On Justin Timberlake as Green Lantern

Last night the news broke online that Justin Timberlake had screen tested for the upcoming Green Lantern film, and is in serious contention for the role. Timberlake would play Hal Jordan, the Earth member of a galactic peacekeeping force who fights evil with a magic ring controlled by willpower. (The character might be harder sell to movie-goers than most superheroes.) Jordan was created in the early sixties as a square-jawed, no-nonsense test pilot, and is as bland as his heroic trappings are outrageous. Some argue that the character doesn’t really work outside of the sixties context, and the best Hal Jordan story in memory is the retro-leaning New Frontier. Unlike Iron Man’s Tony Stark, a genius/arrogant cad, or Spider-Man’s Peter Parker, a vulnerable screw-up, there has never really been enough to the character to make for reinvention or contemporary relevance. Which is why if the JT stunt-casting happens, it could elevate Green Lantern from a generic action film to something else entirely.

During my years as a dedicated weekly comics-buyer (grades 5-7, approx.) I followed Green Lantern from month to month, but it wasn’t Hal Jordan stories I was reading. Midway through the ‘90s, DC comics replaced the title’s central figure with Kyle Rayner, a hip, sarcastic graphic designer meant to attract younger readers. And, it worked, at least for relatively new fans like me. Meanwhile, DC editors had Jordan go insane, kill off a number of his colleagues, and try to rearrange time and space. In a nutshell.

Today, Hal Jordan is again at the center of the Green Lantern comics, after the folks at DC effectively hit the reset button and returned the title to the status quo of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. (They’ve recently done the same thing with the Flash, another hero who had been replaced with a younger, more complex character.) It was a move –one of the moves, perhaps- that betrayed the conservatism deeply embedded in mainstream superhero storytelling, and evidence of why there are probably more forty year-olds than fifteen year-olds reading DC books right now.

The possible casting of Timberlake is important partially because there’s so little to the Jordan character to begin with—unlike Robert Downey Jr. and Tony Stark, a pair that makes intuitive sense, putting an entertainer like Timberlake in the role could make for, well, nearly anything. Assigning an international superstar’s brand to this lesser-known superhero property potentially erases the baggage that comes with Hal Jordan. I have little doubt that if he’s cast, we’ll be getting Justin Timberlake, the Green Lantern, for better or for worse. At the very least, it would be a fantastic kind of mess.

[EDIT: Well, looks like it's Ryan Reynolds. Who's starring in Deadpool too, actually. Bro's gonna be busy. What might have been, eh?]