The Green Lantern Movie Is Still Bad

5 min readI’VE FOUND A lot of ‘hidden gem’ movies through the years. As any devout connoisseur of film will tell you, even if you see just about everything, it’s still not everything—there’s always stuff that will slip through the cracks. And so it creates the opportunity for discovery. The opportunity to find something that you always heard was good, but never got the chance to see. The opportunity to watch something thought to be terrible, but that you can go against the grain and find merit in. The opportunity to pick up on something that was dismissed at the time, but later proven to be more-than-worthy—“ahead of it’s time,” as the phrase often goes.One of my favorite discoveries of recent years has been the Josie and the Pussycats movie from 2001. As a kid of the ’90s and early 2000s (and one with a younger sister), my eyes were often glued to Cartoon Network, and so the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon was a common sight in my house. I was aware of the film, but for most of my life also knew of its reputation as a box office bomb with middling reviews. But the tide turned in recent years, and word of its sly genius crept into my world. In 2024, I finally watched—and, yeah, Josie and the Pussycats rules. Not only does it adapt the cartoon’s story into (what was then) the modern day, but it features great performances (including truly Oscar-worthy work from Parker Posey and Alan Cumming), well-written catchy songs, and an underlying social commentary that’s sharp, clever, and cutting all at once. Josie and the Pussycats is a great movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, can be a great discovery.Given that I was a Cartoon Network kid, the Green Lantern was also a character often in my sights. The Justice League cartoon was on often, and while I never dove deep into the character, I was aware of who he was and what he did—and when I heard of a Green Lantern movie coming out in 2011, I was excited… until the movie came out, and was pummeled with terrible reviews and an even worse reputation.Warner Bros.That reputation hasn’t gotten much better through the years (and the fact that Green Lantern’s star, Ryan Reynolds, frequently uses it as the butt of jokes doesn’t help).But here’s the thing: HBO’s Lanterns—which tells the story of Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart (Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre)—is really good. It tells a grounded thriller/mystery story that would work by itself in a nutshell, but also adds in tons of Green Lantern lore that appeases both new fans and die-hards. Hell, it even organically ties in Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, a third Green Lantern who debuted in 2025’s Superman film. For a lot of different reasons, it’s a great show.So great, in fact, that it made me curious, 15 years later, to check out the Green Lantern movie. The film follows Hal Jordan (Reynolds), a cocky test pilot who becomes Earth’s first Green Lantern. Lanterns viewers learn most of this backstory from the show, but I was curious nonetheless to see how it played out. It couldn’t be that bad, right? Well, I was mostly wrong.The Green Lantern movie isn’t so bad to start: We’re introduced to Jordan and Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), who work for Carol’s father’s company. And when the story is on Earth, it’s fine. We even meet eventual villain Hector Hammond (a wonderfully hammy Peter Sarsgaard, doing the best work of anyone in the movie), whose father (Tim Robbins) is a U.S. Senator. All of this stuff is fine! We even get introduced to Amanda Waller, a ruthless staple in future DC Universes played by Viola Davis, here played by Angela Bassett.Where the movie completely falls off the rails is in a moment Lanterns fans heard through Hal Jordan’s mouth: When he discovers Abin Sur’s crashed spaceship and is chosen as Earth’s first Green Lantern. This is where, I thought, the movie might be helpful—maybe this can help fill in some vital Green Lantern lore. I was, once again, mostly wrong. (For Green Lantern lore, we highly recommend just going to the comics.)Warner Bros.It’s at this point that the movie’s pace slows to a halt. It’s at this point that everything becomes ugly green CGI nonsense. It’s at this point that the script starts to spit out platitude after platitude, cliché after cliche. It’s a this point that things start getting bad. And worst of all? There’s somehow still about an hour left.For all the dated CGI and the cliche-ridden script, that’s Green Lantern’s biggest sin: it feels completely stuck in mud. The movie isn’t even two hours long, but it drags. I remember having the thought in the age of peak superhero movies that the sequel is almost always more fun, because you get the whole movie with our hero as our hero, whereas the original film usually spends about half its runtime getting them there. This is kind of the case in Green Lantern, but it just doesn’t know what to do with any of its characters at all.Lanterns rights these wrongs by grounding this lore in a world where this stuff makes sense, having the story relayed in ways that feel organic (Hal Jordan telling his story on TV, and in an intimate setting to John Stewart, rather than just blurting things out randomly). It makes the characters supremely likable. It creates a world where the stakes feel real, and where the tension jumps off the screen. It does stuff on HBO that the film version didn’t come close to achieving in cinemas.The Green Lantern—all versions—is a tricky character to crack. He’s literally a Space Cop, which can be pretty cool if deployed correctly, but pretty lame if hitting the wrong notes. And you can see why the powers that be at Warner Bros. opted to largely stay away from this world for a decade and a half after the fiasco that was Green Lantern. It was the right move. And maybe someday the Green Lanterns will make their way back to the big screen.But at the end of the day, there’s really only one takeaway from the Green Lantern experience: Thank the superhero gods for Lanterns. Watch Green Lantern (2011) HereEvan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.