In Brightest Day, In Highest Def

No trailer shall... escape... my... sef--fuck it, I ain't a poet.

My opinions on the Green Lantern movie have been pretty polarized, swinging back and forth erratically on each piece of information that drops on it and how much I read into them. I want to like it certainly, I'm a big fan of what Green Lantern used to be and I like a fair amount of the Johns-era stuff (wearing my Red Lantern ring as I type this). But, some of the semi-realistic takes on the Corps designs, the chitinous, organic-looking armor, and, while I didn't feel the vitriol everyone else seemed to towards it, that first trailer didn't do much to alleviate fears. Although I do have to concede I hated the suits substantially less (daresay I even liked them) actually seeing them in motion, as I'd hoped would be the case. As they showed new footage at Wondercon this past weekend, however, we also got a new, full HD trailer for the film...

... and it's exactly what I hoped to see. It just looks like fun and over-the-top action, it hits all the right notes for the characters and gives us a clear look at the world its building for the franchise. It's not perfect; the effects, especially that mask, still look a little wonky (still in progress, I'm sure, and in the final project further obfuscated by the 3D where applicable), and depending on how serious its actually taking itself in some of those scenes it's coming off a little silly, but the over tone seems to be straddling the line between a "serious" action movie and goofy, comedic flick the first trailer leaned towards. Going by just the trailer this seems to be in its favor, certainly, but whether or not it can balance the two into one functional narrative will be its greatest challenge.
The Corps member in cameos in the trailer alone are most of the members I know from the books, so I'm sure there will be more showing up in the movie proper. That does, however, raise the question of scale. Seeing just how much is covered in the trailer makes me afraid of how much they're cramming into the whole film. On top of the whole origin story, with Hal both involved in training on Oa and his normal life back on Earth, we're seeing Hector Hammond and at least bits of Parallax, plus planting the seeds for the inevitable Sinestro Corps War we'll see in subsequent movies. It seems like the hardest part a lot of the comic-adaptation movies have is just keeping it simple. But while there's plenty that could go wrong, at least for the moment the trailer returned to me hope for all the ways it could go right that I hadn't been feeling lately.