“Sinestro” #1 ” : Everything That’s Wrong With The New 52 In Microcosm

If you’ve followed my reviews regularly — or even semi-regularly — around these parts, two things are readily apparent : first, you need something better to do with your time, and second, I’m not terribly fond of DC’s “New 52” reboot.  By this point — nearly three years in — I was hoping it would have grown on me somewhat, I guess, or that I’d be at least so resigned to its inevitability that I’d just shut up and move on, but unfortunately neither of those things have happened, and I still feel the need to bitch about it for whatever reason, —even if it’s just tilting at windmills. Sorry, but I can be stubborn like that.

And DC’s being stubborn, too, aren’t they? I mean, a series that deviated from the norm a little bit would be welcome relief to those of us who like their characters but are bored to tears by how homogenized their universe has become, but so far they don’t seem too interested in catering to us in the least. We can take the stuff they’re putting out or leave it, but they’re not going to change.

Oh, sure — by and large it’s fair to say that I’ve walked away from the entire enterprise (apart from Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman, which is terrific stuff), but every now and again I find myself with nothing better to do with three bucks (I really should consider crack addiction at this point as a viable alternative) and pop my head in at some random spot to see if things have improved. Such was the case just like week, in fact, when I took a flier on the first issue of the new Sinestro monthly series written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Dale Eaglesham.

I can’t profess any particular love for this character, or for the entire “Green Lantern Universe” (or whatever you want to call it) as a whole, but Bunn seems to be a talent worth keeping an eye on if his work on Marvel’s Magneto is any indication (he seems to be drawing the short straw at both of the “Big Two” publishers and landing assignments on the villain books), so I figured what the heck? And I’ve heard that crack can be hazardous to your health, anyway.

Unfortunately, I think even a low-grade crack rock (and I’m assuming that’s all three dollars would get me) would probably give my brain cells more to do than Sienstro #1 did, because this book sucks all the way across the board. It suffers from the acute lack of personality that seems to be the calling card for the “New 52” in general, and while I’m sure the creators put a fair amount of sweat into this thing, the heavy editorial dictates that they’re forced to comply with in order to get a paycheck have resulted in making this yet another completely interchangeable, mass-produced, cookie-cutter offering.

The plot, near as I could be bothered to remember it, goes thusly : Sinestro is holed up on some barren rock floating around in space, determined to lead a life of solitude and contemplation, when his old ally/adversary (depending on the situation), Lyssa Drak, shows up and convinces him to don his tights again and fight to free the few people of his homeworld who are still alive. So he does, since he thought they’d all been wiped out. And the first person he’s called upon to save in his one-man cosmic rescue mission is — well, that would be telling. But that’s all that happens, and that’s where the story ends, so trust me when I say I’m not skimping on any details here.

As I said earlier, Bunn can write. but his talents are wasted on this drivel. This is a story that literally seems to have been born in an editorial meeting and then farmed out to freelancers to do the actual dirty work. The prose is stiff, the dialogue even stiffer, and the wretchedly formulaic nature of what DC has in mind for the character in the long haul oozes from every panel. Get ready for more of the same here, people.

Likewise, I’m willing to be that Eaglesham can draw pretty well, but you’d never guess it from the stale, derivative style he’s tasked with undertaking here. His Sinestro looks like the same guy we’ve always seen plus about 20 pounds of steroid-induced muscle growth, and the overall look of the book is, as with the “New 52” in general, that of a mid-’90s WildStorm comic that just happens to feature DC characters. Yeah, I know, I’ve made that exact same complaint before, but DC keeps putting out comics that have the exact same problem, so I’m just gonna keep it up until they either produce something even marginally different or I finally give up. Whichever comes first.

In any case, the end result here is a book you’ve already seen a thousand times before, even if it was called Green Lantern #20, Justice League #16, or Flash #9. DC either doesn’t care about letting their creators do anything unique these days, or has flat-out forgotten how to get out of the way and allow them that sort of freedom. Doug Mahnke’s variant cover (pictured above, underneath Eaglesham’s main one) comes as close to looking a little bit out of the bog-standard ordinary as anything we’re like to see from this series, but that’s about it as far as breaking loose from the assembly line goes.

Hmmmm  — if I have a few extra dollars left after picking up my usual stuff at the LCS this week, I think maybe I’ll track down that crack dealer after all.

TFG Does The Summer Blockbusters : “Green Lantern”

Seriously, folks, where’s all the hate coming from? I’ve seen these summer superhero blockbusters, and you’ve seen ’em too — please tell me how director Martin Campbell’s  cinematic adaptation of the venerable DC comics property Green Lantern is any worse than the rest? In fact, I’d argue — and not just to be contrarian, although I’m certainly not above such behavior — that it is, in fact, a damn sight better than most of them. And yet the word seems to be out — boxofffice.com, in fact, went so far as to call the buzz on this movie “toxic” — that even in a genre expressly designed to be nothing but eye-candy crap, Green Lantern is especially bad.

