The best way to start this is by saying I probably know more about the backstory of this character than most just through having a good friend who’s a diehard fan of this character, but in terms of my expectations for this movie, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away.  And as I turns out, I wasn’t.

Now that doesn’t mean I thought this film was bad, that’s going too far.  From my point of view though, there were two major problems.

One, it was trying to be all things to all people.  There’s a storyline about the three main characters and their relationships with their fathers; that’s interesting.  There’s the visual, outer space story about how the Universe is broken up and how there’s a Green Lantern for each section of the Universe.  That’s interesting.  There’s the love story between these two childhood friends who can’t commit to each other.  Interesting.  And there’s a story about their third friend who is the smartest of them all but gets the least emotional support.  Also interesting.  And the movie tells all four of the stories, fairly equally.  So you have about a half hour total with each story, with the tone moving from ‘The fate of our world is at stake’ to ‘I look pretty cool as a superhero’ to ‘Daddy didn’t love me’.  I think you see where I’m going with this…it was a lot.  And that was my take as a casual fan; I heard some true fanboys spewing hate as the credits rolled.

The other problem for the film (which others have said) is that this is a rough time to make an ‘average’ comic book film.  The bar is just ridiculously high.  And especially if you’re not one of the Big Three (Superman, Batman, Spider Man), you have to really knock it out of the park to get the casual moviegoer to say ‘I want to see more of that.’  I’m kind of indifferent to ‘Thor 2’ for example, but I am interested in how ‘The Avengers’ will turn out.

You’re on deck, Captain America…