Buyog's Lair

Green Lantern: First Flight

Monday, August 10, 2009

(Listening to: Ring Capacity, by Kirby Krackle)

I watched the new straight-to-video Green Lantern movie, First Flight this weekend. Overall I enjoyed the heck out of it (and the soundtrack was EPIC), but I had a few quibbles.

Most striking to me was that, despite a few nods to current continuity (e.g. Sinestro's "evil" uniform, his motivation for opposing the Guardians), but overall the mythology Geoff Johns has built up over the past few years isn't there: the yellow impurity, Abin Sur's killer (and why he died), even the role of the central power battery is different here.

I don't want to be "that guy," I recognize that the GL's decades-long history of published comics needs to be streamlined in order to produce an approachable film, but I personally felt that a few more nods could have been easily made, for example Abin Sur's killer could just have easily been Atrocitus, even if his backstory was different. And framing the "green power" and "yellow power" in terms of the emotional spectrum would have been a nice touch, even if their respective entities and the other five color corps aren't referenced. But then again, there's nothing necessarily preventing those aspects from getting grafted on after the fact, just as Johns has been doing in the comics themselves. If successful enough (hint: go buy it!), I can totally see them doing a Sinestro Corps War movie.

Which would be at least 31 flavors of awesome.

Labels: Blackest Night Hal, reviews