhero movies that came out this summer, and all that's left is my favorite of the bunch, Thor. My buddy Dom, NYU film student and professional youtube guy, wanted to write the piece on Thor for here, which is super great because he knows movie stuff that I don't and will offer his own unique viewpoint, something the ol' Junction needs more of. Since Dom is in the middle of post-production for his short film, The End, we're gonna take a brief hiatus on the At Da Moofies column until he's ready. Hopefully his post will turn up by the time Thor gets released on DVD/Blu-Ray/Netflix/brain injection on September 13, but it's gonna be tough to say.

Meanwhile, you've probably heard all the hubbub about the DC Universe relaunch coming into effect this Wednesday. What with this looking like the biggest comic book event in decades and all, prooker (it's his idea so you know he'll be posting!!) and I will start a series of posts offering an in-depth analysis on all things related to the New 52. We're your guide to the DCNU! And on top of all this I'm finally buckling down on that Jack Kirby post I kept talking about in my Spidey villain articles. You can expect it soon.

Here are the At Da Moofies articles for X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. Your mileage may vary. You can watch Dom's cool youtube stuff here.

At Da Moofies: X-Men: First Class, or THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR THREE

Between the sparse, abysmal marketing campaign, rushed 10-month production schedule, and general lack of interest from the public, X-Men: First Class was in many ways the underdog in this summer's superhero race. All the better that it was the best-reviewed and, thanks to word-of-mouth, made a $350,000,000 killing at the box office. I saw it with my co-blogger prooker soon after it was released and we both agreed it was a refreshing, exhilarating ride. Director Matthew Vaughn pulls out all the stops with this one, delivering a sleek, stylish, dynamic product filled with a youthful vitality that's been long absent from today's superhero movies. Vaughn imbues the film with a distinct, forward-moving visual chic, setting it apart from the epic scope of Thor, the videogame vapidity of Green Lantern or the retro-nostalgia of Captain America. It's definitely the cool kid of the bunch.

What really seals the deal, however, are the performances of James McAvory and (especially) Michael Fassbender, who costar as younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, respectively. The rest of the ensemble cast ranges from satisfactory (Kevin Bacon impresses as Nazi/would-be world conqueror/evil fop Sebastian Shaw) to clearly-they-fucked-the-director-to-get-in-this-movie bad (January Jones as mutant whore Emma Frost), but it's McAvory and Fassbender who steal the show with their suave magnetism. The chemistry between the two is undeniable; it makes you wish the sequel will be a buddy comedy where they just bro out for two hours. In a perfect world...

Yet despite all this praise I may lavish on First Class, a mere two months after seeing it I find that I can barely remember anything specific about the 132 minute film. The details of Thor, which I saw two weeks before First Class, still remain fresh in my head, as do those of Green Lantern, which I saw only one week after. Its form is certainly laudable - strong and unique enough for the film to shine on these merits alone - but its content is sorely lacking. X-Men: First Class doesn't have anything particularly novel to say, nor does it - with the exception of McAvory and Fassbender's interplay - offer up anything we haven't seen before. Vaughn's brisk, efficient direction makes the movie seem a lot smarter than it actually is.

The film's plot concerns a covert team of mutants (the black guy dies first, natch), recruited by Charles Xavier and Erik Lenhsh...Lehnsh...Magneto on behalf of the CIA, and their efforts to thwart Sebastian Shaw's Hellfire Club - a James Bond-style secret organization with goals of world domination - during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Hellfire Club's plan, lifted straight from You Only Live Twice, is to ignite war between America and the Soviet Union and, after the two superpowers nuke everything to hell, conquering the planet itself. The way this ends up going down is a bit lazy and problematic, especially for a film franchise that prides itself on political allegory. The Soviets, for example, are generally portrayed as bumbling, plucky comic relief helplessly subservient to the Hellfire Club's whims. This characterization cheapens the entire film, deflating the credibility of its driving force - the prospect of total nuclear annihilation. Which, of course, was a very real threat throughout the Cold War. By the time Magneto starts drunkenly lobbing nukes back and forth at the height of the Crisis, the whole situation seems ludicrously funny. Something tells me that the filmmakers weren't going for the Dr. Strangelove angle here.