I say pshah (or however you sell that) on that. GL  is a goddamn blast.

All of which is not to say it doesn’t have its flaws. They are many, and they are varied — from Ryan Reynolds’ poorly-executed costume to Blake Lively’s thoroughly nondescript (to put it charitably — although she is easy on the eyes) performance as love interest Carol Ferris to the TV-movie-the-week “quality” of James Newton Howard’s musical score,  this movie has a shitload of problems.

But it’s also tremendously ambitious and not afraid to use every penny of its purported $200 million budget bringing summer braindead audiences exactly what they want, and probably a great deal more than what they expect. Sure, you can quibble about the movie’s overall unnecessarily somber tone, its few attempts at humor falling absolutely flat, the general unlikability of central character Hal Jordan, its ham-fisted attempts at dwelling on the metaphysical nature of fear itself, etc. — but why dwell on the negatives with this flick while giving all the other mega-blockbusters a pass when they throw in everything but the kitchen sink and most of it doesn’t work?

I think Green Lantern is coming in for extra criticism for a couple of reasons, one obvious and one less so. The first is that pre-release buzz to a large extent defines critical and audience perceptions of a film these days, and this flick was in deep trouble on that front from the word go (and even before it). At the concept/pre-production stage it went through all kinds of bizarre transmutations (at one point it was even envisioned as a straight-up farce to be directed by Jon Favreau with Jack black as an incompetent superhero) before the steady hand of James Bond veteran Campbell was brought in to provide sensibility and stability. The seas were calm until that first disastrous preview trailer hit, which again made the whole thing look like a half-assed comedy of some sort, and required an almost-immediate response in the form of a new, CGI-heavy trailer designed to calm all the fanboy nerves out there. The reaction to the second trailer was mostly positive, but the damage had been done — this was now perceived as a movie with problems.

Secondly, and this is where we get just a little bit theoretical so please bear with me, Green Lantern, rather than trying to eschew the inherent implausibility (and, frankly, absurdity) of its premise, which is something all self-respecting blockbusters just plain must do in order to provide a thin veneer of supposed “respectability” to their outlandish scale and nature, not only embraces, but flat-out flaunts how fucking impossibly crazy it is. This is a movie about a guy with a magical green ring that can do anything fighting a giant goddamn space octopus made out of pure fear energy, for God’s sake! I say screw the supposed “respectability” you’re never going to get anyway, and go for the gusto — and that’s exactly what Green Lantern does.

On a practical level, sure, there are some nice performances from Peter Sarsgaard as the demented villain Hector Hammond (and this is a flat-out great insane movie baddie, folks), tim Robbins as his morally and politically corrupt US Senator father, and the criminally0underutilized Angela Bassett as alien-researcher Dr. Amanda Waller. Mark Strong is also solid as bad-add GL Corps member (and future bad guy if they ever do a sequel) Sinestro. But the main star here is the CGI, as is always the case with this stuff, and it’s straight-up awesome to look at. Yes, what’s unfolding on the screen is patently, even hysterically, absurd — but then so is what we’re seeing in Thor, Transformers, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, you name it. But the scale and scope of the story here is such that you can’t really run and hide from the absurdity and pretend it’s not there — you’ve either gotta embrace it all the way, or go home. Give Green Lantern credit for never shying away from what it is and for not being afraid to fail. It’s as if Campbell knew that some of this shit was gonna hit, some was gonna miss, and he had no choice but to go all in and put every one of his cards on the table. He shoots for the moon each and every time and if he doesn’t get there at least he sure as shit tried.

And that’s where I think this movie ultimately succeeds. What it lacks in brains and believability it more than makes up for in sheer balls. This is a movie that knows what it’s supposed to do and occasionally isn’t afraid to try to be even a bit more than what it is. there’s no cruise control setting here, folks — Campbell and his cohorts got up every morning and went the fuck to work. The end result isn’t high cinematic art or even anything close to it, but then that was hardly the goal. Their objective was to hit you with everything they’ve got and then some, and while admittedly a great number of their punches miss, those that hit really wallop the hell out of you. Why waste your time with movies that insult your intelligence by even pretending for a minute that they have any? Go all out, embrace your inner 12-year-old, stick your brain in a formaldehyde jar in case you decide you need it again after the movie, and kick back and enjoy the spectacle. That’s all these summer superhero mega-monoliths are — at least Green Lantern has the guts to admit it and drag you along for a thoroughly entertaining ride. A guy in the seat in front of me summed it up best when he said “Fuckin’-A right” as the credits rolled, and it occured to me that somewhere Martin Campbell should be smiling, as I can’t imagine a more perfect reaction to his handiwork.