In the superhero game, imagination is king. New heroes, new villains, new powers, new fights, new schemes, new worlds, and new costumes are what have weekly populated the pages of comic books since their inception, limited only by what the writers could dream up and the artists could sketch out on paper—which is to say, not limited at all. 

Their near-boundless imaginations have, in turn, fed ours, to the point where the superhero movie is not just mainstream, but a staple, a genre necessary partly because our movie-going entertainment demands have grown so large they can’t even be contained by the laws of physics anymore. Remember when a car chase was a thrilling display of speed, force and danger? Now we want to fight in the sky, punch each other with bolts of energy, hear our lover’s thoughts and die in a blaze of incandescent color, and nothing less will do. 

In that context, the Green Lantern is one of the most super of all the heroes, as the ring that provides his power is driven by imagination itself, allowing whatever the bearer imagines to become real, tangible and useable: a sword, a gun, a shield, a jet and, of course, a giant fist. It’s an odd ability, but since the character is more than 70 years old, obviously one with appeal and staying power. It would have been hell to make into a movie before the rise of computer animation, but... well, we’re not in Kansas anymore, are we?

Like so many superhero movies, “Green Lantern” suffers from an abundance of origin story. That’s not a terrible thing, but it is tiring to feel as if every movie is just a tentative start, and all the stories end up being similar. In a comic book, you might get the origin in one issue, then if you jump into the series at issue #200, all you get is a three-line summary and then straight to the action, and that was always good enough; something like: “When ace test pilot Hal Jordan was given a mysterious power ring by a dying alien, he put it on and gained spectacular cosmic powers. He now serves as a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, protecting the Earth from evil.” Then, bam, straight to the action, and we just cut 40 minutes of exposition out of the movie. 

Ryan Reynolds gives Hal Jordan a great sense of cocky charm and earnestness as he undergoes his transformation into a superhero, but is hobbled by a script with little interesting dialogue. Some actors are able to improvise weak writing into something grander, but most still need to be given some good lines, and that’s hardly their fault.

One would have hoped that director Martin Campbell would have had a tighter hold on the tiller—“Goldeneye” and “Casino Royale” were both big, tight pieces of entertainment, but that boldness and vision are missing here. 

The scope of the universe portrayed is huge, and we hop between galaxies, see aliens and fight monsters, but we only get glimpses of it, and the scope of the story itself remains small. The movie would have been much better served by breaking from the origin format and giving us a more complex, diverse storyline.

Having gotten all that grumbling out of the way, “Green Lantern” is a lot of fun. It doesn’t screw up (like “Fantastic Four”), it just doesn’t impress much. It would fit in great as a lead-up to a larger Justice League movie, similar to what Marvel has been doing by making movies of the individual Avengers before making a big Avengers team movie. But “Green Lantern” doesn’t seem to be part of any such plan, and it feels a bit lost on its own.

Whether you’re a Green Lantern, a comic book writer or a movie maker, your power is only as great as your imagination.