First look at the movie power battery

An image of Hal Jordan’s power battery from the upcoming Green Lantern film made its way onto the Web over the weekend:

(image source: Daily BLAM!)

As with the costume reveal earlier this year, fans are fiercely debating the battery’s design. Time for my two cents!

• It’s certainly…alien. Even though a “lantern” is a tool developed by human beings on Earth, this thing makes no bones about the fact that it comes from another world.
• It reminds me of Kyle Rayner’s battery. That was my first thought when I saw the shape and basic design of this thing. It’s not exactly like Kyle’s version in the comics, but the resemblance is obvious, especially with the “seam” bisecting the battery:


If this was at all intentional (the likeness is too close to be a coincidence), it was a very smart move on the filmmakers’ part. Since both Hal and Kyle have legions of fans, putting aspects of both characters on film will only add to fans’ enjoyment of the movie. (It’s likely that Kyle himself will show up in the sequels, anyway.)

• I bet it pulses and flows with energy. We already know that the Green Lantern uniforms will glow accordingly based on the wearer’s actions, and it makes sense that the battery will do something similar. This may only be a still image, but we can see flashes of some sort of energy running through it already. Perhaps it’ll look as though Matrix code is running over its surface.
• Will there be an actual battery prop? I’m not talking about a collectible; we know that’ll happen at some point. I mean in the film itself. The energy pulses I mentioned above will likely be animated through some CGI magic, but it’s also possible that the entire battery itself is just a CGI model pasted into the film. Or, if it’s something that Ryan Reynolds will physically pick up, the object he lifts will likely look nothing like that. It may be just a flat blue (or green!) shape that the CGI model is pasted onto in post-production.

While I’m not drooling over the battery, I certainly have no big problems with it. Its overall design fits in with the rest of the film universe that we’ve seen so far, and that’s the way it should be. The only glaring “error” is that it looks nothing like the Green Lantern symbol, and the entire point of that symbol is that it’s meant to be continuous across the uniform, rings, batteries, and Central Power Battery. Oh well.

Now I’m left wondering how long it will take before this new battery design appears in the Green Lantern comics…

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