Failure to Launch: Lauren Montgomery's Green Lantern First Flight

 Voices of Christopher Meloni, Victor Garber, John Laroquette, Tricia Helfer, Michael Madsen, Larry Drake. Dir. Lauren Montgomery, Warner Bros. Animation, 2009

Early in the proceedings of Lauren Montgomery's straight-to-video origin story for Justice League mainstay Green Lantern, members of the council of immortal, intergalactic Guardians governing the Green Lantern Corps spend one scene establishing the film's basic theme of not judging by appearance, reputation - really, just not judging, by, of course, judging the living shit out of humanity in the form of its unknowing proxy, Hal Jordan. The scene brought to mind one of my favorite album titles, Dave Edmunds' Subtle as a Flying Mallet. Whatever a flying mallet lacks of the former, it usually compensates for in its brute effectiveness. A blunt instrument has its uses.

First Flight and Montgomery, in the first reel, appear either unaware of the fact, or unwilling to exploit it, outside of kicking our ass with its Big Idea, with the gusto I look for in comic book heroes. Pretty soon, a Guardian will say, "You are at your best when you are at your worst," and we still won't have seen the First Flight's story achieve the same impact.

This is the fear First Flight inspired in its first few minutes. A few minutes after that, the story reveals itself to be theme-dominated, as Sinestro, Hal Jordan's cosmic-cop mentor, goes on your basic pro-fascist rant that seemed comic-book-villainous in '09 and now, of course, like most any day in the US between Jan 20, 2017 and Jan 20, 2021. So the whole movie offers a meditation on the use/abuse of power in identity politics, aka the "can't we all just get along"-movie.

The only problem in the above is that it sounds darn lofty and highbrow when contrasted with the movie, itself. Which, despite offering plenty of action and intergalactic, um, stuff, consistently failed to hook my attention and, more importantly, my affection in the first two acts, the usual window of empathy in a superhero movie.

First Flight eschews the standard superhero-movie trope, the discovering-my-powers montage. While that montage has become a trope, it's usually effective at establishing the hero as a guy or gal we'd like to have a beer with. Without it, First Flight forces us to develop our empathy/sympathy for Jordan as the story unfolds. That could work, I suppose, but Christopher Meloni, so great as Detective Stabler on Law&Order SVU, would need give him many chances. I understand that Warners and DC were doing an "origin story" for an audience long in love with the character, but it asks newcomers to this hero's world to assimilate a great deal of character and story without a more traditional origin-story structure via a voice ensemble of good names living down to less-than-great material.

I'm committing one of my own cardinal sins. I'm composing this as I watch First Flight for the first time. That's not giving a film a fair shake, but First Flight shrugged off shaking hands with me when it needed to and, though I'm following the plot, I don't especially give a damn about it. I watch enough movies to know this is not going to improve. Or end well.

What is it with DC and Warners? They got their premiere properties, Superman and Batman, just right for movie audiences at the dawn of the '80s and '90s, fine tuning a rebooted Bats to a not-yet-surpassed gold standard in the mid-late Aughts. And they only got Supes dead-right twice, in Superman: The Movie, and Suprrman II. Since, DC has mucked about trying to reinvent the son of Jor-El for a modern audience with as much success, so far, as Marvel with its post-Raimi Spidermen. Nor have they contented themselves to weakening Supes. Warners/DC also ignored Chris Nolan's designated next-Bats, David Gordon Green, opting instead for Ben Affleck. It sounded wrong, it turned out that way across two pictures, and now Bats is as sucky as the rest of their failed attempts to create a credible, viable comic book movie franchise to rival Disney's Marvel Studios. If I'm on a self-imposed diet from the MCU, I have enjoyed their movies in even the recent past. While I realize some of DC's attempts, particularly Suicide Squad-related titles, have found an audience, I've yet to say the same about the WB product, live action OR animated. Their Bats movie, The Killing Joke, failed to launch with me and most other critics, despite fine voicework by Mark Hamill and Kevin McCarthy. Though it baited  me with graphic violence, language, and "sexual situations," its weak, unfocussed screenplay, welding two almost-contradictory narratives together for no clear reason, failed to keep me on the line. First Flight offers me a first-rate cast of voice talent and no more reason to watch them than Killing Joke gave me to watch it. First Flight's narrative may be more linear, but it's not more interesting. Or, after about an hour, interesting. 

