Yesterday Warner Bros. showed four new minutes of Green Lantern at Wonder Con and, if you’ve been paying attention to this site, then you know the reaction to it was spectacularly positive. Maybe that’s why they’ve made it a point to get that footage into the hands of as many people as possible as fast as possible, by immediately releasing it online.
You can now watch all four minutes of Green Lantern’s Wonder Con footage right here, embedded below or in HD on Apple. What you’ll see is something very different, and far grander, than anything you’ve seen from the movie so far. Play now.
If you saw the movie’s first trailer from a few weeks ago then you know that a lot has changed. Lantern’s suit, for instance, is now a darker color. The suit is a completely computer generated effect, which accounts for a lot of the problems with it, but that it is computer generated actually makes sense since it's not a real piece of cloth but something created by Lantern’s ring. They’ve also introduced a pretty cool concept for the use of his mask, which will allow Ryan Reynolds’ face to be seen more frequently on screen. I like it.
For me though, the really big improvement here is that this footage does more to separate Green Lantern from every other superhero movie, than anything we’ve seen from it before. This makes it clear that Lantern more than just another superhero out to fight crime tale, it’s a massive science fiction s[ace opera, a superhero movie on a galactic scale. That’s something we’ve never seen before, and that Warners has the guts to try this new direction for a genre which until I saw this footage seemed completely out of new ways to go, says a lot. If nothing else, when Ryan Reynolds says the oath, it ought to send chills down your spine.
The effects still aren’t perfect, but they’ll get better as they keep working on the film. Even if they don’t, I think it’s time we all started to get excited about Green Lantern. There’s something completely unique, maybe even special, going on here.
