👉 To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days by clicking brilliant.org/CGY/. You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. This is the first video I’ve ever been really nervous to post because it’s my first time addressing some “bad” CGI - Although, I’ve tried to be really fair to it. I also really enjoyed the second half of this video where we discussed all the pros of a CGI suit because those certainly have been overlooked for many years - Especially all of the Lantern Corps stuff. I think that was really impressive and for sure deserves more credit. But yea, how do you guys feel about this suit? Did this video change your opinion on it at all? Or is it still bad 😂
Another huge problem is that the suit is supposed to be glowing but there's no green light reflecting on his face or his surroundings. That's why his head and body don't look connected.
I agree, adding some actual green LEDs to the mocap suit would have helped tremendously. I'll say this for the movie, the director's cut is nowhere near as bad as theatrical. They cut some really good scenes.
Good point. I liked the movie, (with a minor cringe or two) and had to explain numerous times to the clueless, the suit is comprised of pure energy, not solid fabric, which is why they opted for CGI. However while I thought the suit was passable in that context, yes, a glow would probably have enhanced the illusion.
For years I've only heard bad things about this movie. Bad CGI, bad writing, bad movie. A few years ago I finally decided to watch it and I couldn't see any of that. I genuinely enjoyed it.
Worst thing about this movie was the lack of imagination with what a Green Lantern could do with his powers. It wall mini-guns and F-16s or some crap. The only thing limiting a Green Lanterns powers is his imagination. Sometimes it kinds of feels like he craps on his own movie to mimic the publics reaction. And the publics reaction was shaped by the critics. A Green Lantern movie would absolutely have to require a ton of CGI, and this movie wasn’t any better or worse than the MCU movies.
The crazy thing is, and I know a lot of people say this about every movie with a director's cut, a lot of the story problems aren't in the director's cut. It takes the movie from a 5 to at least a solid 7.
@Agent-57 yeah, it also didn't have a major moment where we see why the ring chose Hal. Never gave us a moment where he does something impossible with will power.
The story. The fucking story. I was sold with Ryan Reynolds’s as Green Lantern, but after leaving OA the movie is just really bad story to a charismatic character.
I 100% agree! Re-watching as an adult now, the bad story direction was what made it a hard watch. Like the toby Spiderman movies, but I'll stop there... 😬
Funny thing about the iron man “floating head” is that I actually saw a cosplayer on Reddit who talked about how people kept saying she photoshopped her face onto armor… She kept insisting her and her bf made the armor, 3D printed and custom fitted and everything… the issue is that the metallic paint of the full body armor without the helmet creates an odd effect where the armor and head appear to be lit completely differently. Thats what makes it look fake, is the mismatched lighting. She literally had the Iron Man effect in real legit armor anyway! The people in the Reddit thread were talking about how the CG artists probably used light simulation and made the suit look real, but not right. There’s a difference. Sometimes CGI has to fudge things because our eye is so used to a certain look, like Hollywoo explosions and stuff.. so instead of making it “look right” they made it “look real” but the problem is that in that specific situation, “real” looks fake because of a trick of the light! Haha So this girl made a few posts showing the armor being made, and how they took the photos and inside with harsh lighting it looks fine… outside in softer daylight it immediately started looking like a fake floating head stuck on armor. But a cool thing was that by removing one sleeve of armor, the effect goes away.. it gave our brain another reference for human skin and shadows and lighting and it seemed much less fake! Our brains are so weird… light is so weird. It’s so complicated and small things can mess with our perception of what’s real, or what looks “wrong” to us even if we can’t explain what or why it feels wrong…
as an artist who uses references it’s so weirdly interesting seeing how differently skin reacts to lightning when compared with clothing or in this case armour. Like there’s so many different effects going on at all times like sub surface scattering making skin look like it’s glowing and bounced lighting changing shadow colours, it gets really hard to make it a cohesive piece
For me it's photography. I had my family members and friends thinking that some of my outstanding pictures are photoshoped. Yes, I love to make silly images as joke but it's funny and sad when people think you manipulated the few pictures that you honestly captured at the right time and near perfect lighting condition that the image looked far too beautiful or surreal to be real.
The idea that it was the worst cg ever is absurd. The suit itself looked amazing, even if it didn’t blend perfectly with Ryan’s head. If the film had been better, nobody would have cared about the imperfect cg.