It certainly doesn't help that every other line is something along the lines of "I'M NOT GOING TO LET THEM START WORLD WAR III" or "WE HAVE TO STOP WORLD WAR III." Seriously, it's insane. Either the writers wanted us to think this whole thing is ridiculously silly or they never bothered to read through their script to check for repetitive dialogue. I GET IT GUYS, WORLD WAR III, IT'S A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN IF YOU GUYS DON'T STOP IT. NOW STOP FUCKING TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR III IF AND FUCKING STOP WORLD WAR III" It got so bad that I started counting how many times the phrase "start World War III" and its variants popped up; I got lost somewhere in the double digits. I smell an epic drinking game in the works!

But back to those zany Soviets. Worse than taking the punch out of the World War III doomsday scenario our heroes are fighting to avert, this portrayal paints a false image of the commies, who were in fact an extremely nasty, dangerous bunch. One of the greatest threats the free world has ever known, as a matter of fact, what with the oppression and mass killings and military strength and nuclear capabilities and iron grip over an enormous territory. This double-standard is particularly egregious when compared to the damn dirty Nazis at the film's beginning, who are portrayed, well, accurately: the kind of folks who'll gleefully execute a kid's mom before his eyes just for shits and giggles. Unlike Captain America, this movie has the balls to show what World War II was really all about.

Rather than introducing a new spin on what is anything but a black-and-white debate, X-Men: First Class retreads the same tired ideas fully played out in the original X-Men trilogy. Like Magneto in those films, Sebastian Shaw is a mutant supremacist who wants to wipe out mankind, while Charles is the nonviolent (as far as superheroes go) advocate of peace and equality between man and mutant. Those may be two opposing philosophies, but contrary to what First Class implies the argument itself is not inherently dualistic. The Hellfire Club's comic book incarnation is a testament to this; within its exclusive ranks are both men and mutants, who treat each other as equals. The Club attempts to impose this Utopian ideal by force in its quest for world domination. When its elite Inner Circle of humans, mutants, cyborgs and weird astral parasite things runs the show, the unwashed masses who aren't on board will get washed away in the Flood. Here, the Hellfire Club is no different than the X-Men trilogy's Brotherhood of Mutants. In fact it actually becomes the Brotherhood after Magneto exacts vengeance on Shaw and seizes control of it for himself. I'll admit there's a certain poetry to this, in having Magneto follow down Shaw's path at the end of First Class - becoming the very monster he sought to destroy - but letting Magneto come to his own conclusions instead co-opting someone else's would have been a more satisfying character arc and would have saved the film from being derivative.

While we're on the subject of mutants, boy did the writers pick a dumb fucking bunch to fill out the ranks. Riptide? Darwin? Azazel? Azazel? The X-Men universe is probably the most expansive in all comicdom, surely there are some far more interesting characters we haven't seen on film yet that they could've pulled out of the mythos. Like Dazzler. Wait. No. Anyway you get the point. But this is probably just the fanboy in me talking in the first place. I hate that guy.

X-Men: First Class tries its hand at genre-blending, but it doesn't work out, and the film can't seem to settle on a tone. The picture inconsistently vacillates between Nazi-hunting revenge flick, 60s spy film send-up, traditional superhero origin, historical drama, team movie, bromance buddy comedy and erotic thriller. Vaughn's direction in each individual sequence is impeccable, but they don't mesh well together. And unlike those in Captain America or, say, Kill Bill (it was on AMC last night, what do you want from me?), these scenes don't appear to be making a statement about the tropes themselves, which would have made the jarring dissonance more forgivable.

But there's still a lot X-Men: First Class has going for it. Although most of the film is a blur to me, there is one image that I not only remember, but has vividly stuck with me from the moment I left the theater. That kind of thing is extremely rare, and it's a testament to just how affecting the imagery of this movie is. Here's the shot:

Or at least the best I could find on the interwebs. For context, this scene is part of the picture's "we're building a team" montage, where Charles and Erik track down and recruit members for their first class. Here, they find Angel Salvadore, a mutant working as an exotic dancer. There's something so incredibly eerie, so uncanny about the way Vaughn and cinematographer John Mathieson frame this scene. Between the saturated red colors, the unnaturally-precise symmetry, and our protagonists themselves, looking on from an alienating vanishing point with sleazy, chauvinist glee in their Mad Men duds...it looks like something out of a Kubrick film, doesn't it? I mean can't you imagine this scene coming from The Shining? Or Eyes Wide Shut? The Hellfire Club's front, after all - a classy, exclusive underworld where the ultra-rich and important can act on their seediest, most debauched fantasies - is essentially the depraved high society sex cult from that film, sans the kinky whipping each other with animal masks on and what have you. For me, at least, this scene produced the same incredible visceral reaction that Kubrick's signature techniques do.

And of course there's boatloads of David Lynch going on here, too - it has got such a creepy, vouyeristic feel to it, like we're seeing something we shouldn't be. The look on Charles and Erik's self-satisfied faces as they watch this bug-stripper hybrid thing showing off her mutant goods...the whole scene is both sickening and teasingly intriguing, leaving the audience uncomfortable even as it begs for more (and uncomfortable as they beg for more). It's a great shot, likely one of many in X-Men: First Class. A second viewing would have probably revealed more images with such staying power to me. I'm thinking the coin-through-the-brain scene probably had it.

X-Men: First Class is an undeniably well-made, energetic action flick that breathes new life into the sagging X-Men flm franchise. It is totally worth seeing, maybe more than once. It has got heart, dazzling effects and a killer visual eye. But while all that makes damn good weekend entertainment, it takes a strong, well-constructed story to make a truly great superhero movie, which despite some great moments is something this film doesn't entirely deliver. Is X-Men: First Class on par with Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight or Iron Man, as some have opined? Nah, not in a long shot.

A Message to Dan Slott

Dear Mr. Slott,

I have been reading your run on Amazing Spider-Man for a while now. Through doing so, I have come to realize that you are unaware of two things. Firstly, most readers - such as myself - have been following the title for a while now, and know from constant reiteration within each individual issue that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. More importantly, there's an intro page before the beginning of each issue that gives a crash-course on recent developments in Spider-Man's life. This introduction states that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ.

I bring these up to help you realize that you do not have to spend one-third of every issue telling us that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. Which is exactly what it is, telling us. Describing it. Not offering insight into the effect it has on Peter's life, besides him continuously opining "doh boy it sure is crazy staying on top of all this busy stuff and not being poor anymore." It's just Peter saying to himself that he is, in fact, on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. We all know about these things already. It has been made very, very clear to us.

It's getting increasingly difficult to trod through massive chunks of exposition that say the exact same thing issue after issue. I like the stories you've been writing during your tenure on Spider-Man, I like the way you handle the characters and the plots you put them in. "Spider Island" sounds like your coolest idea yet, I really want to read it. But I don't know if I can take another caption box of Spider-Man think-telling me about how he's on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. I can use these things called pictures and this concept called character interaction to see that he's on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ.

Sincerely,

Everyone reading Amazing Spider-Man

At Da Moofies: Green Lantern is the Best Comic Book Adaptation of All Time

Bet that got your attention, didn't it?

So here we are, Green Lantern, the bastard black sheep of this summer's hero-fest. You don't need me to tell you that Green Lantern is a terrible movie. You don't need me to tell you it's a travesty of a superhero film. If you noticed the horde of marketing tie-in commercials (look Subway costumers, we have avocados now! They're green! GREEN LIKE GREEN LANTERN!) that mysteriously vanished two weeks after its release, or saw its box office results, or read any of the reviews for it, or know someone who saw it and engaged in awkward small talk with them, or (God help you) saw it yourself, you already know how relentlessly, hideously, mind-assaultingly bad it is. The first time I saw it, my friend Theo and I were so overwhelmed by the sheer cringe-worthiness of it all that about an hour in we resolved to leave if there was one more major groan-inducing moment. Less than five minutes later we walked out. I haven't walked out of a movie since Norbit. SINCE. FUCKING. NORBIT.

