green lantern

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern – Beware My Power (2022)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing. 

John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years. 

Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long. 

Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice. 

Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose. 

From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.” 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern — Emerald Knights (2011)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

This one … it’s fine. Ok? It’s fine. This is an anthology film that centers around the first days of training of the Green Lantern Corps’ newest recruit, Arisia Rrab (Elisabeth Moss), with her induction into the group coinciding with a major crisis—naturally—that threatens the Corps’ founders, the Guardians, and the planet on which the organization is based, Oa. Things start out easy enough, as she meets her mentor Hal Jordan (Nathan Fillion, in the first of many portrayals of the character), learns about some of the Corps’ most legendary heroes of past and present, and ultimately proves her mettle by figuring out how to defeat the wraparound story’s big bad. And it’s fine! 

The meat of the story lies in its vignettes, which are perfectly suitable. Together, both we and Arisia learn about the origins of the Green Lanterns, the forging of their rings and those rings’ selection of the first four bearers, including one unlikely candidate in the form of the Guardians’ scribe, who—naturally—winds up defying all expectations. When Arisia worries about how her boot camp with the hulking Kilowog (Henry Rollins) will go, Hal recounts Kilowog’s own brutal training under a previous veteran, who came to see the potential in his pupil when the younger man demonstrated exceptional heroism. When Hal and Arisia encounter Laira (Kelly Hu) and she delivers a prophecy to them, we learn about Laira’s backstory as a princess whose father was saved from death at the hands of an army by the sacrifice of their area’s Green Lantern, and how his ring chose Laira as his successor; years later, she is forced to intervene when her father seeks revenge against his previous oppressors. The following recitation is the best of the bunch, which is fitting, as it’s an adaptation of one of the best stories in the extended GL universe, “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize,” and although it’s a pretty famous one, I won’t spoil it here on the off chance that you’d have any interest in this movie without already having read it. Finally, the still-a-Green-Lantern Sinestro (Jason Isaacs) reveals that his late friend Abin Sur (Arnold Vosloo) was a great believer in fate, unlike Sinestro, until he learned of a prophecy that Sinestro would fall to the dark side and create a Corps that was powered by fear, and rejected the concept of destiny. All that having been wrapped up, the framing device gets wrapped up when the combined might of the Green Lanterns are able to enact Arisia’s crazy/inspired plan and defeat the film’s villain, and a new era dawns. 

This movie is fine. It’s a little thin, which is ironic considering that this one is actually the longest of these films to date, clocking in at 83 minutes; the franchise wouldn’t break the 80 minute mark again for six years, and that’s not even taking into consideration that the title sequence for Emerald Knights is the shortest of them so far as well, not counting Wonder Woman, which consisted solely of a title card. Public Enemies, for example, had a 2:10 title sequence, First Flight’s was two minutes long, and Doomsday clocked in with a whopping three minutes, which is a lot of screen time for something that’s barely more than 75 minutes long. This one is more packed with story than any of the others have been, but that’s not a huge mark in its favor. Although every single one of these things is a corporate product, this one feels the most like it was made with its brand name in mind. This came out the same year as the ill-fated live action Green Lantern starring Ryan Reynolds, and Emerald Knights positively smacks of an attempt to coax some easy money out of a gullible public through synergistic marketing. It’s not badly made—Lauren Montgomery and the other directors on the project are doing good work—but none of these segments are better than the stories from which they’re adapted. Only the first vignette (and the wraparound) is new material, and while it’s fine, that’s all that it is. That same sense of corporate oversight and aftertaste is present in how this film mostly pulls its punches. Compare any of the scenes of action in this one to, for instance, the casual cruelty of Sinestro and the brutal violence of Boodikka’s death in First Flight, or the Amazon battles of Wonder Woman, or even the threat of death by immolation at the hands of the Joker in Under the Red Hood, and this one has more of a Saturday morning feel. It has to if we’re going to be able to package it in a multi-disc set alongside the surefire hit live action feature in time for Christmas! Except it didn’t happen that way, and this film suffers for having been destined (haha) to not only be forgotten because of that movie, but worse because of it, too. 

In its defense, none of these are bad stories. They’re just not as interesting here as they are in the comics, and none of them stands out as an adaptation that improves upon the original text. I can see David Gibbons’s art for “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” so clearly in my mind (and, at least at the time of writing, you can find it here in its entirety), and although this film does dabble in different art styles for each segment like Gotham Knight, the differences between vignettes is not as extreme, so this one isn’t as exciting as the original comic story. As an intro to the greater Green Lantern mythos for newbies, this one might be perfectly suitable, but it’s very middle of the road for this direct-to-video project, and a little too much of a Green Lantern-shaped corporate project to really lose oneself in.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern — First Flight (2009)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Rewatching these DC animated movies has been a strange ride so far. I remembered enjoying Superman: Doomsday as decent but not noteworthy, New Frontier as an unassailable masterpiece, Gotham Knight as forgettable, corporate-driven trash, and Wonder Woman as being quite good. It’s strange to come to such different conclusions now, with Doomsday as a memorable story of grief on the part of Lois Lane despite the film’s off-putting and occasionally ugly stylistic choices, Frontier as fun and novel but hampered but its sudden and overt jingoism, Knight as stylish and fascinating, and Wonder Woman in particular as being much grosser and more sexist than I remembered. The change in my perspective on this one, however, is perhaps the most extreme to date. Green Lantern: First Flight is truly adult in a way that the preceding films have attempted but not achieved. And it’s not simply about going grim and dark through violence (although that is present here, and it’s spectacular), but through a more nuanced approach to the narrative and a few genuine surprises. 

