Greg Berlanti Says 'Green Lantern' Is A Jedi 'Top Gun'; Says 'The Flash' Is Like 'The Dark Knight' & 'Green Lantern'; Confused Yet?

Greg Berlanti sure knows how to make geeks drool while making really vague comparisons. The writer recently talked about the long gestating "The Flash" and next year's "Green Lantern" and drew parallels to other major tentpoles which, in the end, didn't really reveal much about the films at all.

Speaking to the LA Times, he describes what drew him to the character of Hal Jordan/"Green Lantern" and the result is a jumble of mythology culled from his DVD collection. Berlanti says, "The character itself was “Top Gun” before Maverick. He was a guy who had to learn how to care. He shut down early in his life because of something that happened to him, and suddenly he doesn’t just have to care about himself, he doesn’t just have to care about the planet, he has to care about the entire universe. It was writ so large. The other side of it was that he was always the comic-book version of Luke Skywalker, imagining that you’re picked for this group of heroes that’s there to defend the entire universe. It always had this great kind of wondrous scope to it, and as a kid who ran around in his Superman Underoos, it was a chance to do a superhero movie that went off planet."

Um, yeah. So draw whatever expectations you have for "Green Lantern" and let us know what you think because we're not quite sure what he's talking about. We're just getting a mental image of Tom Cruise walking around Tatooine giving people thumbs up and our brains are hurting.

As for "The Flash," Berlanti's tendency to rifle off movie titles gets worse. He tells MTV, "I think it's tonally somewhere in between ['Green Lantern'] and 'Dark Knight.' You're dealing with somebody who is already a crimefighter in a world of those kinds of criminals and that kind of murder and homicide. I find you talk a lot about different films when you're working on a film, and we spend a lot more time talking about 'Se7en' or 'The Silence of the Lambs' as we construct that part of Barry's world, then I thought when we got into it. It helps balance a guy in a red suit who runs really fast." Frankly, a brooding guy who dresses up a red outfit to run really fast sounds like he needs a therapist.

Ok, we're probably being way too hard on Berlanti who is being kind enough to talk about these projects. We guess we're just not huge on the kind of comparisons that only tend to spin fan frenzy out of control. So take all of this with a grain of salt, but it is an insight into the direction they've attempted to take each film.

"Green Lantern" opens on June 17, 2011. "The Flash," last we heard, is still at the treatment stage. Meanwhile, Berlanti's sophomore directorial effort "Life As We Know It" hits theaters on October 8th.