These types of comments really make me happy. We put so much work into this movie and when it came out it was panned. I get it, I've worked on plenty of crap, but this one was special for me. It was my first time working on a mega budget film.
@@RichardServello I really liked this movie. Not only CGI part , story was also pretty good for me. The most amazing part is constructs were actually constructs and not some space magic effects. Many Green Lanterns just use a green dust going around instead of guns/bombs/shields.
@@RichardServellothe CGI was good for GL and felt it worked for the suit as it is just a construct made from the green light of will emitted from the ring. The guardians could have used another couple of weeks they seems like they did not get as much time as needed.
@@RichardServello regardless of the public response, you should still be proud of this, a CG suit like this was super ambitious for a 2011 movie, and the fact that it looked as good as it did throughout the movie is really impressive. It's not perfect, but the general response is definitely excessive, I think most people just jumped on the hate train because it was the popular thing to do. I really enjoyed the movie and the suit as a kid
"CGI" is the go-to complaint when people just want to turn off their brains and regurgitate a popular albeit nonsensical sentiment People who hate on the use of CGI in a freakin SUPERHERO MOVIE are just... Fake comic fans at BEST. CGI is the best way to transfer that comic feel to the big screen when it comes to heroes with actual super powers
With Ryan Reynolds trying to make every possible joke with Green Lantern and the General Public hating on the movie, I'll say this: This movie was the only movie we had at home on DVD and we used to watch this movie over and over again. I just liked the movie and I loved to watch the action scenes over and over again.....
I have treat he’s it many times as well and not just be aide it was all I had available. It’s fun entertainment. People just like having stuff to complain about!
1000% if Reynolds didn't try to keep milking the GL joke throughout his career, the movie wouldn't be nearly as hated. It was never amazing, but people just pilled on it
@@wheeler6768agreed, he even killed himself in Deadpool 2 when he was about to read the Green Lantern script. Didn't he meet his wife filming this movie? He acts like this is his worst failure.
Same. It seems like everyone’s complaints with this movie are them comparing this to what could have been (with the script being leaked earlier into production, or people wanting a physical suit) as opposed to just judging it for what it is. It’s not a great movie by any means, but everyone treats it like it’s unwatchable, it’s just fine.
@@basti.9022 I've been a fan of Green Lantern since I was a little kid in the late 80'-90's, not a superfan I just know about the lore and stuff. Reynolds campy acting style ruined the character, good for Deadpool, bad for Green Lantern. Also making the movie an origin story that's pretty hard to fit into a couple hours, especially when they also squeeze in the Parallax character, which was actually the end of the Hal Jordan era before it was rebooted in comics. They made a movie with the origin, the death, and the reboot of Hal Jordan rewritten into one and it's a MESS. On top of that, they used childish elements of the comics as far as his powers and heroic feats. As if making the movie for a demographic that's not even going to be interested in that character. And that's why people say it's bad. As a stand-alone movie it's passable but it got dragged by the fans.
@@santos8468 it's the best because there are none better than it. It's also the worst because there are none worse than it. My comment was for the algo and the LOLS(small lol in this case 😢)
Nope! I'll "die on the hill" that the production design was A++ and it made sense that his suit is a CGI suit because it's a RING CONSTRUCT in the comics.
While you're 100% correct about the fact IT'S SUPPOSED TO LOOK UNCANNY, you have to realize that this film was made in order to bring the hero to WIDER AUDIENCES. What they should have done is have Hal Jordan make a "Human Spider" tier suit, then through sheer willpower alone have that uncanny suit manifest upon him. Would have really helped out on character development, helped the audience see the uncanny suit as an upgrade, as well as being able to sneak in some goofy jokes/references. Won't lie, I know I just typed the "wider audience" blasphemy spiel. What I'm trying to point out is that they failed at their true intentions.
@@pingaswingas1 The eyes were actually pretty simple! Rather than using CGI eyes layered on top of the suit, they simply stretched and squashed the eyes of the suit in Photoshop!
Constructs were really interesting. There were SO MANY that none were art directed before they got to comp. We would get EVERY energy pass they came up with and everyone would look dev a single construct, then the best design would win. My look of the brick wall was used in the training scene. Might not seem like much, BUT it was the only non-glossy construct so it was fun to create something that still fit in the world but was technically different.