Hal Jordan is a modern-day test pilot for Ferris Aircraft whose simulation pod is forcibly drawn to the dying corpse of extraterrestrial humanoid Abin Sur, who explains that he is a member of an extraterrestrial police organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and that he has chosen Hal as his successor. Within a fairly short time, several other members of the Corps show up to take Hal back to Oa, the planet from which the Corps operates under the supervision of the Guardians, little floating blue guys with red robes and giant heads. These beings were the first intelligent life in the universe, and they created the giant lantern-shaped battery from which the many members of the Corps draw their power. As the rest of the galaxy considers Earth to be a backwards planet of smelly, greedy, crude brutes, the Guardians are resistant to the idea of letting a human join the ranks of the Green Lanterns, but highly decorated and trusted veteran Sinestro requests the opportunity to train Hal and, in so doing, test his worthiness. Their first order of business is tracking down the man who dealt Abin Sur his mortal blow, and use him to locate his employer, the warlord Kanjar Ro, who is rumored to be building his own powerful battery to rival that of the Guardians. 

If you thought Wonder Woman speedran through that character’s origin (it handles in 20 minutes what took an hour or so in the 70s pilot movie), this one really puts the pedal to the metal, with Hal getting the ring before the 5 minute mark and him en route to Oa within three minutes of that scene (not counting the credits). That’s not a bad thing; New Frontier had already covered much of the same territory (albeit in a different era) and the ill-fated Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern was in production already at this time and would cover the origin story yet again, so it was wise to breeze through all of that and get to the meat of the story so that it could spend more time developing the plot rather than the exposition. That may be why this feels the most like a proper movie of these first five, since it hits the ground running and gets to the point with enough time to explore the characters better. By fifteen minutes into the film, Hal is already on a mission with Sinestro that plays out like a scene from Training Day, wherein Sinestro tracks down the mistress of their suspect and, using an orb that produces a narcotic-like euphoric effect, tortures her to the point of nearly overdosing until Hal intervenes (a little too late for us to find him “heroic,” to be honest, but the narrative requires that Sinestro pushes the envelope, so I’ll allow it). 

The cast here is great, as it has been in all of these films. Christopher Meloni is an obvious choice to voice a cop, even one who operates across an entire sector of space rather than simply a unit for special victims. The real standout, however, is Victor Garber as Sinestro. You don’t even really have to be familiar with the comics or any of its adaptations to see his turn to the dark side coming—I mean, his name is Sinestro—but this is one of the more interesting versions of this character that we’ve seen. He’s the epitome of a cop: looking down on those he is supposed to serve and protect, an outsider in the communities that he is policing who thinks his badge ring gives him immunity to instigate and escalate violence with little regard for collateral. He’s trusted and respected by his superiors and peers, but he doesn’t hide this side of himself from Hal for long, immediately saying upon their arrival at the standard wretched hive of scum and villainy that he suggested that the place be destroyed via meteor shower, only for his leaders to laugh off his earnest suggestion. Sinestro is often a character that it is difficult to take seriously—again, his name is Sinestro—but Garber imbues his performance with such strong contempt that he sells the character’s malice completely. It’s really something to behold. Juliet Landau, probably best known either for being Martin Landau’s daughter or for portraying Drusilla in Buffy and Angel, gives a great performance as minor character Labella that sells the pathos of her position, but it’s another actress best known for her genre work, Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, who deserves a call out here. As fellow Green Lantern Boodikka (I know), Helfer makes Boodikka vulnerable and trustworthy in a way that—spoilers for a fifteen year old movie incoming—make her betrayal of Hal all the more agonizing, even if the fact that it’s Helfer in the role means we should have seen that twist coming. 

When it comes to stakes and action/violence, this is the best of these films yet. Late in the film, Sinestro deactivates the lantern battery, preventing any Lanterns in the field from using their rings, so that any who were traveling through space or in a situation where they were protected by said ring are killed, with the rings then returning to Oa where they fall from the sky as thickly as rain in a raging storm. And that’s offscreen violence—characters die by falling into the walls of space transit tunnels and exploding into vapor, Sinestro temporarily reanimates the corpse of a fallen foe into a shambling semi-conscious undead thing in order to ask it some final questions, and one of Kanjar Ro’s men is sucked into space spine-first through a six-inch hole punched in the hull of a spaceship. It’s not simply darkness for the sake of being edgy, it’s often very inventive and integral to the plot. I’ve already given away too much, I fear, so I won’t spoil anything else, but I will say, this is the best one so far, and the most worthwhile one yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond