Green Lantern: Beware My Power - Review

So there’s a new direct-to-video animated Green Lantern movie that just came out, titled “Green Lantern: Beware My Power”, and most of the people I know seem really mad about it.  The movie had detractors from the moment it was first announced, with some people getting upset that John Stewart was the focus of the movie instead of their favorite character, while others were busy getting mad about perceived inaccuracies between the trailer and the comic book source material. Some people even tried to extrapolate the entire plot from the trailer and then rage against a story that they themselves made up.  And then the entire movie leaked about a week before the official release, and that opened up the floodgates of angry people who couldn’t wait to tell you why something they didn’t agree with was the worst thing in the world.

Probably the worst part about being immersed in online communities is how keyed in I am to the most negative parts of Green Lantern fandom…people who want something specific out of Green Lantern, and will always feel disappointment and resentment if they don’t get it.  Sometimes that escalates into extreme selfishness, because in their minds, they've already figured out what's best for the brand, and any deviation from that idea is seen as an insulting mistake.  And as short-sighted as all of that is, I understand where it comes from, because I’ve experienced something like it myself.  I need to tell you about my first time watching Justice League and Justice League Unlimited…and I promise, this is important to my review, so bear with me.

The first time in my life I’d ever seen Green Lantern achieve any sort of mainstream popularity was with the rise of the Justice League cartoon.  Suddenly, people of all ages who don’t read Green Lantern, or don’t even read comics, knew who John Stewart was.  I walked down the street, and some random kid pointed at my shirt, because he recognized the Green Lantern symbol from tv, and I’d never seen anything like that happen before.  Suddenly, this little corner of the DC Universe that not many people pay attention to was gaining popularity, and becoming known to people outside of our little circle.  And as happy as I was about that, I also became frustrated with the cartoon.  The early seasons presented a very limited scope of what a Green Lantern ring could do, and even though it did get better eventually, it never lived up to the kind of greatness I’d spent my life reading about in the comics.  I felt this overwhelming sense that they were missing their big chance to prove what Green Lantern was worth, and I wanted so badly for the best aspects of Green Lantern to be expressed on tv…I wanted everybody watching to understand what I already knew, to understand why Green Lantern was so great.  I wanted them to know why my favorite thing should also be their favorite thing.  Even the Flash got that one big moment in the series finale, where he got to show the audience just how powerful he really is…but that moment never came for Green Lantern.  And I spent a very long time tuning into that show, hoping that each new episode would finally be the one that gives John a massive display of power, or just takes things up a notch in general, to really drive home the point that I wanted to make.  It wasn’t until much later, on a second re-watch, that I realized there wasn’t anything wrong with the approach the show took in portraying Green Lantern…they made the choices they made based on what was best for the story they wanted to tell, and the result was a version of Green Lantern that meant something to a lot of people, who to this day think of John Stewart as their definitive Green Lantern thanks entirely to Justice League.  That show didn’t give me what I wanted to see from an animated Green Lantern, but it gave a massive audience exactly what they needed to become Green Lantern fans themselves, so I guess the people who made that show actually did know what they were doing after all.

I had to come to terms with the fact that an adaptation of Green Lantern wasn’t about showing off the ultimate greatness of my favorite thing.  This show didn’t exist to satisfy my personal need for validation.  And if I didn’t like it, so what?  It still made more Green Lantern fans, and that’s a higher priority than just catering to me.

At some point, every fan has to learn the same lesson…that if all you want out of an adaptation is to see the version of the thing that you already like, then you probably shouldn’t be watching the adaptation at all, because by definition an adaptation changes it into something else.  Maybe that something else is good, maybe it’s bad, but its quality has nothing to do with how close it is to the source material.  So no, I don’t care how many different stories they pulled from to make this movie, or what parts of who’s origins they combined to get us here…all I care about is the final product as its own stand-alone thing, and here’s my review of that:

“Green Lantern: Beware My Power” is the story of John Stewart struggling to deal with the horrible thing’s he’s seen and done during his career in the military, and is forced to work through that trauma on an entirely different battlefield when he’s drafted into the Green Lantern Corps, as a last-ditch effort to prevent the galaxy from being plunged into endless war.  He assembles a rag-tag team from across the DC Universe, uncovers a few conspiracies, and everybody learns a little bit about themselves along the way.  The story is filled with easter eggs for fans of Green Lantern and the Justice League, and there are a few moments that I legitimately didn’t see coming.

Most of my problems with the movie come down to limits placed on production, either in terms of the budget or the amount of time that was given to complete the film.  The animation can get a little janky, like they’re making due with fewer frames than they needed.  Also, the voice acting isn’t great, and nobody but Green Arrow sounds comfortable in their role.  The biggest problem with this movie is that it felt slow, not because of anything to do with the plot, but because of constant pausing…there was an extra beat between most lines of dialogue, and it extended every conversation in a way that felt unnatural.  I don’t know what the production schedule for this movie was like, but I’m willing to bet that just about all of these problems are the result of deadlines that were too short.  As someone who spends a lot of time editing audio, I can tell you that devoting a little more time to it can make a massive difference, and even change the flow of a line of dialogue in a dramatic way.  And that’s not even taking into account the fact that these same voice actors probably could’ve nailed more of these lines if they had been able to do a few more takes.  But if the people above you don’t give you an extension, then you have to settle for what you’ve got.  And in all fairness, even if we do understand why the final product turned out the way it did, we still have to judge it for what it is, and that’s what I’m going to do.

“Green Lantern: Beware My Power” is like a greatest hits mashup of different cosmic DC stories, and uses elements from all of them to tell a new story that never quite lives up to the sum of its parts.  But despite that, this movie very firmly establishes an identity of its own that stands apart from everything it draws inspiration from, and manages to tell a pretty nice John Stewart story amidst all the chaos.  It’s by no means the best of the ever-growing collection of direct-to-video animated Green Lantern movies, but it’s not the worst one either.  If I had to give this a letter grade, it’d be a B…it needs improvement, and they can clearly do better, but this movie is nowhere near as bad as some people would have you believe.  John’s character arc in this movie is a good one, and it ends on a hopeful note for the future of the Green Lantern Corps, and I look forward to seeing that future unfold in more movies down the line.

The more I think about it, the more sure I am that if this exact story was told in this exact way, only it was printed in a comic and labeled as an Elseworlds or alternate universe, nobody would have a problem with it, because everyone would understand that it’s just an off-beat story that doesn’t have anything to do with the main version or cannon of Green Lantern…and that’s exactly what this movie is.  That’s what all comic book adaptations are.  But because it’s a movie, and not a comic, suddenly there’s all this extra pressure to represent everything that Green Lantern means to its fans, and expectations like that are ridiculous.  These stories don’t exist to give us validation, and sometimes their true power can only be found in the positive impact they have on people other than us, people who will go on to become Green Lantern fans because of this, and whether or not we can find value in it ourselves is irrelevant.  Green Lantern is bigger than us, it’s bigger than our specific preferences, and the next generation of fans can come from anywhere…even a movie that everyone agreed was bad before it even came out.