‘Green Lantern’ Director Martin Campbell Recognizes The Design Of Parallax Helped Ruin The Superhero Tentpole: “A Cloud With A Face On It – Literally, That’s All It Was”
It’s not what you can call a forgotten film, thanks mostly to Ryan Reynolds’ endless roasting of it, but Green Lantern was nonetheless unsuccessful for Warner Bros. in 2011.
Reflecting on it 15 years later, the picture’s director Martin Campbell thinks he knows why. He boils it down to a variety of factors including the script, which is always the culprit, especially when there are too many chefs in that kitchen.
Such was the case on GL as the screenplay had no less than four writers – Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, and Michael Goldenberg. “I’m not blaming it on that. I’m simply saying I don’t think that the script was great” Campbell said in a discussion with Variety.
“I read all the comics and so forth. All the characters are true to the comics, if you see what I mean,” he explained when discussing the faithfulness of his approach.
There was one glaring exception that bugged him as well as critics and a lot of fans – the version of Parallax they went with. “I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it – literally, that’s all it was,” decreed Campbell.
A big-headed vaporous monstrosity comparable to flatulence was not an inspiring choice of design (the brown colorization definitely did not help). Moreover, it deviates sharply from how Parallax looked when he was first introduced.
Granted, going that route and turning Hal evil would have overstuffed the film even more. As messy as it was already, Green Lantern didn’t need one more mark against it.
However, for all the movie’s faults, Campbell puts the blame on himself as a filmmaker who doesn’t have a passion for superheroes. “It didn’t do business, I think, for a number of reasons, but the reason I did it was simply I’d never done one before,” he said.
“I think quite honestly, if you’re going to do a superhero movie, you have to be in that world a little bit, you know what I mean? You have to be excited by it. You have to have a background where you are part of that world and you’ve been involved in that thing. And I wasn’t,” he added.
Campbell praised Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively as “terrific,” but they didn’t end the film the way he had in mind. “I had a totally different ending to the movie, or the last third of it, all of which was scrapped in the interest of budget,” he revealed.
That was out of his hands, but he felt obligated to take responsibility. “Listen, I’m not making any excuses. When you direct and people don’t like it, you suck it up and you say, ‘Well, I’m the director, so that’s my fault’,” Campbell admitted.
“I mean, the point was that I made that film simply because I hadn’t done a superhero movie before and the film failed, as simple as that,” said the director. His latest film, The Cleaner, stars Daisy Ridley and is now in theaters.
READ NEXT: Arrowverse Producer Marc Guggenheim Says The Scrapped Green Lantern TV Series “Was Gonna Be Awesome”
More About:Movie News
Read this Next