For years I believed I was the only soul that didn't hate this movie. Yes, it had a bad script and the CGI was noticeable, but I always praised their character design and world building. One of the scenes that stuck in my head since I watched it, was when we got to see all the lanterns and see the alien design with their unique suit/armors. But outside from Hal Jordan and Parallax, the concept and consistency with the lanterns was truly enjoyable for me and I respect the ambition and their efforts. TBH I think this movie became one of those memes that everyone knows they must trash on it because it's fun.
Even though it was considered bad at the time, the CGI Suits don't actually look that bad and haven't gotten much worse as time goes on. It was moreso the disconnect between how Ryan's head and the Suit moved. The body actually blends in with the footage fairly well at times and it's really only the Mask that constantly looks horrible. Now I am being loose with the term "blends in" because it's constantly glowing & reminding you that it's fake but the alien GLs do look like they're in the scenes. When they're not attaching a real head to it, the CGI Suits work. So rather than a full CGI Suit, they should've had a practical suit that was just the dark greens and then add the highlights & glowing with CGI. Even if they'd end up replacing the whole thing with CGI, the animators would've had better reference footage if Ryan wore a tight suit. At least we're able to learn from it, like I never noticed that the movement at the bottom of the neck was why it's easy to tell when a real head is placed on top of CGI. It explains why that part is usually hidden like with Iron Man. On a side note, was there even an explanation for why his eyes turn Blue when wearing the suit? I'm assuming the character had blue eyes in the comics and this was a way to pay homage but the constant color change looks bad and makes the CGI mask even more unbelievable when Ryan's eyes are being edited too.
Even just having a real collar could have saved so much labor. That said it would have entailed some compromise of not looking as otherwordly, not as much like a perfect second skin.
Yeah I had that thought a few minutes into the video and couldn't not think it. A practical suit with the same effects would look much better. I also don't think the suit looks that bad, my big thing is the mask. It's too small and tight
His eye turn blue to mimick the way he looks in the comic where his eyes are pure white when he wears the domino mask, I guess it was a middle ground because they figured completely white eyes in live action was too creepy for kids or something
Thank you for doing this. I've honestly never understood the hate this film gets. I think it's quite good and the cgi works well imo because the whole green lantern power is making these constructs. It makes perfect sense that the suit would match that, and I've never had a problem suspending disbelief watching this films. And it's one of the few superhero films that I don't mind rewatching many times. Plus the whole Green Lantern theme of conquering fear is great.
Not gonna lie, I've kinda always been okay with the CGI suit. 1) It's the first time they've tried doing the GL suit in live action (to my knowledge) and 2) How else did you think they were gonna make it. it's a suit made out of energy that's in a CGI world, its gonna look a little weird. What they should do in the future though, is to have a practical suit that they can use and add CGI effects to in post. A mocap suit can be used when the suit is being put on or taken off.
That would have helped...A LOT. Also didn't help that a lot of the blue screen shots were dark and magenta and several of the green screens were yellow. Overall production was less than stellar and gave us more than a few headaches!
I've honestly liked this movie since it came out and even have the art book where you can see ultra HQ images of the different corps members. It's pretty funny to hear people rag on the cgi in it, particularly the suit. I still maintain that the vfx team did an incredible job and people only say it looks terrible because they know it's cgi going in. A really strong case I feel for it was just a personal experience I had where I was watching the deleted scenes that have no finished vfx work on them so it was just Ryan and Mark Strong in the mocap suits talking. My mother happened to walk through the room at the time and said "what are they wearing?" I had to explain that the suits in the film proper were fully cgi and she'd watched that with me in the past. Just never realized.
