Green Lantern: Not who I’d have picked

I’ve never read a Green Lantern comic, but I’ve always liked the idea of Green Lantern. I’ve picked up a lot of the basics through popcultural osmosis, as I have with a lot of superhero IPs. I know it’s got a lot in common with E. E. Smith’s Lensman books, which are one of my literary guilty pleasures. I know the Green Lanterns are cosmic policemen with magic rings powered by willpower, and their greatest enemy is fear, and so forth.

I suspect a lot of people approach superhero movies from a similar position, and the makers of superhero movies know this. You might never have read an X-men comic but if you’re the movie’s target audience then you’d probably recognize Wolverine if you saw him. Added to that is the fact that there have been so many comics, with so many bewildering continuity reboots, and so many other adaptations, that there is no single definitive version of these stories. Superhero movies adapt the myth rather than adapting the story: there are characters and story elements that have to be present, but you expect the movie to put them together in new and interesting ways, to add its own spin to the telling as it passes it on to the next storyteller.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the Green Lantern myth, the movie’s opening narration helpfully explains it. Billions of years ago, the Guardians created the Green Lantern Corps, a magic space police force powered by Will, which is green. The voiceover sounds like it’s finished, but then starts up again, almost as if the next section was added in post-production, and tells us about Parallax, an entity powered by Fear, which is yellow. Parallax was imprisoned by Green Lantern Abin Sur. We then see some hapless space explorers stumble upon Parallax, who quickly eats their souls and goes off to conquer the universe. His first move is to attack Abin Sur in a brief but very entertaining sequence that ends with the mortally wounded Abin fleeing in an escape pod.

Then we cut to Earth and get our first glimpse of our Lantern-to-be, Hal Jordan. He’s waking up in bed with a pretty girl whose name we don’t know and whom we never see again. He realises he’s late for work and drives recklessly to get there in his sports car, at the same time wrapping up a box which we later learn is a birthday present for his nephew. At work his wingman is annoyed at his lateness, and he responds by flirting with her. They’re fighter test pilots, and today they’re up against some robot drones. Hal beats the drones by using his wingman as a decoy and then climbing to a higher altitude than the drones can safely reach. (It seems the drones aren’t smart enough to not follow him past their safe operational height.) On the way down, Hal has flashbacks to his off-the-shelf backstory about being in the shadow of his dead father.

I instantly disliked Hal Jordan. He’s an immature, arrogant prick; he endangered several people’s lives by driving dangerously, he doesn’t seem to respect his colleagues, and he invalidated the test by knowingly going against its rules. I started to dislike the movie, because it felt like this was the sort of person it was saying I should admire, the sort qualified to be a Green Lantern, and this Hal Jordan wasn’t even someone I could respect.

Why, I thought, did the Green Lantern have to be someone already traditionally powerful–someone who has a teenage boy’s dream job, someone who drives fast cars and gets girls and can act like an arrogant jerk and get away with it? Am I meant to regard that guy as heroic? Why not have it pick someone weaker, the bullied rather than the bully, someone less like a traditional hero. Someone…well, someone more like me?

As the movie progresses, though, it looks like the movie is thinking the same thing. A less traditionally heroic character appears in the form of Hector Hammond. He’s a scientist; a ‘thinker’, as someone puts it, whereas Hal is a ‘doer’. No waking up beside a beautiful woman for him: the first we see of him is playing chess against a computer and eating an instant meal. When some Men in Black appear to recruit him for his alien biology skills, his first thought is that it’s a practical joke. Later on, at a party, he comments that the female lead would never notice him, because she would only notice Hal. There are archetypes at work here: the winner and the loser, the hero and the other guy.

I started out finding Hector more sympathetic than Hal. Another quality I liked was that he wanted to succeed through his own merits or not at all: when he learned that he’d got the alien autopsy gig because of a family connection, he was angry that more qualified scientists had missed out. Then he tries to kill someone by crashing their helicopter, which robs him of that sympathy and pretty definitely puts him in villain territory.

Hector Hammond is, in fact, an exploration of one of the things that might happen if the other guy–the bullied, the unsuccessful, the weak–finds himself with superpowers, and it’s not heroic: it’s an ugly revenge fantasy. Hector’s got mind-reading and telekinetic powers from a fragment of Parallax that was lodged in Abin Sur’s wound. Hector glowers and engages in a campaign against the world. If Hal’s abilities are powered by will, Hector’s appear to be powered by resentment.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the movie knows that Hal Jordan is an arrogant jerk, and starts forcing some character development on him. Carol Ferris–the other fighter pilot from earlier, who has slightly implausibly ended up as Hal’s love interest–even calls him out on it. Life has given him all these opportunities, and he still walks away from them–or runs away.

It turns out that Hal’s weakness is the Green Lanterns’ Achilles’ Heel: fear. Green Lanterns are supposed to be fearless, but Hal feels fear more than he likes to admit. The arrogant jerk act is just there to cover up the fact that he’s insecure and frightened.

Carol brings about Hal’s character development by delivering everyone’s favourite stock platitude about courage. Courage doesn’t mean not feeling fear: it’s the ability to overcome your fear! Hal acts as if he’s never thought of that before.

