Overhype: Green Lantern to be like "Star Wars"

You know how there are always rumours and comments for upcoming films, sometimes from fan speculation, other times from people who actually worked on the movie. Well it dawned on me that we usually forget all these rumours and comments once we've actually seen the movie. And I thought it would be fun to go back and review some of the things people have said, after I've actually watched the movie myself, and determine which were true, and which are just the results of the studios overhyping the movie.


The recent superhero movie that I thought was really a big disappointment to me (the bigger the expectation the bigger the disappointment), was Green Lantern. Before the movie came out, I distinctly remember someone saying that Green Lantern was going to be like Star Wars. I searched and came back with these two quotes:

“It’s not a comic book movie as much as an epic adventure with huge scope and scale, a space opera in the vein of Star Wars with an Earthbound Top Gun vibe” [Greg Berlanti, producer and writers of the film]

“I wandered through the art department, and that’s what sold me, seeing this universe that’s created and the scale of it all. They’re taking the Green Lantern canon from the comics and they’re extending it out into this new medium. Our goal is to make the first superhero who really goes on a ‘Star Wars’ kind of epic journey, and this mythology goes back a lot further than Star Wars." [Ryan Reynold's, portrays Hal Jordan/Green Lantern in the film]

Really? Where was the space opera? If Berlanti was referring to the few shots of the Green Lantern Corps we saw in the movie, that really wasn't "Star Wars" like at all.

We never got to see Jordan interact with anyone alien except Tomar-Re, Kilowog and Sinestro. And the rest of his interactions are on earth.

As for Reynold's comment about it being as epic as Star Wars, this first movie was really not inspiring at all. Whereas in Star Wars we saw a young Luke Skywalker take his first step to train as a Jedi, what did we see Hal Jordan do? He goes to Oa for training, and gives up after a bout with Kilowog and Sinestro.

We didn't get to see much of his Green Lantern training at all, which I was really hoping to see. I wanted to see him in Green Lantern bootcamp, interacting with aliens from other sectors, showing them that the first human to be a Green Lantern wasn't a pushover. Instead he showed the whole Corp that humans were a lousy species that flew off when the going got tough. Great way to start an "epic" story.

This is definitely one of the times where the people involved in the film really got way ahead of themselves in selling the movie.

[Greg Berlanti's quote taken from indiewire]
[Ryan Reynold's quote taken from movieline]