People born in the six years comprising my micro-generation have either always lived in a world with Star Wars or don’t really remember what it was like before the saga began. I’m not giving Star Wars sole credit, because I’m sure it doesn’t deserve it, but it is a highly visible signpost on the road of special effects development, one of the big moments in the history of cinema that blew the doors off and made it seem as though anything were possible. They’ve been making movies out of books for as long as they’ve been making movies, but there were always some books that people felt were unfilmable, impossible to capture with a camera. But I’m of an age where we assume every good story will eventually be given a chance to grab cash at the box office. So playing Casting Call isn’t just an exercise in wishful thinking, it’s a stab at predicting the future.
And maybe more than that expectation, my post-Star Wars (and post-MTV and post-Atari and post-every-other-modern-entertainment-introduced-in-the-80’s) generation has an ingrained preference to see stories end up in some kind of video format. I’ve been playing Casting Call since I was nine years old or so. And despite the fact that I was always a weirdly bookish little kid who filled all of his downtime with reading, I have very few memories of finishing a book that don’t include my brain immediately going from “That was great!” to “I wish they would make that into a movie!” The shiny-sparkly appeal of moving live-action images was so strong that I just took it as a given that the movie would always be better than the book. It took a long time to even become aware of the things books could do better than movies, and the elements films were always forced to sacrifice to convert a story from paper to celluloid. Still, there’s just enough of that child’s-eye view of movie magic remaining in me that my adult cynicism about the industry doesn’t completely dictate my response to the ideas of movie adaptations; I still want the flicks to be cool, until they prove themselves otherwise.
I was thinking about this last weekend as my wife and I got sucked into watching the Oscars. (Hey, we love 30 Rock, we wanted to give Alec Baldwin a chance to make us laugh.) We didn’t make it anywhere close to the end of the telecast, but did see a few of the teasers of the Best Picture nominees, including one that was introduced by Ryan Reynolds. Whom I am now incapable of seeing in any context without thinking, “Huh. Green Lantern.”
Yes, they are making a live-action movie out of Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds as same. You may or may not be aware of this. At the moment the release date is June 17 2011, so if you haven’t scoped out the local showtimes on Fandango yet, I understand. But information like that is something I go actively looking for like it’s my job. I have it filed away in my mind. As Summer ’11 approaches I will be getting ready for a very important life-event: my fifth wedding anniversary. Oh, and also I’ll be trying to schedule a Green Lantern opening night excursion a couple weeks before that. But right now, with the movie over a year away, barely in production, rumors of its quality or faithfulness or lack thereof essentially non-existent, all I really have to obsess over is the casting of the lead character.
And I find myself oddly ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, Reynolds is a fine actor and I don’t automatically recoil at the thought of him stepping into Hal Jordan’s bright green boots. And for whatever it’s worth, Reynolds has some serious geek cred. In addition to all kinds of genre fare on his resume, from playing young Peter Pan in Hook to Hannibal King in Blade:Trinity (a standout performance, arguably the best thing about that whimpering conclusion to the trilogy) to Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which, I confess, I haven’t seen because no one has convinced me that I need to), Reynolds has always told anyone interviewing him how much he loves comics and for a long time was allegedly lobbying stridently for someone to make a movie of the Flash and cast him as the hero. (We reserve the right to save the deeper explorations of the Great Flash/Green Lantern Divide at a later date.) On the other hand, he’s just not exactly what I expected.
But that’s primarily because those expectations were curiously non-existent. I can claim that the following is not by design, because my fandom goes back to my innocent youth before I was remotely aware of noxious hipster notions of authenticity and such, but Green Lantern is kind of an ideal comic book character to geekily obsess over because he is so solidly second-tier. He’s neither Superman nor Spider-Man, by which I mean I can easily name famous non-geeks who are fans of those characters (e.g. Shaquille O’Neal for Supes) and any random person you stopped on the street would be able to name them if you showed them a picture. There’s a first-tier of comic book characters like that who are so culturally ubiquitous that if someone says “Oh, I love Wonder Woman!” it doesn’t mean much on the geek level. “I love Green Lantern” at least strongly implies that the speaker has been inside a comic book shop, and possibly to a convention or three. Green Lantern has never had a live-action tv show, really no precedents outside the comics at all unless you count the SuperFriends. (And a short-lived cartoon of his own in the 60’s. And a recent direct-to-DVD animated film. But most people would only recognize the SuperFriends.) On the other hand, in the insulated world of comics, he’s not an obscure character by any means. His namesake title has been published more or less continuously for close to 50 years. So there’s a steady stream of consumable content to feed the dedicated fan, who gets to hang out in the pleasant middle ground between the blah mass popularity of over-exposure and the frustrating wasteland of under-appreciation.
That’s where I’ve been for a couple decades of personal Green Lantern fandom and I simply never thought they would make a live action GL movie. Never even occurred to me. Not because I thought it was unfilmable, but just because it was a little too niche. Now that they are making the movie, my brain isn’t quite sure how to process it.
I’m not one of the bitterly disillusioned comics fans who has grown to hate comic book movies over the past ten or twenty years because “Hollywood always gets it wrong.” I very quickly made peace with judging the movies on their own merits, separate from the source material and separate from each other. I could run down almost all of the major adaptations and give my take on each one and they’d be as all over the map as anyone who wasn’t an initiated comic book collector, with probably a lot of overlap (I loved the first two X-Men movies and though the third one was a bit of a disappointing mess; ditto for Spider-Man’s trilogy; Daredevil was OK but a little off; Ghost Rider was god-awful; I’ve never seen any of the Punisher movies because I have no interest in the character; Iron Man was amazing and I eagerly anticipate the sequel, etc, etc). Even when Watchmen was in the process of becoming a movie, I didn’t feel any soul-searing angst, even though I count myself among those who think the graphic novel is one of the greatest and most significant examples of superhero storytelling in the comics medium. I figured they’d probably screw at least some of it up (and they did) and yet I still looked forward to seeing the movie, and I enjoyed the experience, mainly for that visuals-come-to-life magic that the kid in me eats up, and I recognized the flaws I had anticipated (and some I hadn’t) and I moved on.
But Watchmen isn’t mine, just like Spider-Man and Batman and Wolverine aren’t really mine, not the way Green Lantern is. Every other superhero movie that’s ever been made has been a potential source of moderate entertainment and/or intellectual interest. I don’t really want to admit it, but on some level I know it’s true, but Green Lantern is going to be more important to me than all the others put together. If it’s on par with The Dark Knight or Spider-Man 2, I’ll be elated. If it’s on par with Superman Returns, I’ll be crushed. (And as it probably goes without saying, if it has a bunch of CGI Uncanny-Valley-dwelling trying-too-hard Avatar-esque aliens, my outrage will reach murderous levels.) June of next year is still a long ways away, though, so mainly I’m just trying to stay open-minded and (more importantly) calm. I’m reasonably certain that the thought of the movie’s very real existence and all the possibilities it entails is a little too big for me to wrap my brain around, so I haven’t even tried.
Although every once in a while it does occur to me to wonder what it’s going to be like in the late spring of 2011, when all the department stores are flooded with movie tie-in action figures sculpted in Ryan Reynolds’s likeness. My personal Green Lantern museum is going to go supernova. Even if the movie bombs, that will be fun. Weird and unexpected, but fun. And hey, if the movie does bomb, then scooping up all that swag will be cheap, too.
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