Headscratchers / Green Lantern (2011)

• Hal demonstrates that the ring silently answers his questions for him almost as soon as he can think of them, provided it has that information in its database. Then he goes on to ask Tomar Re what the gigantic green light coming out of the center of Oa is. I get that they wanted to exposit for the audience, but wouldn't it have been easier to just make the ring answer his questions only when he directed them specifically towards it? Or am I supposed to believe that his ring didn't know about the central power battery which it was made from?
  • In-universe, the rings are semi-intelligent on their own so it might have decided to keep quiet and let Tomar Re exposit to Hal for the sake of encouraging camaraderie among fellow Lanterns. Out-of-universe, if the ring is transmitting all the exposition directly into Hal's brain then the audience doesn't get to hear it.
• Apart from fanservice, why is it that during the credits, Sinestro took the yellow ring? From what we saw Sinestro gave no hints to any displeasure or desires against the Guardians. There wasn't any clear motive what with Jordan proved, using Fear was bad and using Will could defeat it. So In-Universe, there's no clear cut reason.
  • Sinestro spent all movie believing that Fear was stronger than Will, and that it was essentially an untapped resource; he believes that Dark Is Not Evil and plans to use Fear to fight evil as a Well-Intentioned Extremist. He has witnessed his group of Green Lanterns (Will) being completely out-powered by Parallax (Fear) in a straight fight. Hal killed Parallax though trickery, not sheer strength; in the preceding straight-up battle, he barely holds it off. Nothing has so far proved Sinestro wrong that Fear is stronger in sheer power than Will. Sinestro is also the mastermind behind the yellow ring, or at least the one who encouraged the Guardians into its creation. It was his project, and from his point of view it's perfect and the Guardians are holding him back, and will probably have no reason to deploy it at all with Parallax gone. So, in frustration against the restraint and perceived weakness of the Guardians, Sinestro resolves to go it alone and use what he has (directly or indirectly) created.
  • Perhaps Sinestro is also (more than) a little power-hungry, and as seen above, he sees Fear as more powerful than Will. He seems too eager to use the yellow ring throughout the film, and ignore any other options. He doesn't just want to see Parallax beaten, he wants to use the situation as an opportunity to "trade up" his ring. Once again, at the end, his frustration with the Guardians "holding him back" overwhelms him and he steals the yellow ring to go it alone.
• Parallax is supposed to be the most terrifying force of evil in the entire universe. It's a bazillion years old, it's defeated whole squadrons of Green Lanterns without breaking a sweat, and the most anyone has been able to do to it in all that time was to trap it and turn it into Sealed Evil in a Can. Yet in the movie's climax, Hal Jordan defeats Parallax once and for all by ... tricking it into flying a little too close to the sun? That's all it took to defeat it? An intergalactic force of unstoppable evil should be able to eat suns for breakfast!
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, I suppose. The film's version of Parallax doesn't seem to be an actual living entity of fear, like in the comics. So I'm guessing he's not as powerful.
• At one point, during an attempted attack on Parralax, all the Lanterns that are ganging up on him use their collective will to construct a net of sorts to keep Parralax immobilized. How does it work when multiple Lanterns create one object with their energy? Wouldn't they all have to be thinking the exact same thing? And are Lanterns limited in the size of the things they can create with the ring?
  • My guess, either a) the rings give them some kind of limited mental link or b) it was a plan they had gone over before the fight
    • Probably a bit of both: I recall a panel where John Stewart is telling Guy to stick to the "telepathic" communications on their Rings so as not to ruin their attempt at stealth or something. So there's obviously an option for telepathic communication, even if it's just "I think we should make a net".
• The government agents discover that Hector Hammond has been "infected" by Parallax's energy. Why would they risk being around him without protective clothing? Were they not worried about a completely unknown, possibly parasitic life form, having the ability to spread from one host to another?
• What happened to the souls Parallax devoured when it got destroyed by the sun? Did they get to move on to the afterlife? Or were they set ablaze and vaporized, too?
  • Presumably once the body's been destroyed there's nowhere to put the soul; what else was he going to do? Let Parallax consume more people just to protect the (hopeless) souls he's already eaten?
  • On the other hand, he might have saved them from an eternity of being imprisoned within a gigantic malevolent fear entity (which had already killed them) instead of having a peaceful death.
• How was Hal able to hold back the blast that Hector shot at him after giving him his ring? For that matter, how was Hector able to use the ring when it didn't choose him? Is that how it's supposed to work? At first, I thought maybe the ring Hal turned over was a construct and that he still had the real one on, but no, he needs to get the ring back from Hector once Parallax shows up, and there was no reason for him to conjure up an attack directed at himself, anyway.

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