Interestingly, some of my close friends had dissenting opinions of the film. My habitually absent co-blogger prooker thought it was adequate for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on. I think it's something along the lines of Green Lantern being one of his favorite heroes and starring in a major motion picture. It could've been Hal Jordan sitting on an emerald toilet taking a two-hour shit in the middle of space - which isn't that far off in the first place - and he would've been satisfied. My buddy Dom, who I'm sure remembers he said he wanted to write a post on Thor for here, thought it was passable too, but I'm pretty sure he just wants to fuck Ryan Reynolds. And who can blame him?

I mean damn, look at him. The man is cut, ladies and gentleman. And funny too! OH GOD HE'S A DREAMBOAT. But alas, Ryan's rock hard abs and glorious pecs couldn't do shit to save this trainwreck of a movie. Nor could Blake Lively's (wait for it) lively assets. Get it? GET IT?!

Look it's four in the morning here and I am in no state to write puns. At this point all I can do is type something in all caps and pray that it even makes sense.

I'm not here to tell you how appallingly, insultingly awful this movie is. I'm not here to complain about how rotten the performances are, or how stale the dialogue is, or how sub-par the CGI the film hedged its bets on ended up being, or how poorly paced it is, or how it couldn't settle on a tone, or how utterly goofy and ridiculous everything they tried to make serious actually was, or how there's no character arc, or how irksome the exposition is, or how fucking horrible every aspect of this movie and everything involved in its creation from the first goddamn letter typed on its asinine script to the last day of post-production turned out. I'm here to argue that Green Lantern is the best adaptation of a modern superhero comic we've seen on the silver screen.

To understand what I mean, we need to take a brief history lesson. Superhero comics have been published for over 70 years. The history of these comics are categorized into a series of "ages," each roughly 15 years in length, based on the prevailing narrative and formal properties of comics during that time. The Golden Age of Comic Books lasted from the creation of Superman in 1938 until the early '50s; the Flash began the Silver Age in 1956, which lasted until the beginning of the Bronze Age in 1970; the Bronze Age would last until The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were released in 1985; the Dark Age, which hasn't been formally separated from the catch-all "Modern Age" taxon yet (I assume these things are decided by a shadowy council of comic book nerds from inside their moms' basements), went on until let's say, JLA: Earth 2 and JSA both came out in '99. The period we're currently entrenched in probably won't be delineated for at least another two decades, even though we've already mapped out its fundamental attributes so far - attributes that reflect themselves in Green Lantern.

The two giants in the current era of mainstream superhero comics have been Brian Bendis (at Marvel) and Geoff Johns (at DC). Seemingly independent of each other, the two developed a remarkably similar writing style, one that quickly became the defining lexicon for how superhero books are written as of 2011. Most writers working at the Big Two derive their storytelling methods from the Bendis/Johns school (which is definitely too formal a term to describe it but, again, 4 am and all that); those few that do not are usually copyists of Grant Morrison and his kind. Good luck with that.

So what are the formal characteristics of a Bendis or Johns comic? For one, both are marked by heavy use of exposition and a belabored pacing. Bendis, for instance, makes excessive use of an artistic technique called "decompression." It's a stylistic choice - pioneered in American comics by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in The Authority - where panels are allotted to portray subtle visual changes and character movements/interactions, in turn creating a slower-moving story. Decompression can be used to great effect, creating poignant moments that can just make a comic, such as throughout Joss Whedon (*squeal*) and John Cassady's run on Astonishing X-Men.

And then there's the way Brian Bendis uses it: as a vehicle to cram as many lines of dialogue as humanly possible into a single page. Bendis, you see, is the God of Verbose Exposition. I'll let his work speak for itself. Here's a scan from New Avengers #5:


I don't know how people can get through that. Reading this made me feel like I was cleaving my way through an Amazon jungle of exposition without the help of my trusty Bantu guide. Indeed, Bendis doesn't write characters so much as he does talking heads. Here's a two-page splash from the same issue:


For reference, splash pages are typically reserved for cool dynamic shit worth devoting an entire 1-2 pages to. Something like this:


Now which would you rather read? Which is infinitely more interesting than the other? Which conveys something actually happening?

Here is the second of a two-page conversation from Bendis' run on Daredevil, an example of decompression gone horribly wrong:


This one seated conversation takes two pages out of a 22 page, $2.99 superhero comic and I still have no goddamn idea what the fuck Ben Urich is trying to say. He sounds pretty cool saying it, I guess, but if there's something of genuine substance being discussed there I may have missed it amidst the sequence of slightly tilting heads and massive word balloons.

