SUTTON:
Henry, before getting into Green Lantern's hilarious color-coding system (green = willpower, yellow = fear, purple ≠ gay), let's talk about the allegory with which Martin Campbell and his seven-writers-strong screenwriting team (!) flirt most overtly: that the Green Lantern Corps are an intergalactic version of the UN peacekeeping forces—or, more sinisterly, the U.S. Army. In the opening CGI-and-voiceover exposition, a former ally who turned evil escapes his space prison. The Green Lanterns, at the behest of the Security Council-like Guardians, dispatch troops to fight the fear-fed, planet-devouring terrorist baddie, while the Corps' latest recruit—playboy fighter pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds)—trains at their home planet military base Oa. If Green Lantern is another comic book-sourced showdown between pacifism and militarism—a la X-Men and Thor—which side wins in the end, Henry? A possible clue: did you notice that most of the things that Jordan creates with his willpower are military weapons? How unimaginative!

STEWART:
Yes, Ben, there's a UN parallel there, but only so this very conservative movie can bash that peacekeeper's lily liver. The US Army parallels are much more conspicuous. After all, it's called the Green Lantern Corps, which evokes the Marines, and that each member is a handpicked elite made me think of special forces—Green Berets, for an earlier era, or a Seal Team for the present. Look at who the good guys are in this movie: defense contractors, fighter-plane pilots, even a government scientist (Angela Basset), who in any other movie would be sinisterly conspiratorial, and the senior senator from Louisiana (Tim Robbins), who in any other movie would be conniving and corrupt. And who's the only earth-bound villain? An academic (Peter Sarsgaard)! Ben, did you catch how the movie admonishes the cowardice of "assessing the situation" regarding the impending war? Do you think the movie was written while Obama was weighing his options in Afghanistan? And when Jordan finally accepts his lot as a Lantern, he gives a stirring speech to the UN-like elders in which he highlights the threat to Earth—specifically, to America—as being not just "fear" but the fear to fight. We have to bring the fight to them, Ben, "to destroy evil wherever it may hide"—particularly in Iraq, maybe? Jordan sounded a lot like Colin Powell ca. 2003 there.

SUTTON:
Yes, Henry, Green Lantern's world-policing U.S. Army stand-ins were much more striking; I guess I was just trying to be diplomatic. But as you point out, diplomacy isn't on this movie's agenda. Neither is owning up to your mistakes: Jordan's whole speech to the Guardians is premised on the idea that, yeah, humans are idiots, but "we're only human." The film's argument for passion and might over reason and problem-solving recalls Kirk v. Spock two summers ago and Erik v. Xavier two weeks ago. Here, vanquishing fear becomes commensurate with proving humanity's worth, which is funny given all the evidence of our worthlessness we see. The city Parallax attacks is New Orleans, the site of an especially inhumane disaster; and when Jordan's predecessor crash-lands on Earth he ends up on a sad little stretch of the Gulf of Mexico, another place devastated because, hey, "we're only human." Is Green Lantern trying to blame evil aliens for man-made problems? That would explain its backwards environmental politics: the film's fetishism of muscle-cars and mighty jets is some Michael Bay-caliber shit; the threat to the entire planet only registers as a risk for humans (there's other stuff on Earth, right?); and when Jordan finally harnesses his green energy, he uses it to create giant (toy) cars and fighter jets. Green Lantern's misrecognition of the contemporary meaning of the color green is astounding—it's enough to make me hope for a big screen adaptation of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. What did you think of the ways in which Jordan used his new-found powers?

STEWART:
Did you notice that Jordan's new-found powers—his responsibility—was symbolized by putting on a ring? One of Green Lantern's most striking features is its 12-year-old's conception of masculinity, embodied by Jordan, who's stuck in arrested, pre-adolescent development. (When he shows up late to a flying job because he slept in, his love interest tells him "I used to sleep in. And then I turned 11.") After he pisses off his employers with some stunt flying, he's "grounded"—something every pre-pubescent boy can relate to! And Jordan's romance of recklessness is something they can all admire: how he drives with his eyes off the road, has casual one night stands, used to ride a motorcycle. The "ring" that takes him out of this state—what more encapsulates growing up to a child than getting married?—first brings him through a (re)birth: Reynolds is picked up in a giant ball of energy (womb), dumped out into swamp water (placenta...or baptism?) Jordan's foil, Sarsgaard's professor, is also reborn, but into a monster. What did you make of the movie's "sibling" rivalries, and their Abrams-esque daddy issues?

