Green Lantern: First Flight

A pleasant introduction to one of DC Comics most beloved heroes, an origin story well adapted and finely crafted in terms of its animation. I find most DC films from its animated universe to be of top-quality, and this effort is no less. Perhaps it doesn't fully share the spectacularity of Justice League films or the grandeur of Superman, or the somberness of Batman, but it feels rather cosmic in its nature, it takes on an astronomical dimension obviously due to Green Lantern's stories mostly taking place in outer space. To me is utterly satisfying when a hero and their stories develop an atmosphere of their own, and are able to produce a sense of warming familiarity when you are watching.

Make sure you watch this, if you don't know the first thing about Hal Jordan's Green Lantern, definitely check this movie out, and even if you do you'll realize what a fine origin story WB has in store for fans.

What did you expect from this? Animation that is decent, but nothing spectacular, lots of pretty colors and funny faces, everyday guy with large manly jaw becoming galactic marshal rookie, rookie fighting evil, rookie defeating evil. I knew what was going to happen, who was the bad guy and how good will prevail from the first 10 minutes, yet it still was fun :) Sneaky sobs!

Bottom line: it's a cartoon for kids. Nobody sings, thank you very much, but there isn't much humour in it either. A simple plot which explains the birth of the Green Lantern superhero. To their defense, I doubt they could have squeezed much in it anyway, as the plot was packed with action from beginning to start.

It just fails to really introduce us to Hal Jordan before he gets the powers, and after that, he's kind of a "Gary Stu" (male's version of Mary Sue) that in my opinion is a pretty weak character beyond some fine jokes here and there.

Yet, when the plot of the actual story takes off, it has great pace, good twists and particularly violent action (compared to other movies of the genre), that serves the (considerably serious) tone well.

The third act is more "typical", but the animation finds another gear (and the great use of color and good desings help) and the action is good enough to end the movie on a high point.

A very solid effort from the writers and animators at DC. The origin of GL, Hal Jordan, is solidly told, if a little quickly and predictably. We have the dying alien, Abin Suhr, giving his ring to someone worthy, ace pilot Hal, a decent guy doing a hard job and trying to have fun with it.

And fun he has! Hal takes to the ring like a duckling takes to water, and soon he is flying high with the other Green Lanterns, getting into trouble on alien worlds, and saving the day.

The pluses of the movie are many. The animation is smooth, and green never looked so good. The voices are excellent. Christopher Meloni excels as Hal, and Victor Garber is suavely evil as Sinestro. All the other voice roles are handled well; in fact, there are no slackers in the bunch.

The music is also excellent, providing drama when necessary, being playful and light at others. As always, the alien worlds were depicted imaginatively. Watching this movie might have been somewhat predictable, but it was a fun ride all the way.

Its only drawback was that Hal took to his power ring too quickly. No practice, no failures in forming constructs...nada. A little exposition might have made the screenplay work better, but all the same, it was enjoyable, and the ending fight between Hal and Sinestro was superbly staged. A worthy addition to any fan's animated collection.

Green Lantern is part of a group of superheroes in comics that I'm only familiar with on the periphery, either from seeing some parts of Justice League or hearing here and there about his powers, the ring, the whole fleet of Green Lanterns, the color codes and space battles, etc. It's safe to say then than, for the novice crowd, First Flight is an ideal choice to watch. It has all of the fast pace and (mostly) terrific animation that one's come to expect from the Warner brothers animation with collaboration from DC Comics. This comes now after a few other new animated straight-to-video movies: Superman Doomsday, Justice League New Frontier and Wonder Woman (the last one not yet seen by me). And it's safe to say that Green Lantern can claim its rank with those other examples, nestled most likely in quality and entertainment between Superman and Justice League.

It basically plops us into his origin story, or at least a solid re-telling of it. We get the story of Hal Jordan, who was a test pilot until he came across a dying alien with a green ring on his finger which he entrusted to Jordan. From then on, he's the Green Lantern, but not the only one: he's met on Earth by Sinestro, a red-skinned arrogant jerk, and a few other alien Green Lantern folk, who take him along into space to meet with the council that guides the Lanterns in their adventures. In this case, they have to find the "Yellow element", which is like a yellow machine that is the one weakness of the Green Lanterns: this color is the one thing that can block their power, and in the wrong hands it can wrought devastation on the whole universe. And, meanwhile, Sinestro maneuvers behind the scenes...

Oh, it's not exactly the 'easiest' sort of story and world, so to speak, to enter into on a first viewing with only limited experience to Jordan and the Lantern corp. But once one is acclimated to everything, the animators and filmmakers take it from there and make it a rollicking science fiction action story, with touches of the space opera (sometimes blatantly, like with the rip-off of the Cantina scene from Star Wars when Hal and Sinestro go to interrogate someone). While some of the supporting characters are quite stock-like (i.e. Madsen's honorable pig character), and the usage of CGI, especially during the back-story exposition on the Yellow Element, is sub-par, it's mostly compelling thanks to Jordan being a heroic hero and Sinestro being a complex enough villain in the story. In fact, Sinestro was what made this far better than I initially expected, as a character who is on the side of good, but has his very questionable methods - and then crosses that line where he can never go back from.

I imagine that for the die-hard fans of Lantern from the comics, who perhaps aside from the die-hard fans of WB/DC animation, this might not be anything too new storywise, but the best thing about it is it doesn't need to be. This is the first time we've seen any kind of direct-to-video, or just perhaps any, actual feature film version of the Lantern story (until the Martin Campbell film comes out anyway), and as an origin story it does what it needs to. It sets up its universe (again, so to speak), delivers us interesting characters (more or less), and is jam-packed with intense action and some very particular and amazing scenes of animation. Another Bruce Timm produced effort worth watching, if not an immediate must-see unless one is itching to learn more about one of DC's most popular characters (after, you know, Batman and Superman and maybe Wonder Woman too).