Bendis writes as if he were writing a play or a film script. He wants to be a Mamet or a Tarantino or a Sorkin. But he's writing a comic book script, which by the nature of the medium operates under completely different aesthetic parameters. Text and still image must be balanced to tell a complete story (or at least a complete chapter of a story arc) in a limited number of pages. It's all about synergy. Much more so than a film or play, comics are a "show, don't tell" medium; if anything, image is favored over text. Aaron Sorkin's breakneck conversations and lengthy monologues work magically in walk and talk motion, but they don't translate to comics, something Bendis simply fails to comprehend.

Over at DC Comics, Geoff Johns wields exposition like a Green Lantern ring. Johns made his career out of referencing, reviving, re-appropriating, or outright rewriting elements of the DC Universe's history. Retroactive continuity isn't a new thing - I mean there's even that term for it - but it has never been done to the absurd, wildly unrestrained extent that it has under Johns' pen. He's a history nerd - a made-up history nerd - and all his stories dig deep into the most obscure pockets of continuity. He loves that continuity with the obsession of the world's queasiest fanboy, even as he completely changes its convoluted timeline to suit him - to what he specifically wants it to be. To get what's going on in his comics, you would need an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe's 70+ years of stories, so Johns goes through the trouble of detailing the forgotten events and situations his comics refer to. Through lots of expository dialogue.

Here's a page from Flashpoint #1, where a Flash villain has rewritten the history of the DC Universe and it's up to the Flash (Geoff Johns' favorite hero) restore it to his (Geoff Johns') vision of how things really are. In what is probably a poorly thought out apology for killing off most of DC's minority characters and replacing them with white folk during Blackest Night, in this alternate reality Johns makes Cyborg both the superheroes' token minority and their leader. Here we go.


Even in a tale where all the history was invented on the spot, Johns must go the whole nine yards to fill us in. So I guess the question here is "Cyborg, if, uh, if you say we all know why we're here then, um, why are you telling us why we're here?" It probably would've been kinda cool for us to see all that stuff Cyborg describes go down, but that's not how Johns runs his operation. Why show when you can just tell? That way it's so much easier to write!

Also, Africa is now "ape-controlled." Yikes. I guess Cyborg has too much good taste to touch that issue.

What I mean when I claim that Green Lantern is the best adaptation of a modern superhero comic book is that, uniquely among its genre brethren, the film recreates the formal aesthetic qualities of contemporary superhero comics for the big screen. Like a Bendis or Johns comic, Green Lantern is bogged down by heaps of unnecessary exposition and suffers from wildly uneven pacing. The movie begins with a shot of outer space as Geoffrey Rush narrates us a crash-course on the Green Lantern Corps. He goes on and on and on for what feels an eternity, and the only thing we see throughout the entire thing is that one shot of space. It's just agonizing from the audience's perspective. We're at the beginning of the film and already the writers are throwing their hands up and saying "ah, fuck it!" About 45 minutes into the film, when Ryan Reynolds is transported to the Green Lanterns' home planet, Rush gives him a tour packed with all the excitement of the Epcot Ball ride, all while re-explaining everything he already told us in the film's beginning down to the very last detail. It's a slow, excruciating experience, one of many trials that test the audience's willpower (HERPADERP SEE WHAT I DID THERE) to endure through the movie. By the time I left an hour into my first attempt at seeing it, not much had actually happened - Hal was just getting introduced to his future-Lantern buddies - but I felt like hours had passed since we took our seats. Such is the vacuity of Green Lantern.

There's another overriding quality that defines modern superhero comics, one again made fashionable by Bendis' and Johns' work: exploitation. The sensationalist portrayal of lurid subject matter that is A) unconcerned with exploring said subject matter and B) bereft of a discernible literary or artistic sense. Now exploitation has obviously been a prominent element in comics storytelling for ages, but it was never truly essential to the fabric of a comic book story. Until the past decade, that is. As expected from one whose influences include David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino, Bendis gleefully indulges in extravagant, borderline ridiculous excess. Mamet's over-the-top, fuck-ridden dialogue expresses an enormous vitality, reaching highs of sweeping triumph and lows of hopeless despair; the sadness belying our routine, obscenity-filled everyday speech becomes grand drama exploring the American working class. Tarantino uses an exploitation atmosphere in his movies to simultaneously homage, analyze and deconstruct the precepts of genre and structure, the distinctions levied between high and low culture, and the nature of cinema.

