Rhapsodies

I always like to give superhero shows and movies the benefit of the doubt. It is one of my favorite genres after all. Regrettably, this leaves me even more likely to get disappointed when they fail my expectations.

So having said that I just saw the premiere of Green Lantern the series on Cartoon Network. …

I wanted to like it, really I did, but regrettably, like the movie earlier this year, I left disappointed. It wasn’t anything specific. More accurately, it was a whole lot of little things. Let’s start with the most important element, the plot. Now I realize that this was the pilot, and regrettably, the pilot episode tends to be fairly weak because there are very few good ways to dump in that much information without interfering with the story. While this was mostly the case in Green lantern the series, half the time it seemed to assume that the audience had seen this summer’s movie or was at least familiar with the comic books. It pretty much started us in the middle knowing who Hal Jordan was as well as the corps and the key elements of the setting, and then promptly threw us into the deep end introducing the villains (in this case the Red Lanterns) and the setting of the series (unless something changes in the next few episodes it looks like Hal and Kilowog will be wandering the “frontier” for the next nine months) 

Frankly, I’m tired of plots being dependent on everyone being stupid. Being the hero seems to mean always jumping into the fray with no idea what the threat is, with no plan and a half-charged ring, and many of the problems wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the blinding hubris of the Guardians of the Universe.

As a Science fiction fan, it always bugs me when a writer doesn’t consider all of the possibilities of the setting. The Green Lantern rings are supposed to be able to do anything. The marketing of the show says as much, saying the hero is only limited by his imagination. Despite that, the rings so far are mostly only used for flight, shields, and shooting beams of energy. Granted, in this series so far, Hal’s presented as a bit of a meathead, but still… You’d think he’d have a little bit more imagination than that. At least be able to use it to do two things at once, so he didn’t crash the plane he was flying when he became Green Lantern to save a runaway train.

Finally, the whole look of the thing was off, I’m generally cool with a simplified style be it from aesthetic or budget choices. Perhaps they wanted something like the look of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but what they got was just sloppy.

Anyway, I hope that all of my problems with this pilot are because of the usual problems of a pilot, and the actual series improves. So far, I’m not getting my hopes up.