BUT... if they were to make a Green Lantern movie with John Stewart... here's how I would see it done:
Green Lantern: Emerald Guardian
We see a strange landscape, dead aliens all around and an apparently dead John Stewart just a few inches from a bloodied Green Lantern ring. Voiceover starts: "The Most Poweful Weapon in the Universe... and all I had to do was keep it on my finger..."
Cue Opening Credits. Present Day Coast City.
John Stewart is an out of work architect from Detroit, fighting ghosts from his service in the US Marines. His girlfriend, newswoman Tawny Young, is totally wrapped up in her career and wondering when he will stop making excuses and make things happen. His pitch to Ferris Aircraft for some soundproof hangars doesn't fall within their budget. The local hoodlums in his neighborhood accost him for trying to be a 'good guy' and failing so badly. Rent's due. Car's broken down. Times are tough. John doesn't trust his own judgment because of past mistakes, he even has nightmare flashbacks. Deep down, John is scared that he doesn't have what it takes. People talk about that Green Lantern guy sometimes, no one's seen him in
years.
Then, in the middle of one of his darkest moments, this alien sweeps out of the sky. "John Stewart. You have been chosen. You have the capability overcome great fear." says Katma Tui, a gorgeous but taciturn fuscia-skinned alien.
She immediately begins training John in the use of the ring and charge it, as they discuss the cosmos, and Katma is very dodgy about the state of the Green Lantern Corps. As they spar, she is impressed with his military training and remarks that he is a 'builder' and that he assembles real solid objects with his ring instead of just willing shapes into existence. His first field test is an assassination attempt on a public figure, Sentator Jeremiah Crutcher (here, comics fans will notice that Katma is playing Hal's role in John's first appearance), where John bucks orders, uses the Senator as bait, catches the true culprit and gets on Katma's bad side worse. After he mocks the oath, Katma says he's unfit to be a GL, and will submit her review to the Oan Council, at which point they will come take his ring away. She leaves.
John, seeing as how his time with this thing is brief, has a field day, showing off Green Ferrarris and paying cash for everything. He builds a prototype of the soundproof hangars easily, all sorts of stuff. It's all just very fun... well, until the Manhunters show up.
Yeah, they're clearly robots, their eyes glow green. They're there for Earth's Green Lantern, for crimes against sentience and strange cosmic legal terms. With their superior numbers and his ring running out of charge (which cold female computerish voice regularly announces), he's subdued very easily, and taken to the planet Dhor. Here, he first meets the mastermind behind Manhunters... Sinestro.
"Sinestro will ask the questions," and finds it very interesting that his replacement, that he trained, trained John. John is able to gather Sinestro has it in for the GL Corps for their ineffectiveness, but where he got this army from his a mystery. He also taunts John with the fate of the first human GL, alsoa mystery. Sinestro leaves to attend to the next phase of his plan after this factory planet finishes making his army. John manages to summon the GL Corps with the last of his ring's power, and a squad of GLs including Katma, Kilowog, and Tomar-Re, bursts in and manages to distract the Manhunters enough to allow him to get free, charge his ring and with the others, stop production, but the army escapes to rally with Sinestro, pursuing such superior numbers is inadvisable, but Tomar Re trie anyway, and is killed by the powerful yellow entity that covers the Manhunters' escape, "Parallax" is whispered in hushed tones.
John is taken to Oa, where he sees that Oa has some advanced security perimeter that protects them, and meets with the Oan Council, the Guardians of the Universe. These little blue men in their ornate structures of green, after an argument, decide that John has proven himself worthy enough to be a probationary member of the Green Lantern Corps, warning against the dangers of a human Green Lantern, and is assigned to Katma to her shagrin. They make a stop at Mogo, a fun thing as any god Mogo scene should be, and then head to Xanshi, where, thanks to Mogo, they have a lead on an old decommissioned Manhunter. It's in a museum there, as it fell defending them millenia ago. John ends up quickly infatuated with the princess, Yrra Cyril, something which bothers Katma, surprisingly but not surprisingly. John, being a builder, scans the old Manhunter, identification 5TEL. John discovers it was created by the Guardians because it runs on Green Lantern batteries, which is why the Manhunters were capturing GLs to add to their numbers. John reactivates 5TEL and it tells part of the story of the pre-GLs before warning about incoming allies. Cue space, army of manhunters descending. John and Yrra warn Katma, backup is not nearby. They fight as hard as they can, Yrra shows that she's quite a fighter herself, as do many other Xanshi-ans. They seem to be holding them off until Sinestro and his monstrous pet Parallax show up. They offer surrender, but John instead baits Parallax into chasing him. He sets up a trap for Parallax which will recycle his energy on himself until he's spent and weakened and kill able. The trap, ornate as it is, works, until Parallax's true weakened form is revealed: a defenseless, distraught, terrified shadow of Hal Jordan.
John gets more flashbacks to the Marines, where he basically had to gun down a defenseless person after locking eyes with them. John even has a construct Assault Rifle in his hand to add to the symmetry. He can't do it. He hesitates, he realizes that he's hesitated and then he tries to finish it, but it's too late, Parallax has turned John's fear into power and thrown John off of his feet and burst from the trap, fleeing into the sky, leaving John with this energy feedback loop that he can't hold. He tells Katma to evacuate the planet. There's little that can be done in less than a minute, John is overwhelmed, and almost out of power, and Katma flies in to pull him out of the explosion which destroys the planet.
We see Yrra, but not her father, has made it into a shuttle, and weeps as her planet disintegrates. Back on Oa, John is found unfit, stripped of his ring and told he'll be taken back to Earth. Katma volunteers for the job, after dressing him down and telling him how many billions of lives he has on his conscience, she thanks him for doing what he thought was right. "You'll be a great architect, I know it..." and then she makes a starship and they start heading back to Sector 2814. That's when Sinestro and Parallax and the Manhunters attack, bypassing security protocols thanks to what they pulled off of 5TEL, they start bombarding Oa. Guardians sequester for cover, unready GLs try to fight, transmissions for backup are blocked. It's bad. Katma makes the ship solid and says goodbye to John before locking in the ship's autopilot and leaving the ship to join the fight.
On the ground, we see Sinestro is a monster, he walks right into the Guardians' chambers, his beams and constructs cut through GLs like butter, and talks down to them while taking John's ring, still sitting on the pedestal where he had to leave it. Sinestro puts the Earth GL ring around his neck like a trophy. Meanwhile Parallax snipes people from above. In the sky, John uses the ship to communicate with someone (Mogo) to get backup, kamikazes the ship into Parallax to slow him down and dives out of the ship towards Oa. He freefalls towards Sinestro. He reaches out towards Sinestro as he's about to fly by (and then hit the ground and splat if he misses) but Sinestro sees him and knocks him silly as he passes, John ragdolls through the air and off of some structures before skidding across the ground limply. Sinestro smiles and then looks down at his neck... the ring is gone. Cut to the scene we saw from the beginning, but now the ring lights up and comes back onto John's hand, he stands up, he has a green aura but the computer is counting down the last 0.5% of his power with every move he makes. Manhunters rush him, and he makes... a sword, while reciting the Green Lantern oath with pride, as he fights, he does a couple blasts, a little flight, makes a lever to protect himself from a falling ship/building and then, with a spin, uses the sword to cut the front off of a Manhunter, as he finishes the Oath by plugging his ring into the exposed battery. "...Green Lantern's Light!" He becomes fully powered, full suited up, ready for action.
Elsewhere, Sinestro faces off with Katma, who is no match for him while Parallax descends on the planet, and on the Power Battery, the source of the GL's Power. 5TEL, now under control of the Manhunters tries to fight John, but John, knowing his systems, rebuilds his insides so that he's now on the GL's side. 5TEL then, under John's influence, basically hacks and starts to shut down all of the Manhunters. John's own well planned Trojan Horse. Parallax tries to one shot John, but he no longer has anything to lose, so he has no fear. Parallax pulls up all of John's fears, giving John a preponderance of flashbacks that seem to have no effect on this guy who is totally prepared to die at any moment. Parallax cannot stop him and John basically tackles Parallax into the energy for the Power Battery. They wrestle in there and then there is a large corona of light, yellow first, then green takes over as John's fearful flashbacks are slowly replaced with Hal's and then... nothing. Moments later John, glowing green and a powerless Hal Jordan appear from inside the Green Lantern battery. John's ring says he's at 1000% power, which he then uses to rebuild Oa even grander and more beautiful than it was before.
Sinestro is now isolated, and his advantage of Katma seems less and less relevant as more GL's are fighting against him. Hal meets up with Kilowogg who takes him toward Sinestro while John calmly builds a sniper rifle. Sinestro is having at everyone and telling them off, and even Hal shows up in that bomber jacket and Sinestro has his big speech... John has finished the extremely long sniper rifle and fires it at Sinstro, right through Sinestro's.... ring. Sinestro, now powerless gets punched in the face by Hal. Manhunters are all stopped, on standby, thanks to 5TEL and Mogo, and GL backup has arrived, ready to help with anything else that needs doing... there's not much else.
The final resolution scenes have Sinestro in prison, and Hal being re-inducted into the Corps and given a position as the Honor Guard Lantern, a position he gladly gives up for John, who's earned it, and has less desire to return to Earth... cue kiss with Katma Tui and innuendo about additional training time. The two humans part calling each other "Green Lantern" and we go to credits.
After the credits of course, we find Yrra training hard out in some alien wasteland , striking makeshift GL dummies with her staff and then some off camera stranger comes to her. It doesn't speak, but it does toss a Yellow Power Ring at her feet...
) The Equalizer, Tears of the Sun, and a variety of different types of films.