In contrast, Bendis' work isn't too concerned with anything other than, well, exploitation. He's trying to sell as many comics as possible, because he knows people line up in drones for bullshit like Final Destination 12: This Time Everybody Dies Again and Saw XX: DAYUM Lookit All Dat Blood. Accordingly, Bendis has no qualms with crossing boundaries that his inspirations would never dare tread without a damn compelling reason. So in Avengers #12.1 it's only natural that Bendis gives us some completely arbitrary torture-porn of Spider-Woman that doesn't factor into the plot at all: ladyparts sprawled out for us in the most graphic way imaginable for sexploitation's own sake. It's only natural that in Siege #2 he has the Sentry, a character who is in many ways representative of everything wrong with today's superhero comics, ripping Ares in half before our eyes.

It's supposed be a shocking, appalling, intensely visceral moment, as evidenced by the reaction shots. It is. That's the point of exploitation. That's how it works. It's also supposed to establish the gravity of the situation our heroes are in, to accentuate the enormous power and depravity the threat before them possesses. It doesn't, because this kind of thing is the status quo. The previous issue of Siege begins with a football stadium full of people getting incinerated, an event that is never dwelt on or even brought up again in the rest of the story; gory dismemberment is just business as usual in today's superhero fare.

For his part, Johns rivals - and often even surpasses - Bendis at his most shameless on the exploitation front. Johns rose through the ranks of DC Comics writing epic, blood-soaked killfests between the Green Lantern Corps, their allies, and legions of baddies who seek to defile (in all the term's connotations) the memory of a simpler time where superheroes were the pinnacle of innocence and sanctity. Of course, through his extensive rewriting of DC Comics' history, Johns has made it so that simple time never existed in the first place - it was always the festering pool of idea-barren grim-n'-grit he's currently writing. His work nostalgically fetishizes the brightly-colored days of superhero comics, even as it drags them further away from those days than ever before. Johns' work is entirely devoid of any greater meaning, the countless mutilations within it are purely for entertainment. Sound and fury signifying nothing, like this space kitten who liquefies people with its acidic blood vomit in Green Lantern #54. I kid you not.


Or Infinite Crisis #6, where a villain dies by getting his metal face mask pushed through the back of his head by the eyeholes:

And of course we can't have a modern superhero book without a staggering amount of sexploitation, so on top of all this Johns gives us an army of Star Sapphires (the one whose costume is magenta goop covering her double-E nips and a star insignia over her cooch, for those not in the know) who harem-worship a man called "The Predator." Matt Seneca has written two fascinating posts on his blog - here and here - that investigate the relationship between Johns' work and exploitation in far greater detail. He tells it better than I ever could.

While gratuitous violence is absent from Green Lantern (the film borrows more from the form of modern comics than their content; Bendis and Johns revel in oppressive bleakness while Green Lantern is trivial, lighthearted fare), it is no less indebted to an exploitation film aesthetic. One of the biggest formal hallmarks of exploitation movies is that they have very low production values - they look poor-quality. In spite of a $200 million dollar budget, the film looks very, very cheap, something many critics have gleefully pointed out as they collectively tore it a new anus. One remarks that our protagonist's stomping grounds is a "flatly generic city...pasted together from random urban skylines." Others variously called the production "tacky" and "chintzy-looking," describing the earthbound scenes as "stilted" or "cardboard" set-pieces with the "staid artificiality that comes with extensive soundstage shooting." The CGI that would make-or-break the film has been even more harshly bemoaned, criticized as "a big bore...blandly digitally rendered, "not so special effects," "ludicrous, in an intricate, painstaking, seriously over-the-top way," "more like screen-savers than inhabited environments," "failing to take on the gravity and substance of real events," etc. Put bluntly, the CGI looked like something that would have been acceptable - just acceptable - half a decade ago. How do you blow all that money and end up with a product so schlocky?

