Straight to the Uncanny Valley - A Green Lantern Review

[RetroRomper]

Green Lanter
A Review

The its issues with the new Green Lantern film are very, very weird but oddly common: it foregoes common sense and any sort of aesthetic integrity to be over the top, spacious, and to give the entire production an excuse to use a blue screen. And hey, by being so horrible, it even calls into question the idea that a bright, intelligent, and talented individual can make it in the "show biz," because by being so bad, Hollywood is putting the message on view screens everywhere that it doesn't have a place for people like you.

Lets start running down the problems: first issue is one I don't care about - the first six minutes of the film is a CG intro more suited to a direct to video cartoon from the late 90's. The sort of artistic direction of "cool looking models," lens flair, overly reflective textures and money shot film direction, feels more akin to the days when they were using Video Toaster to create their scenes and had Amigas in the back to render all of it. This is because while the technology has progressed, the director has taken every lesson learned from how to properly use CG ("lets have a frontal shot of a cool looking alien thing and splice it with lens flair") from the last twenty years, and discarded it.



What is left is technologically advanced but feels lifeless, campy and looks plain awkward: the film takes these graphics and combines them with directing that tries to apply the usual Hollywood cliches to CG, except if CG is done incorrectly it makes the experience painful for the viewer and comes close to the infamous uncanny valley.



The Uncanny Velley is, thanks to Green Lanter no longer the exclusive realm of rubber faced robots, because the film makes the questionable decision to have both full CG versions of the actors, latex/costumed actors and then it tries to validate this expense by interposing the digital version of the character over the live action. This decision lacks any sort of aesthetic sense: were left with CG, full live action, and a half and half that do not at all mix well because it drawsl the watcher to compare and contrast between how bad al of it looks. In general, the entire process feels as if computer graphics were this novelty to be tried and tested.

Except of course, all this has been done before. The avant garde of the "actors appearing in a digital environment" was the now forgotten Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, where the entire premise of the film is to try and see how actors could integrate and interact with a virtual environment. As was Sin City to a large extent, but the point is that many films have come before that have experimented with these concepts and have gotten some things right and some wrong. But these early films figured out what did and didn't work and honed this discipline to a finger point. A point that Green Lantern impales itself on, by ignoring the common sense forged years ago and instead it pushes ahead in the precise way that didn't work in these earlier films.

Noticed I haven't said anything about the plot? These glaring issues mitigate any story to the background: this film is just plain unpleasant to sit through (maybe not as unpleasant as your grandfather's snuff film, but still very awkward). I'm not sure whether it say that it takes talent to completely mangle a craft in such a way, or that the entire team was just blind to their own issues. But either way, Green Lantern is so far the worse film of the decade.

GREEN LANTERN
Zero out of Five Stars

[Tdarcos]

You should explain what the Uncanny Valley is, as the reference in this sentence does, because some might not know the meaning of the term.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Is Kilowog in it? Guy Gardner? ARISSA? Who's the female lead?