PG-13 for insufferable trailers, gross overexposure, angry recitation of a poem about a lamp
Certain people are beyond our capacity to forgive, and the marketing director for Green Lantern is one of these people.
Director Martin Campbell I can forgive. Goofy-looking aliens I can forgive. Ryan Reynolds reading that poem as though he’s sitting on the toilet the whole time and only overcoming his constipation at the final line (“…green lantern’s LIGHT!!!â€) I can forgive. If making a bad movie were a mortal sin, then most of Hollywood would be marching single-file down to the gates of hell. A bad movie I can forgive.
What I cannot forgive, Marketing Director, is your ubiquitous handiwork. I do not know if you are man or woman or – more likely – horned and ageless beast. All I know is that you took this movie and you haunted me with it. Starting in roughly 2006, I began seeing trailers for this, not on occasion, but in endless loop, on every channel, before every film, before every YouTube video. Insanity slowly wrapped its long green fingers around my skull. I saw this trailer in window reflections, in the faces of strangers, in fevered and restless dreams. Soon I passed the point where I could bear to see the film itself. On sleepless nights I muttered in the dark, praying for the day when the film would be released, so that I too would be released from its suffocating omnipresence.
It was not Ryan Reynolds who chose to air these trailers. It was not Martin Campbell. No, Marketing Director, it was you: the puppeteer in the shadows, the incompetent mid-level bureaucrat who thought you could force us to see this movie by prying our eyelids open, Clockwork Orange-style, and burning the images onto our corneas.
Curses upon you, Marketing Director. And when the sleep overtakes you each night, may you find – as I did – this trailer cascading and repeating mercilessly across the nightmare-strewn landscape of your dreams.—Ben Orlin
