Green Lantern Emerald Knights Review

A movie that’s just all origin stories isn’t something I’d pitch to a producer. Really that’s the extent of the entire animated film Green Lantern Emerald Knights. It also confuses me in relation to the previous animated film Green Lantern First Flight, which shares the same art style, and what I thought was the same continuity. Yet Sinestro is a member of the Green Lantern Corps again…so it can’t be the sequel to First Flight. If that’s the case then why use the same art style, it makes it seem like both movies are interrelated; instead they’re not and it just comes off kind of misleading. Wasn’t Sinestro evil in the last film? What the hell is going on?

Krona, a powerful being that created the Anti-Matter Universe has somehow risen to once again torment the galaxy. The Guardians dispatch their Green Lantern Corps to subdue Krona. This really isn’t the main story, but the movie instead is split into 4 different origin stories about different members of the Corps.

Many of the stories are directly adapted from one-off Green Lantern issues like, “Mogo doesn’t socialize” and “New Blood”, which tells the story of how Kilowog was trained upon becoming a Lantern. This really isn’t a movie for those who already read these tales. Sure the fight scenes are pretty entertaining, but far too often most of the Lanterns just use their rings as laser guns: just blasting at foes and not creating fanciful objects, you know, the reason why Green Lantern is fun to read in the first place. 

"Can I bench-press you"?

That’s not to say that the various origins we are shown aren’t well written, voice acted, and they do make you form more of an emotional attachment to minor characters. Yet I thought that each Lantern that had his or her own story told was going to do something relevant in the final-scene. Not the case, it just feels like filler. The threat of Krona coming back is largely irrelevant to the film, it’s just kind of happens and then it’s dealt with rather quickly.

I think my biggest problem with both Emerald Knights and the previous film Final Flight is that both scream to me that DC should just make a animated Green Lantern television series; but their waiting to see how the Green Lantern movie performs before they decide to go that route. So they just keep throwing out random Green Lantern films that aren’t even the best stories featured in the DC Comic series. If you don’t make a TV series at least change the animation for the next film.

The characters are way too bulky; Hal Jordan is three times bigger than he should be -- looking completely “roided” out. And others like Kilowog are just unappealing to look at -- it’s not like the animation comes from budget constraints -- the art style is a conscious choice, and it’s just not appropriate.

PEW PEW...LASERS! Fun right? No, the word is boring.

All-in-all Green Lantern Emerald Knights just feels like a series of episodes strung loosely together to form a decent movie. And it’s definitely not the best product DC could have put out. There’s way more interesting things that the Green Lantern movies can be doing then just telling a series of origins and then calling it a day. It’s just a waste.