- Green Lantern has always occupied a strange niche in the DC superhero pantheon. On one hand, his ring arguably makes him the most powerful member of the Justice League. Super-strength? Sure. Spaceflight? No problem. On the other hand, there's this whole issue with the color yellow. And he's got this corny, mustache-twirling arch-enemy named Sinestro, whom Wikipedia claims was modeled after David Niven. Dig deeper into the mythology, and it only gets stranger. There's an entire rainbow of rings to reflect the emotional spectrum of the Universe, a concept dangerously close to "mood rings". One wonders if Green Lantern's most insidious foes are actually decades of comic book goofy-plots and sloppy retconning.
- It's a surprise, then, that the feature-length DC Animated release Green Lantern: First Flight manages to succeed despite these potential obstacles. Realizing that Green Lantern isn't so interesting without the ring, the film wisely grants Hal Jordan (Christopher Meloni) his powers as the opening credits roll. Thus, we are spared much of the predictable repartee between Jordan and his love interest, Carol Ferris (Olivia D'Abo), speeding instead to alien encounters on faraway worlds. There, Jordan meets the aforementioned Sinestro (Viktor Garber), whose characterization is certainly the film's crowning achievement. Instead of being merely an evil guy with a yellow ring, Sinestro is a surprisingly complicated character whose primary motivation is impatience with the impish Guardians of the Universe and their ponderous ways. Of course, Sinestro tends to err on the side of brutality, even going so far as to implicate Jordan in the death of the squid-like criminal Kanjar Ro (Kurtwood Smith) before his diabolical plans are laid bare.
- My only real complaint about Green Lantern: First Flight is that it didn't give quite enough screentime to the rest of the Green Lantern Corps. Kilowog (Michael Madsen) gets in a few good lines and Tomar Re (John Larroquette) is granted a noble death, but the others are mostly there as a backdrop for the real conflict between Jordan and Sinestro. An exception is the trecherous Boodikka (Tricia Helfer), but even she isn't that interesting until she makes her big move. Still, the film makes a lot of great choices, and the high quality of its animation and writing easily make it one of the best DC animated films yet.
- Larry Drake was one of the Guardians of the Universe.
