Summer of Green Lantern, 4: First Flight

Warner Video’s straight-to-DVD animated film Green Lantern: First Flight has a terrific premise. Since the Green Lantern Corps amounts to an intergalactic police force, the creative team offers a story that could be pitched as “Training Day... in space!” Test pilot Hal Jordan (voiced by Christopher Meloni) serves the “Ethan Hawke” role as the inexperienced but shrewd rookie, who finds a mentor in celebrated Green Lantern Sinestro (Victor Garber of “Alias”), the evil “Denzel Washington” of the piece.

Apart from a brisk version of Jordan’s Earthbound origins, First Flight takes place entirely in space, including such alien planets as Oa and Qward. Given the unlimited imaginative canvas of animation, First Flight would seem perfect for an animated film, but it’s a minor disappointment by the standards of such predecessors as the Cold War-era Justice League: New Frontier and the feminist action-fable Wonder Woman.