I ended up quite liking Hal Jordan, certainly enough to be able to root for him while he’s saving the world. Perhaps I was wrong about him. Perhaps, I thought, that is the sort of hero the Green Lantern ring ought to pick.

Then I thought back to the start of the movie and remembered that  he risked several people’s lives by driving recklessly and generally behaved like a child, and none of his character development has fixed that. He learned courage but what he really needed to learn was humility.

So, if I were a magic alien space ring having to pick the best new owner from all the people of Earth, I think I could have done better than Hal Jordan. But the person who would make the best space policeman wouldn’t necessarily make for the best story.

A few other miscellaneous comments about the movie:

• There’s no way that mask conceals Hal’s identity, even with the caveat that his close friends can recognize him when they get up close. I’m choosing to believe that the ring has a magical mind-clouding effect, and he domino mask is just a visual reminder that it’s turned on.
• The Green Lanterns appear to be able to fly all across the universe with just their rings, so why did Abin Sur need a spaceship?
• Why did Abin Sur imprison Parallax in the first place rather than killing it? Maybe the Lantern Corps has some absolutely-no-killing rule, but it’s never mentioned. Also, it was a pretty rubbish prison; you’d think they could have made it harder for random space people to stumble across it and get eaten. I’m wondering if Abin Sur was really all that competent. Come to think of it, all I ever see him do is lose a fight and run away.
• The Green Lantern Corps looks a bit like an all boys club. None of the named Lanterns are female (although there was a lady Guardian), and I only spotted one recognisably female lantern in the crowd scene; most are either male or so alien you can’t tell. I would have hoped for more diversity.
• I know this is space fantasy rather than science fiction, but the final space sequence still bothered me. They’re flitting around the solar system faster than light, which I can kind of accept since the rings let you travel at the speed of plot, but that asteroid thicket was unforgivable.

On the whole, despite my complaints, this was a very enjoyable movie, especially the scenes on Oa. Hal Jordan may be a jerk, but the Green Lantern Corps is great space fantasy that works on a mythic level.

Maybe once the DC-wide “you don’t need to know the continuity” reboot happens I’ll check out the new Green Lantern #1.

Writing and the battle with procrastination

Procrastination and lack of self-discipline are traditional problems for writers. This post by Elizabeth Bluemle on Shelftalker lists some ways in which some writers and artists have conducted their own battles against procrastination, and it was refreshing for me to see that I’m not alone in having a problem with it. I thought I’d share the techniques I use to stay focused on writing.

I do most of my writing on my laptop, and do most of my other stuff (research, social networking, random web surfing, etc.) on my desktop.

Unlike some writers, I don’t have a strict no-internet rule on my writing computer. I’ll sometimes have Facebook and Twitter open in the background, and I’ll let myself check them every now and then. I don’t post, though, and if someone links to an article or similar then I won’t read it until later. Feeling that I’m around people virtually, even if I’m alone physically, helps me feel more positive and is worth the slight waste of time.

I don’t ever play games on my laptop. In fact, becoming mostly a console gamer rather than a PC gamer has probably helped with my discipline, since I no longer associate games with computers at all.

I move to a different room in order to write. At the moment I do most of my writing at the dining table. It’s a little silly that I’ve ended up sitting in a nice ergonomic office chair while reading webcomics and doing my serious work on a dining chair, but maybe sitting on a less comfortable chair helps me to stay alert. Sometimes I’ll take laptop to a cafe or (if it isn’t exam season and full of students) to the public library.

If I’m writing at a weekend or have taken the day off work, and the weather isn’t terrible, I start my writing day by walking to a local park and back. As soon as I get back, I start writing. This formally separates out my writing time in the same way that moving to the dining table gives me writing space. Basically I pretend I’m walking to work, and as soon as I get there I’m ‘on the clock’ and have to focus. Plus it gets me some fresh air and sunshine.

I usually listen to music while writing. I’ll start an album playing, and I’m not allowed to get up or do anything but write until it finishes. Then I let myself stretch my legs, check Facebook and Twitter, make yet another cup of coffee, and decide what to listen to next.

I’ve tried using rewards to motivate myself, but that only has limited success for me. On the one hand, if I feel the urge to play a videogame, it’s good to tell myself “You can do that, but only after you’ve hit your writing target.” On the other hand, if I don’t reach the target, I also don’t get the reward, so I’ll go to bed having not made enough progress and also not had the nice thing, which puts me in a miserable mood and not the best frame of mind for writing the next day.

Anyway, that’s enough time spent blogging for today. Now I should take the laptop into town and get some work done on the novel.

L.A. Noire: Saying Goodbye

Warning: Major spoilers for the ending of L.A. Noire.

Yes, the flamethrowers were ridiculous. Yes, the switch to gunplay in the final mission feels like it betrays a lack of confidence in the game’s core mechanics. The thing that bothered me, though–the thing that left me feeling faintly unsatisfied after completing what is on the whole an excellent game–was the way the ending handles the two player characters.