unironically love this movie. it also gave us possibly the most beautiful Barbie face ever created with the carol ferris doll. Not to mention bringing blake and ryan together. 💜
I kid you not, I could never see the problem with the Green Lantern suit. Sure, it can look weird at times, but it never bothered me that much. It's crazy though how it looks a lot better than CGI in some modern films.🤔
Oh, another little bit of insider info. The rooftop scene was a reshoot WAY into post production. Ryan was in Africa shooting another movie that he had to shave his head for. The entire sequence was shot in a hotel room drapped with green fabric. He was wearing a TERRIBLE wig, which was subsequently replaced by CG. I had one shot in that sequence...it looks SO BAD. LOL. In case you didn't know :)
Y'know, looking back at these clips, I genuinely think the biggest visual problem with the suits is the colour grading - the green is *way* too heavily saturated to look tangible next to the live-action elements. Any shot with a primarily digital environment, the suits look great, but in shots where they're the only digital element (especially darker or backlit ones) the luminance of the green is way too high to look like it fits in with the rest of the shot. I remember Corridor Crew mentioning a similar issue in the original live action Sonic trailer - his fur's so intensely blue that it doesn't look like it's reacting to the ambient light enough
It makes sense to use a cgi suit though. The suit is a construct like all the other ring constructs. It makes sense to have it look consistent with all the effects.
The Iron Spider suit covers his head mostly of the time, and don't mark his body muscles, so i don't think is comparable. Bcs once they cover Tom Holland's face, it's just 100% CGI body without need to blend with a real person. Ryan's face was always visible.
As a result of watching this video, I had a dream last night where Ryan Reynalds became my roommate and I was hanging out with him for a few weeks and the entire time he was kinda rude and didn’t like me but he was also really insecure about being in green lantern so I spent the time trying to convince him that green lantern wasn’t actually THAT bad of a movie and he shouldn’t be so hard on himself especially when the problems with the movie weren’t his fault. Over the time he grew to be a bit kinder to me and to himself
for me it was the fact that since they had a budget they made some of the objects the lantern portrayed not practical like the gun at the end of the movie😂
Honestly the biggest issue I had with the movie was the plot and specifically that of the villain, after he left Earth it should have stayed in space going off to feel like a buddy cop movie in space with Hal and Sinestro but end up with revealing Sinestro is basically a dirty cop planning to overthrow the Guardians.
Anytime you don't see Ryan's face he's fully CG. We would have a butt reel every week of all the shots that were from behind to not have to deal with footage.
Think of how much money and how many skilled artists worked in service of this suit, and wonder why the heck they didn't put just a little more time and effort into the script.
We had the entire building in Culver filled with artists AND the building in the culver studios lot next door. We also had a facility in New Mexico. Smurfs was going at the same time so we had to have an additional render farm brought into the parking lot in trucks! Power outages also happened often.
Hal is notorious for being unimaginative with his constructs, so they got that accurate in the film. Constructs are convoluted as hell anyway a bunch of characters construct things they couldnt possibly imagine in detail
I ain't have a problem with the CGI itself, I had a problem with how the suits looked like they were basically just spray painted onto the user's bodies and the Very drastic design changes everyone but Sinestro went through. Like Kilowog looking more like a Pug than a Pig in the Humpty Dumpty one looking like some creepy Jim Henson Workshop puppet
Very interesting! One thing I'm a little unsure about is what you said about full digital replacement not being very common? At least nowadays I'm pretty sure it's very common for Digi Doubles to fill in for a lot Effects like this, if you don't see actors face very clearly.
this is such a guilty pleasure movie if they maybe had the focus on sinestro trying to teach hal while showing sinestros fall due to another villain i feel like it wpuld have a came away with a better script/story
Honestly, I appreciate the explanation bc I don't think ppl realize how hard that stuff really is. And like you said, I think it actually captures what the comics were trying to convey. As a fan of the comics it was really cool to see it come to life. I think most of the problem the film sufferS from is more revolved around the writing / casting. I don't think RR was the right choice for the role.
One thing I would put "Green Lantern" over most other movies for is how aliens are really highly diverse in their appearances. With all my love for "Guardians of the Galaxy" almost every single alien is just human. And you're in big luck if they have colored skin. Is there at least any canon explanation for that? Like "in far future mankind figured out timetravel, but something went wrong and a lot of people were sent back on a bunch of random planets"?
The movie (and this video) is a valuable record of the progress in the art of capturing and reproducing the minute details of the human body movements of a professional actor toward the goal of becoming believably a living human body going through the experiences portrayed in the movie.
This one feels like one of those movies where the director had no idea how to work around the limitations of cgi. Not only that he literally made their job harder by the sets and on location shooting
I always loved the suit design. The glowing emblem with the viens glowing throughout the suit was so cool! Had they lighted the environment and his face better it would have looked better.
