With the white text now known to work, I'm going to write a movie review for both Green Lantern and Super 8. First up is Green Lantern, which I've seen most recently.
After being spoiled by Marvel's Thor and The Dark Knight of Batman fame, Green Lantern was definitely a let-down. It takes everything I didn't like about Dark Knight and made it worse. Plot elements aren't explained clearly or not explained at all. Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern character has flashbacks of his father's death, but he never really seems to grasp it fully: he can't even explain it to his aerospace co-worker/love interest, not even by the end of the film. Hal's nephew is seen toward the beginning of the film, moments before the Green Lantern Ring kidnaps him and brings him to the dying alien that would change his life. He never reappears. The villain, scientist Hector Hammond, was infected by the other villain, a many-tentacled cosmic horror, but it wasn't his fault he died and wasn't all that much of a surly character before becoming evil (most comic-book villains, including the comic book version of Hammond, were). The other main villain, a "Guardian of the Universe" turned evil, has pretty much zero character to him and is just some soul-eating beast to descend upon the city and have the Green Lantern save him.
I can't tell what exactly was wrong with Green Lantern: bad character development, very little humor (heck, I laughed more at Dark Knight then this one), the wrong mix of action, too much talking and exposition...it just wasn't good. There were four people in the theater (including me) that I went to go see it (on Friday), on one of two showings.
So I didn't like Green Lantern all that much, but I did enjoy Super 8. It's directed by Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams, so it comes off as a very interesting mix as E.T. meets Cloverfield. There is a boy who forms some sort of psychic link with an extraterrestrial, but in Cloverfield fashion, the extraterrestrial is in fact, a many-eyed insectoid monster who destroys property and kills human beings.
If you're reading this (and not by accident) you have to understand that if I individually tried to pick through everything good and bad about it, we'd be here all day. Highlights: Lots of 1979 references, including a Mattel Electronics electronic football game (Google it). I couldn't quite tell if it was a real one or the 2000-era replica one (the real one has "Mattel Electronics" written on the top, the replica has "Classic Football" in the same font). The fact that it had that beats the shot of Green Lantern'sPokémon Sapphire cartridge but just barely.
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