So, L.A. Noire turned out to more story-arc-based than I had thought when I was half way through it. The Traffic cases are self-contained; the Homicide cases at first seem self-contained but turn out to have their own arc; but the Vice and Arson desks, the entire second half of the game, tell an increasingly unified story, until by the end of the game the breaks between the missions begin to feel arbitrary.

Towards the end, the game introduces a second player character, Kelso. I didn’t mind the switch in itself–I enjoyed the Kelso missions, and the change itself gave a sense that things were changing because we were moving into the endgame. What I was expecting was to play as Kelso for a few missions, have him deliver the final evidence that Phelps needed, and then switch back to Phelphs for the climax. The overall arc of the game had been about Phelps’s gradual rise in the police force, then his fall, just as he was on the verge of uncovering major corruption. I expected a final act to that story, in which Phelps survives his darkest hour and rises triumphant. Even if it were at great personal cost, I expected to see Phelps win.

Instead, the baton passes to Kelso and Phelps is sidelined. There are a few more Phelps missions, but they seem half-hearted. You investigate a crime scene in which you already saw in a cutscene what happened.

There is one excellent playable sequence as Phelps, where he escorts Kelso’s car to the scene of the endgame as the rest of the police force hunts for him. They get there, and then they say they’ll split up: Kelso will go one way into the storm drains, and Phelps will go in another way, and they’ll meet in the middle. I find myself playing Kelso, but I assume that I’ll be playing one sequence as each of them. Two heroes, both player characters, working together in the endgame–great stuff.

But I don’t get my final Phelps sequence. I make it to the middle of the storm drain as Kelso, and then Phelps arrives, having made his own way without my help–any adventures he had, I don’t get to see. And then, unexpectedly, that’s it. In a final cutscene, Phelps is killed, in twist of fate only barely related to the plot up to that point. The final cutscene is Kelso attending Phelps’s funeral.

I don’t object to the main character dying, but I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. The last car chase mission was great, but nothing about it flagged to me that it would be the last Phelps mission. I wanted Phelps to be the main character of the endgame as he was of most of the game, or at least for him to be joint main character with Kelso. You could imagine a great final mission in which you guide Phelps as he goes knowingly to his death, for some tragically inevitable Film Noir reason. Instead he dies suddenly, in a cutscene, as a supporting character in someone else’s story.

To be clear, I like Kelso, and I would happily play a L.A. Noire 2 in which he was the main character–but he wasn’t the main character of this game and it shouldn’t have ended as if he was. I also very much liked the game over all, and this is just a criticism of one aspect of it.

L.A. Noire: Interactive short stories vs interactive novels

I’m very much enjoying L.A. Noire at the moment, and one of the most interesting things for me is the way the game structures its story.  Most story-focused games are like novels or movies in that the game has a single main story. The game might be divided into chapters or missions, but these function like the chapters in a novel, each one adding dramatic beats to the main story rather than standing alone.

Playing L.A. Noire, it struck me that the game felt like a collection of linked short stories rather than like a novel. (Or, if you prefer, like an episodic TV series rather than like a movie.) Each case is a self-contained story, with its own cast of characters and its own beginning, middle, and ending.

I think that this short-story-like approach might be a better way of structuring non-linear, story-based games than the more common novelistic approach. Developers can give the player plenty of different paths to take through the story without it getting unwieldy, because the branches will all be cut and the player put back in place at the start of the next mission.

It also makes the prospect of replaying the mission and making different choices more attractive. Each case is short enough to easily play through in one sitting (again like a short story as opposed to a novel), so I’m not put off by the length of time it would take to replay them. I don’t have to invest multiple sessions playing from the start in order to make a different choice half way through the game.

L.A. Noire’s missions aren’t actually as self-contained as they first appear. There is an overarching story (I’m only half way through, but it’s not hard to see where it’s going), and there are story arcs covering smaller groups of missions. Still, it feels like a collection of short stories with a plot thread running through them, or like a TV series with a myth arc running through mostly stand-alone episodes, rather than like a novel or film. The distinction between games with self-contained missions and those with single overall stories is a sliding scale, but L.A. Noire comes in closer to the short story end of the scale than any other game I’ve played recently.

Thinking about it, it would be possible for a game to go much further towards the short story end than L.A. Noire has. A game could be a compilation of stories, built on the same game engine and with the same game mechanics, but each with its own self-contained story, with its own main character and perhaps its own setting. (It might be easier on the graphics budget for them to all take place in the same city and time period.) The stories could be linked by theme rather than being part of the same plot. The player basically gets a compilation of small games, but doesn’t have to learn new game mechanics each time, so can focus on them as interactive stories.

That sort of game could lend itself to storytelling possibilities that aren’t being explored in many current games, just as short stories are a different sort of beast from novels. The question would be whether there would be a market for short-story-anthology games. I think there would, but a limited one, and the games would probably have to ride on the coat-tails of more conventional story-based games from the same studio. (To stretch my analogy further, there’s also a smaller market for short stories than for novels, and an author isn’t likely to get a short story anthology published until they’ve had a few novel sales first.)

I’ll see how many self-contained stories there are in the second half of L.A. Noire, and here’s hoping that other games explore the short story model in future.