Going into Green Lantern, I knew very few things about the character. He does stuff in space, and he can do anything at all with his magic ring, unless what he is opposing is yellow, in which case he’s completely powerless. (DC, you know, about which I know little enough except for their very majorest characters.) My point is: yellow? Really? High budget effects or not, I wasn’t very hopeful. Yellow.

I’m not sure, but I think that may have been the movie’s saving grace. It had a lot of “gee, whiz” coolness going for it, don’t get me wrong, but the plot was really quite predictable, and the origin story fell flat for me when they spent half the movie establishing that Hal Jordan isn’t reliable and needs to grow up to realize his potential, and then had the turn-around occur on a dime for the flimsiest of reasons. So while I can’t say that it was one of the great comic book movies, it easily surpassed my tragically low expectations.

I mean, yellow!? I’m not saying yellow lameness was absent from the movie, but either they fixed whatever made it especially horrible in the comic, or else I’ve had a misguided notion of how things worked all these years. Either way, really. What’s important is nobody painted a baseball bat yellow to defeat the otherwise cosmically powerful good guy.