SUTTON:
Well Henry, let's see, there's the coded brothers' competition for the affections of the same girl, Carol (Blake Lively), and the approbation of the same father (figure), Senator Hammond (Robbins). Both are brought into the intergalactic conflict by the same Lantern, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), whose ring chooses Jordan after he crash-lands on Earth, and during whose autopsy Hector becomes contaminated with the fear virus. In Jordan's case there's also some very over-determined psychoanalytic subtext to do with his dad: his task as a Lantern mirrors, distorts and exaggerates the trauma caused by his father's death. In the early exercise during which Jordan and Carol try to defeat Hammond's scary new military drones, our hero becomes parallaxed with fear, engendering an overlong boyhood flashback of his father's jet blowing up right before his eyes. In this militarized revision of the Icarus-Daedalus myth, Jordan flies too close to the sun (twice!) and very nearly dies much as his dad did before. Jordan can't best his father's apparent fearlessness flying jets on Earth, but his training program on Oa revolves around his need to step out of his daredevil daddy's shadow. Literally the entire universe conspires to usher Jordan into functional, fear-facing adulthood. His journey to defeat the monstrously externalized fear of not measuring up to his father provides a convoluted first-person fantasy that echoes Green Lantern's adolescent sensibility and pervasive video game aesthetic, don't you think, Henry?

STEWART:
Oh, totally, Ben. Not only did the digital rendering of outer space have that relatively crude virtual-reality look of video-game graphics, but that whole beginning sequence, with its narrated back story that introduces the villain, felt like those expository sequences between game play. I kept wishing I had a B-button to push so I could skip through it! I wonder, Ben, going back to what I was saying earlier about the movie's conspicuous attempts to lure in the pre-teen demographic, whether this visual and narrative resemblance to video games is a result of the inevitable need for Green Lantern to be adapted for Xbox—you can already imagine what the levels will not only be about but what they'll look like, even feel like to play—or if it highlights a new cultural aesthetic: do 12-year-olds play so many video games that their movies have to look like video games, too? And their heroes have to act like petulant children? Sorry to get back into this again, but how about how Jordan's cockiness single-handedly destroys an entire small town economy, and then the movie portrays his consequently laid-off neighbors as the bad guys?

SUTTON:
Henry, Green Lantern's class politics are exactly what you'd expect from a movie whose dominant color is green: mad greedy and cash-grabby. As you already pointed out, the good guys are plainly evil defense contractors and an irresponsible fighter pilot, and the bad guy is a humble academic (and, okay, an escaped space clergyman). Carol is the heir apparent to her father's weapons company; Jordan lives in a swank loft (not so different from Tom Hanks' in Big) and drives a vintage American gas-guzzler, while Hector lives in squalor. This all seems not to register until Jordan crashes an F-35, causing most of his colleagues to be laid off. In Green Lantern's only dark scene, three former colleagues beat the shit out of Jordan in the parking lot of the local dive, at least until he harnesses his green-ness and lays them all out in one punch. Take that, jobless jerks! And of course, a scene in which an entitled asshole critically injures three no-longer-insured unemployed men appears all the more offensive for being set in New Orleans, a city that was very nearly destroyed by its class divisions. Hey, speaking of Green Lantern's way of tactlessly tapping into environmental disasters worsened by human neglect, Henry, did you notice that Jordan kind of uses global warming to defeat Parallax? Apparently the best weapon against fear isn't willpower, it's denial.

STEWART:
Hm, I think I detected some (willfull) climate change denial here, too, Ben. There's a minor subtext about different kinds of energy: there's willpower, which harnessed by alien technology gives the Lanterns their power; and there's fear, an alternative energy source the Lanterns have eschewed for its unpredictability (and, as we see, its tendency to end in disaster). Is fear a stand in for "solar," because it's yellow like a child's crayoned sun? Or is it nuclear power? At first, I wondered if this was some super-lefty environmental position that had snuck its way into Green Lantern but then I realized, of course not. A movie this conservative? It must be financed by the oil industry.