I grew up watching Hanna-Barbera's diluted kiddie-TV version of DC's Justice League comic book, The Superfriends. It omitted Green Lantern, The Flash, and Hawkman from the comics of the time, augmenting Supes, Bats, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman with the animation studio's own characters, first a brother&sister&dog team with absolutely no powers of their own, followed by the now-iconic Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna, and their hijinks-prone space monkey, Gleep. Being more of a Marvel Silver Age buyer, like my friends, I thought Green Lantern looked interesting but I never learned dick about him.

Therefore, I expected this origin story to teach me said dick and, if it does, it doesn't do it by making Hal Jordan a relatable character. A test pilot who encounters Earth's first-ever confirmed extraterrestrial life, followed swiftly by the knowledge that wearing a ring gives him the power both to fly through outer space without needing oxygen and wield almost godlike powers, Meloni's Jordan, confronted by the next four confirmations of alien life, says, "Why not?" when offered a chance to travel across the known universe to meet godlike beings the way I say it when a friend pulls up and says "Get in, we're going to McD's."

If the idea in most superhero movies is to allow us to live vicariously through the new hero, I think I might have more to say to the first extraterrestrial beings ever encountered by humanity than a nonchalant, "Why not?" 

Quite apart from that paradigm-shattering moment, as a gravity-compliant, earthbound human, I also tend to think being able to fly without a machine's help after a few decades of only-that might prompt a little excitement. My avatar here disagrees. Meloni plays Hal Jordan as a less-self-righteous Stabler. I wouldn't know what to do with that Stabler within my understanding of SVU, and I don't know what to do with it here, either.

All the cast' great names identify with one or two popular TV characters. Like Meloni, they all deliver approximations of those characters as these new ones, and it all fails to work for them, too. Victor Garber sleepwalks through a more-obvious version of his Alias character, as Tricia Helfer does her standout turn on the reboorrd Battlestar Galactica. Michael Madsen, as Hulkesque Lantern Corps agent Molliwog, again demonstrates his marvelous ability to be utterly dull outside Tarantino movies. Laroquette plays the avian-simian-humanoid agent who has proved completely uninteresting thus far.

Kurtwood Smith, as usual, manages to make peevishness hilariously villainous. The one great voice performance here, he of course gets the least screentime.

Green Lantern: First Flight proves the same fascinating failure most of Warners' DC adaptations have to date. Having grown up with Superfriends' blandness I was primed for an action-packed introduction to a character I've wondered about. Lauren Montgomery's direction of Alan Burnett & Michael Allen's screenplay executes a classic George-Lucas, using all the dialogue to deliver clunky exposition rather than establish character and tone, as the MCU characters do, punctuated by the occasional one-liner. I found myself so unengaged with the characters that each time one dropped a gag line I would say, woodenly, "Oh. One liner."

Like the Resistance in the JJ Abrams Star Wars sequels, Green Lantern: First Flight appeared to already have everything it needs to succeed. It certainly had a willing, waiting convert in me. If it failed to entertain me and to convert me, it at least had the failure of other DC-adaptations to soften the blow. I continually hear Warners has done some great animated-feature work for certain of DC's heroes. I continually find crashes like Green Lantern: First Flight.

Over the last few months two DC titles from Warners failed to lure me further into their animated universe. In the same span, Marvel's Spider-Man Into the SpiderVerse, established near-endless goodwill for more animated Marvel work at a time I'm deliberately abstaining from their live-action stuff. That could be bad luck and timing and the vagaries of thriftshop inventories, but it's hard not to think, again, that Marvel gets it in a way DC and Warners never will.