One summer movie we were more excited about seeing footage from at CinemaCon than any other movie was Warner Bros’ Green Lantern, directed by Martin Campbell. At Warner Bros.’ The Big Picture 2011, the studio delivered by showing four clips from the movie and a new trailer.
The first clip begins with the title “Sector 2018” and we see Abin Sur using some fancy light-based controls on his ship and communicating with Mark Strong’s Sinestro, who is telling him about a planet that’s been destroyed by Parallax, but before getting too far into the conversation, Abin Sur is attacked by Parallax–we can’t see it too clearly but it looks like a large yellow head with sharp teeth–and he gets seriously injured before flying away in his glass cylindrical spaceship.
The second clip has Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan finding Abin Sur’s spaceship in the water and he runs out to try to save the being he sees in there. He wades out and pulls Abin Sur out of the ship and carries him to the beach, making a joke about having to get him to a hospital where they have purple blood. After giving Hal his ring and telling him to use it with the lantern in his spaceship, Abin Sur dies and his body transforms into some sort of grey substance.
The third clip has Hal with the lantern and ring back at his place. He places the lantern on a table and then slips on the ring, following the instructions to insert his hand and recite the oath, but the only oath he remembers is the Pledge of Allegiance, so he tries a variation on that, but the lantern rejects it, pushing him away with a green blast. Suddenly, Hal knows the oath that’s required and he recites it as the ring glows and he’s transported into the sky with a green hue surrounding him, out into space away from earth and the Milky Way and towards the planet OA. When he lands, he’s in his full Green Lantern suit and mask and he tries to act cool like he belongs there by strutting around. He’s called over by Tomar-Re, voiced by Geoffrey Rush, who is basically the OA welcome wagon, and Hal is surprised that he can understand the creature in front of him, and Tomar Re explains that the ring is translating and that it can also create a mask or not depending on whether Hal’s identity needs to be kept secret.
The last clip has Sinestro addressing the massive Green Lantern Corps collected to warn them about Parallax having killed four of their members. This is a giant open space filled with Green Lanterns with a giant Green Lantern symbol behind Sinestro, and this is probably the scene that’s going to have the biggest fanboys soiling their trousers because there are so many of the great Green Lanterns we’ve seen in the comics over the years and probably more than a few easter eggs. We don’t know enough of their names by heart to expound at length about who we saw, but we did see a very familiar robotic GL and possibly even an Alpha Lantern in there. (Our colleague Silas Lesnick will likely be watching the same footage at WonderCon over the weekend and he might have some new insights to add to the above.)
Afterwards, they showed the new trailer, which is a lot more action-based, as well as showing quite a bit more of Peter Sarsgaard’s Dr. Hector Hammond, but we haven’t really seen a lot of Hal and Carol together, so hopefully Warner Bros. won’t completely forego a lot of that important character stuff in the future. Since we know that the footage we saw wasn’t completely finished, we’ll reserve judgment on how it looked compared to our expectations, but we definitely think Reynolds was the right man for the job from what we saw.
Before the footage, we had a chance to do video interviews with Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively from the press line, which you can watch below:
Ryan Reynolds:
