Top Five Things That Would Have Made The Green Lantern a Good Movie.

5.  A leading man.

Ryan Reynolds was for whatever reason cast as The Green Lantern.  Who knows why?  Well, we all do.  He looks good in spandex.  The problem is aside from looking good in spandex, he has never displayed any other entertainment quality except for being funny on occasion.  In other words, Ryan Reynolds is more fit for 1980’s professional wrestling than he is for the silver screen.  In summation, he’s certainly no Nathan Fillion, who actually looks better in spandex, if you ask me.

4.  More comedy.

As I previously mentioned, Ryan Reynolds is a comic.  He’s not an actor, he’s not an action hero, he’s certainly not a superhero.  He is a comic first and foremost.  If you’re going to cast a comic in a movie, at least make it funny.  I mean, if they’re going to tarnish the Green Lantern’s name and bury the franchise for at least another twenty years, at least have it go down with enough jokes so that ironic nerds like myself could at least enjoy it for being so bad it’s good.  Maybe every now and again, right in the middle of serious dialogue, all of the film score will suddenly come to a halt, as the actors watch a clucking chicken inexplicably saunter through the set.  Maybe in the middle of an action scene, The Green Lantern strikes up a conversation with whomever he’s fighting about the merits of taping grasshoppers to one’s back to ward off AIDS.  Maybe The Green Lantern means to conjure up a giant fist with his ring, but instead all that comes out is a little flag that says, “BOOM!”  You see what I’m getting at.  The movie was a joke anyway, so the least it could have done is give it a sense of humor about itself, or even go as far as to make it a complete parody to ensure it would make at least some money.

3.  A director.

For those of you who don’t quite know what having a director actually lends to a movie, I’ll sum it up.  A director reads the words on the paper (script) and makes it come to life by translating his vision onto the screen.  If someone had done this with The Green Lantern, it could have been something good.  I see the cost-effectiveness of making a movie directed by a lobotomized goat playing Mad Libs, but sometimes putting just a little more money into a film to hire the right people, well, you get what you pay for, is what I’m getting at.

2.  Set and concept designers.

See “lobotomized goat playing Mad Libs”.

1.  A script.

Was there one?  I mean, there had to be one, or how else would the artists know what to create in post, since half of this movie was green screen.  So, it obviously had a treatment at the very least, but what I saw, I wouldn’t call a script at gun-point.  Simply writing words on paper that are double spaced and written in a specific format, doesn’t make you a writer.  Just like how I write constantly between various blogs, I write two columns, and I’ve released two books, but that doesn’t mean I’m an author.  This movie certainly had words, sluglines, action and maybe even the occasional parenthetical all written on many sheets of paper, but it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a script.

In the end, DC is not having a very good couple of years, and the fact that they’re going to attempt a Justice League movie series to compete with Marvel’s Avengers series is somewhat laughable.  The Green Lantern – much like the most recent Superman movie (and they’re making another one), the Wonder Woman TV show that was gone before it was even there (and they’re making another one), The Spirit, Catwoman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and so many others since what was the worst of them all, Superman IV – was a fail.