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Plot

Let's drop the side-by-side and just straight up compare these two. First of all, nobody wants to see these movies for their plot, so this will be quick. Both of them are the first movies about their respective heroes, and therefore waste a lot of time on boring origin stories. Also, they're packed to the gills with exposition. Plus, both movies are monumentally stupid. Here's the difference though: Lantern is mindlessly stupid. If you don't think about how absurd what you're watching is, you can kind of forget about the story and enjoy the movie. Hornet, meanwhile, smacks you in the face with its stupidity. Mostly this is the fault of monumentally obnoxious and useless Britt Reid, but there are a lot of other reasons. Let's give Lantern the point and move on to what matters.

ACTION/SPECIAL EFFECTS

Hornet is filled with Michel Gondry's trademark CGI-less cool effects, and the action scenes are pretty fun to watch, especially because, and I can't stress this enough, I love Kato. The one weird thing is that when Kato fights, we see any potential threat or weapon glowing red, and then watch Kato beat the crap out of it. This gives the sense of being in a videogame, and leads me to believe that Kato is secretly a robot. I don't know if it's a stereotype that all Asian people are secretly robots, but if so I am extremely offended. Either way, I would expect more from someone as brilliant as Gondry when he has $120 million to play with.

Lantern, on the other hand, makes the most of its $200 million budget. Giant planets, huge alien monsters, and a CGI costume that effectively shows off Reynolds's abs. Every action scene, from the ones where Sinestro and Co. are training Hal to the showdown between Hal and Hector, are a blast to watch, especially the latter because, and I seriously cannot stress this enough, I LOVE PETER SARSGAARD.

As stupid as both movies are, at least Lantern has the crazy cool special effects to help you ignore that. Lantern snags the final point.

So out of a total of seven points, Lantern gets four and Hornet gets three. However, this does not accurately represent just how much more enjoyable of a film Lantern is than Hornet. Lantern is bad, yes, but as Hollywood Blockbusters go, it's pretty darn entertaining. I fell asleep watching Hornet... twice. I have no idea if Britt Reid defeated the bad guy and got the girl, and I really don't care. Actually, that's not true; I hope he didn't. I hope he died and Kato became the star of the movie. But I don't care enough to find out.

Conclusion Number One: “This Weekend Watch This” is my favorite BOP column.
Conclusion Number Two: On paper, and in every other way, Lantern is the “green” superhero movie to watch.
Conclusion Number Three: Three is the number of times I mention Ryan Reynolds's abs in this article. In general, this article makes me sound super gay.
Conclusion Number Four: Kanye West jokes never get old!
Conclusion Number Five: I never found a good place to slip a “green with envy” joke in there, and I'm disappointed by that. That being said, this is only my second entry in this column, so you could blame it on my inexperience. After all, I'm still pretty... green.

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