In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night

I’m still a bit skeptical about Green Lantern, and its prospects for box office success. The concept of a ring that turns thought into reality is sort of wonderfully cheesy and magical, but I’ll be curious to see how it plays against the spate of superheroes grounded in at least theoretically plausible scientific explanations. I’m a big fan of getting plunged into societies that incorporate multiple species, but the movie’s setup asks us to take on a lot of aliens at once, and I’m not sure how much information we’re going to get and how much we’re just going to have to accept. I’m totally confused about the link between Peter Sarsgaard and the Giant Smoky Tentacles of Death. But even with all of that said, I think I’m finally on board for this movie:

I think a lot of what helps is that I’m watching Kings right now, and knowing that the same guys who wrote that, and Jack and Bobby, and Eli Stone wrote this is making me feel better about what the Green Lantern script will look like in totality. That, and I think Ryan Reynolds has the right combination of humor and wonder to pull this role off. If something this intensely weird happened to you, of course you’d make jokes about dead purple aliens as a way of expressing that you’re freaked out. And it’s nice to know that the other Lanterns are going to be reasonably funny, too. The whole guardians of the universe thing can get awfully dry awfully fast without an appreciation of the oddness of your role and your powers.