I don't think it deserves this much hate .I would still like to see an energy based suit for Green lantern it just makes sense and is less time consuming to change then a super suit .The villain,the motives ,the Hal Jordan was annoying but sometimes it worked ,The settings on earth were a miss .
Nice video. My son and I both saw the flick in theaters when it released and we liked it for the most part. My biggest complaint was that they tried to shove too much in - the whole Fear monster story should have been woven into a sequel.
I think one thing people forget when bashing CGI is that vfx artists don’t want to create something that looks bad, why would they? I’d argue that 9 times out of 10, it’s not a lack of skill or artistry, but a lack of budget or clear art direction.
I thought it was genuinely pretty good. Like, when I was a kid I thought it was pretty cool and looking back now, the concept of the idea of the suit and end result was still pretty solid
I think the better solution would have been to have gone with a practical suit and then added VFX touches to it. Because nothing about the CGI suit looks something somebody couldn’t have physically made.
What you say here matches with my impressions when I watched this movie years ago. I felt like they should have taken a Tron approach. Giving Reynolds an actual suit that looks like a lantern suit, but has CSO elements ON it that can be digitally replaced or built on... Instead of a blank suit with mocap. They could have easily incorporated things in a way where most of the body would have been real and only the effects layered on top mattered. And would have been just that - layers. Not a full replace!
This was also rendered using Arnold and the entire suit had to be parametized in order to render a segment of it. The shot that starts with the lantern logo and pulls back had to be rendered on 10s for months to be able to work on it because that shot alone took a week to render on the farm. Getting the logo in full detail meant parametiztion of his toes at that same res, even tho it's not in view. I had a shot in the training scene where he stands up and I needed less neck on the render...took 2 days to get a new render.
I genuinely loved this movie as a child. So much so that I watched it multiple times even tho the version my dad pirated on a dvd was a VR version and I had to watch one half of my tv screen.
honestly the suit is the easiest to meme on, but the VFX is probably the best part i love how they made the suits unique ... the actual movie though? yeah it wasn't very good. & yeah as another person in the comments pointed out, the fact that there's no actual green light makes it blend less; so yeah maybe they could have used physical suits with green LEDs for the filming & add the CGI on top
I applaud you for defending CG artists, whose work mostly falls short due to decisions made by people not associated with the visual effects companies. Regardless of the flaws, I never understood the criticism of the suit. There are plenty of elements deserving of criticism for the movie (💩☁), but in my opinion the suit isn't one of them. As you stated it was energy formed into a suit. As such it wasn't physical material clinging to his body, so the justification for the wonky definition is that the suit looked like Hal's mental idea of what it should look like. From your research it seems they actually tried materials and techniques to create a physical suit and simply couldn't make it work.
Yeah... There was some strange disharmony... And the boom box of the show was the suit, so you couldn't just let it go as it was there all the time. Great pieces of work that didn't just fit together. You said what I was thinking about. 😊
CGI artists are literally the backbone of the modern Hollywood cinema, yet a thankless job whose work catches eyes not when it's done good but only when it's flawed.
Could have used a mixed approach, practical effect with CGI to enhance spandex. The suit is supposed to be constructed from his mind, he is an earthlink, so he knows clothing. Guy Gardner suit has a vest/jacket, so using spandex would have worked, Heck they could have thrown a little easter egg by making the suit the one from Alan Scott and the Hal not liking it, and still it being made of cloth.
I wonder what the corridor crew could to to fix the graphics in this movie. Maybe not the whole thing, but I bet they could redo a bunch of key scenes and make it look a lot better now.
I always thought that the scripts for the live action movie and the animated movie First Flight got switched. First Flight was basically a buddy cop movie (think Lethal Weapon in space) and was fantastic.
You ain't the only one. I loved the movie and didn't even think the cgi was bad. Also Ryan Reynolds was a great casting choice for Hal Jordan Green lantern. I really wish seeing Ryan again as Hal someday.
I'm glad that someone else addressed that the CGI suit was still going strong even in the Marvel side of films. Unfortunately, the worst thing about Green Lantern isn't the suit, it's the final battle. It's cliché for the newest/best member of the group to succeed where the big group failed, but it was a mistake to have Hal defeat Parallax by himself, with no support from the Green Lantern Corps. It ends up making the Corps look incompetent. In which case, why would Hal Jordan want to be a part of their crew?
