Green Lantern: First Flight 2009
This DC animated movie didn’t get great reviews when it came out, but I still wanted to see it since I don’t know anything about Green Lantern and the live action movie starring Ryan Reynolds got terrible reviews. The reviews on these direct-to-video animated movies can be spotty since there usually only a handful of reviews for Rotten Tomatoes to use (and Metacritic doesn’t even try). One complaint was that the movie is light on the origin story of Hal Jordan, a test pilot (of course) who becomes Green Lantern by being given a powerful ring. Rather than see him learning about his new powers and trying to figure out what to do with them, he learns to use the powers very quickly and is soon caught up in galactic intrigue. I actually liked that approach. At only 75 minutes typically, these movies don’t have to pad the plot at all and you still get a lot of background on the power source of the ring and the many, many other ring bearers throughout the galaxy. So it is more the origin story of the rings than Hal Jordan. Jordan (voiced by Christopher Meloni, who I‘m not familiar with) isn’t that well fleshed out, but is a fun, heroic character who seems unrealistically unimpressed by this huge galaxy of aliens and powers that human aren’t technologically ready to participate in. The final conflict drags a little and is a little bit of a disappointment (a big fist fight), but there are some neat things along the way including how Jordan can summon clever, sometimes silly, powers out of the ring (e.g. a giant green flyswatter to dispatch insect-like aliens). I feel like I probably am too soft on these DC animated movies, which are maybe just slightly more grown up versions of Saturday cartoons, but I enjoyed this movie despite it taking place almost entirely away from Earth.
Written: 14 May 2022