Furthermore, Green Lantern indulges in the same over-the-top shock tactics employed in exploitation cinema, the kind that are so absurd they verge on self-parody. One example is the abrupt, out-of-place flashback where we see Hal's dad die in a plane crash. Little Hal asks his dad if he's afraid something will go wrong with the experimental jet he's test-piloting. Dad Jordan responds, "It's not my job to be." GROOOOOOAN. So here's how they filmed the inevitable crash: the plane goes up, then spends the next thirty seconds wobbling around as electronic stuff presumably malfunctions. After a precipitous fall, the plane lands...completely intact. Lil' Hal runs to the dud jet as his dad gets halfway out. Dad Jordan gets out a brief, melodramatic "Hal--" before BOOOOOM!!!! The whole fucking thing explodes right before lil' Hal in a fiery inferno about thirty times larger than the jet itself. I guess it was painted in several coats of rocket fuel or something. And of course neither the crash itself nor the implications of it are ever brought up again, save that, by virtue of the scene's inclusion, we are to believe Hal's reckless douchebaggy behavior throughout is somehow the result of undefined daddy issues. Ridiculous moments like this occur over and over again until movie's merciful end. Exploitation cinema at its cheesiest.

The film's script was co-written by two second-string comic book writers, both copyists of the Bendis/Johns style. It's content is heavily indebted to Johns in particular, whose work on the Green Lantern franchise for the past sevem years has propelled the writer to superstardom and made the character one of the most talked-about things in mainstream comics (though clearly he's still B-list to the general public). The film's plot is adapted from Johns' 2009 retelling of Hal Jordan's origin, while its main villain was conceived by Johns as a "space parasite" in a contrived explanation why Hal really turned evil in the early 90s. Johns was a producer on the film, and described his duties as being its resident "Green Lantern guru." Whenever the filmmakers had a question about any aspect of the mythos, they turned to him as the ultimate authority. So its no wonder that, like the material it's based off of with its harebrained Emotional Spectrum cosmology, Green Lantern revels in shallow meaninglessness. No matter how aggressively it alleges a good-vs.-evil duality between abstract "will" and "fear," its attempts at a moral message amount to literally nothing. It's all dressing so our guys in green can fight a yellow cloud monster with just as hazy motivations.

If I were to summarize the enormous appeal of Bendis and Johns' work, I would say this: Bendis' audience is the kind person who loves Tarantino movies because they have a lot of badass violence and their characters say "fuck" a lot, but doesn't know what they're actually even about, what truly makes them great films. Johns' audience is the foregone fanboy, hardcore continuity nerds like himself. The kind of people who will gladly overlook a story's quality because HOLY SHIT he brings up that one plot point from the 90s and re-introduces Vibe, those are insider things I know about and now I feel validated. Far removed from the brilliant work of their early Halcyon days*, both writers now get by appealing to the lowest common denominator, to separate aspects of the superhero fandom at its absolute worst and most stereotypical. They're both the most popular writers working in comics.

If Green Lantern was a comic book it would be one of the industry's best-selling titles.

Oh wait.




*Both Bendis and Johns produced some consistently fantastic work during their early careers, from ca. 2000-2003. On the Bendis side of things, Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man were revolutionary ideas that to this day remain influential for all the right reasons. Alias is his closest thing to a masterpiece and his run on Daredevil, for all its faults, still has many phenomenal moments. Johns produced some truly great - and vastly under-appreciated - work during this period as well. His stint on The Avengers and his relaunch of Teen Titans were both exemplary; his work co-writing JSA with James Robinson and, after the latter's departure, writing it himself unquestionably deserved every bit of acclaim it received. Hell, I even got a pretty big kick out of "Sinestro Corps War." For both Bendis and Johns, it seems as though it wasn't until they were given the keys to the kingdoms that everything went to shit. A pity.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that while Green Lantern is a hot steaming pile of shit, it ain't the worst superhero movie by a long shot. Elektra, Catwoman, Superman IV, Steel...there are quite a few comic book flicks that sit above (below?) Green Lantern in the echelons of bad cinema. Still, to see Hal Jordan and his pals suffer such a fate is a fucking bummer, man.