Green Lantern is part of a group of superheroes in comics that I'm only familiar with on the periphery, either from seeing some parts of Justice League or hearing here and there about his powers, the ring, the whole fleet of Green Lanterns, the color codes and space battles, etc. It's safe to say then than, for the novice crowd, First Flight is an ideal choice to watch. It has all of the fast pace and (mostly) terrific animation that one's come to expect from the Warner brothers animation with collaboration from DC Comics. This comes now after a few other new animated straight-to-video movies: Superman Doomsday, Justice League New Frontier and Wonder Woman (the last one not yet seen by me). And it's safe to say that Green Lantern can claim its rank with those other examples, nestled most likely in quality and entertainment between Superman and Justice League.
It basically plops us into his origin story, or at least a solid re-telling of it. We get the story of Hal Jordan, who was a test pilot until he came across a dying alien with a green ring on his finger which he entrusted to Jordan. From then on, he's the Green Lantern, but not the only one: he's met on Earth by Sinestro, a red-skinned arrogant jerk, and a few other alien Green Lantern folk, who take him along into space to meet with the council that guides the Lanterns in their adventures. In this case, they have to find the "Yellow element", which is like a yellow machine that is the one weakness of the Green Lanterns: this color is the one thing that can block their power, and in the wrong hands it can wrought devastation on the whole universe. And, meanwhile, Sinestro maneuvers behind the scenes...
Oh, it's not exactly the 'easiest' sort of story and world, so to speak, to enter into on a first viewing with only limited experience to Jordan and the Lantern corp. But once one is acclimated to everything, the animators and filmmakers take it from there and make it a rollicking science fiction action story, with touches of the space opera (sometimes blatantly, like with the rip-off of the Cantina scene from Star Wars when Hal and Sinestro go to interrogate someone). While some of the supporting characters are quite stock-like (i.e. Madsen's honorable pig character), and the usage of CGI, especially during the back-story exposition on the Yellow Element, is sub-par, it's mostly compelling thanks to Jordan being a heroic hero and Sinestro being a complex enough villain in the story. In fact, Sinestro was what made this far better than I initially expected, as a character who is on the side of good, but has his very questionable methods - and then crosses that line where he can never go back from.
I imagine that for the die-hard fans of Lantern from the comics, who perhaps aside from the die-hard fans of WB/DC animation, this might not be anything too new storywise, but the best thing about it is it doesn't need to be. This is the first time we've seen any kind of direct-to-video, or just perhaps any, actual feature film version of the Lantern story (until the Martin Campbell film comes out anyway), and as an origin story it does what it needs to. It sets up its universe (again, so to speak), delivers us interesting characters (more or less), and is jam-packed with intense action and some very particular and amazing scenes of animation. Another Bruce Timm produced effort worth watching, if not an immediate must-see unless one is itching to learn more about one of DC's most popular characters (after, you know, Batman and Superman and maybe Wonder Woman too).
