Green Lantern

Sinestro's bipolar, Hector Hammond's a screaming chump with space mumps, and Hal Jordan's an ego-maniacal jerk-off nursing Hot Shots! flashbacks. Above all, Green Lantern feels like a cack-handed best-of reel, compiled from a yawning TV serial kin to Smallville. We get massive stretches of Earth bound boredom, while Hal selfishly refuses his space-cop calling, until his exact neighbourhood is threatened. As a DC second stringer, Green Lantern would have been well advised to pattern itself after the easy breezy Iron Man. Instead of actualised joy, we get bum note hissy fits and vapid anti-romance, burning screentime and squirrelling away budget for dimwitted smoke monster climaxes. Green Lantern is impenetrably dull, and content to waste the brief vim outer space offers by bogging events down with intelligence insulting speeches - what exactly can the Masters of the Universe learn from a huckster, plane crasher that hates the working class? That's right - we're all 'only human' deep down. Work is already underway on a Green Lantern 2. The mind boggles.

Green Lantern: First Flight

Since Justice League: The New Frontier firmly established an origin for the character, Green Lantern: First Flight is allowed to ditch the usual ability discovery and zap straight into intergalactic policing. Hal Jordan's Green Lantern hasn't ever maintained a constant presence in Bruce Timm's DC animated universe. His priors are limited to the aforementioned period piece and a brief cameo in a time-slipped Justice League Unlimited two-parter. First Flight plays it taciturn, Jordan quietly sniffing out the motives of his new allies and taskmasters, before shining in a series of hyperbolic beam battles. Director Lauren Montgomery's film seizes the cosmic implications of the Green Lantern Corp, wrapping Jordan's trainee efforts in a rich environment of baffling realities and alien otherness. Jordan, a daredevil test-pilot on Earth, takes it all in his stride. The spiky, extraterrestrial characters also work as a further departure from the usually rounded house style, and then as a sub-textual body ideal. Jordan is schlubby in Terra civvies, weighed down by oversized baggies that obscure his outline. In Lantern duds he's sleek and gleaming, his space-cop armour glistening like an insect's carapace. Animated man takes his place amongst the stars.

"In brightest day.."

The trailer for the newest direct-to-video animated offering from Warner Bros. Animation, Green Lantern: First Flight, is out. With rumours circulating that Warner Brothers are looking to Green Lantern as a rival super-franchise to Marvel's unfolding Iron Man series, it'd be easy to see this as product interest toe dipping. Thankfully, there's enough talent in this that it'll likely end up making a live-action take irrelevant: Lauren Montgomery follows up her directing stint on the lively Wonder Woman and Superman: Doomsday, with Bruce Timm producing, and Alan Burnett on writes. First Flight focuses on Silver Age space-cop Hal Jordan, his induction into the Green Lantern Corp, and burgeoning rivalry with assigned mentor Sinestro. Although barely clocking in over a minute, the First Flight trailer is full of promise: Star Wars Cantina brawls, inventive blunt trauma will objects, and determination Chakra Z-rays. See for yourself. First Flight is out July.