When you consider the fact that it will be one of the biggest films of next year, it's fairly surprising how little of Green Lantern we've seen. Sure, we've seen some stills and those at Comic Con got to see some footage (which, strangely, never leaked online), but it's really all still a mystery. Fortunately, Greg Berlanti, who was one of four writers on Green Lantern, directed the upcoming Life As We Know It and is currently doing press rounds which means only one thing - journalists squeezing out as much as they can.
The Los Angeles Times recently spoke with Berlanti about the project and the writer-director was happy to put the film in a frame of context. While he recently said that The Flash will be darker, sharing elements with Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, the comparisons for Green Lantern are much lighter, namely Top Gun and Star Wars.
The character itself was Top Gun before Maverick. He was a guy who had to learn how to care. He shut down early in his life because of something that happened to him, and suddenly he doesn’t just have to care about himself, he doesn’t just have to care about the planet, he has to care about the entire universe. It was writ so large. The other side of it was that he was always the comic-book version of Luke Skywalker, imagining that you’re picked for this group of heroes that’s there to defend the entire universe. It always had this great kind of wondrous scope to it, and as a kid who ran around in his Superman Underoos, it was a chance to do a superhero movie that went off planet. When you look at all the superhero characters, Hal Jordan is considered sort of Tier 2, but when you talk about which ones have gone off planet and gone beyond our world, he shoots up to No. 1 for a lot of people and goes to the forefront of everybody’s mind.
Then there's the matter of Ryan Reynolds. When he originally came on board, some fans were upset, seeing the actor as too goofy for a more serious character like Green Lantern. Berlanti, however, saw him as something else.
Hal’s a little bit of a jerk, but you have to still love him. [Reynolds] can play that, and he can play sweetness...There’s an element about him that guys look at and go, “Oh, I’d hang out with that guy.” That realness is what Ryan has in spades, that charm. You have to believe that here’s a guy who hasn’t succeeded at anything in his life but is still being picked for the most important job in the universe because the universe sees something in him that he doesn’t see in himself. We have to believe that it’s there, but we have to believe that it’s hidden and that it comes out. He has all that. And Hal was funny but offhandedly funny. Ryan has that.
Star Wars and Top Gun seems like an okay mix, provided the latter is a more because Hal Jordan is a pilot and less because he likes to play volleyball. Seeing as the film won't be released until June 17th next summer, it may still be a while until we see the first trailer (by comparison, Iron Man 2 came out in May and we saw the first trailer in December). Then again, I've been hearing rumor of a trailer being attached to Harry Potter come November, so who knows? Maybe it will be sooner than you think.
