The marketing campaign for the upcoming Green Lantern movie started off sluggish late last year with an interesting but frustratingly earthbound teaser trailer. Now of course raising awareness of the Emerald Avenger’s big screen debut was always going to be a difficult task; the Green Lantern is one of the most iconic characters in all of the DC Universe, but he’s not on the same level of instant recognizability as his fellow DCU stalwarts Superman and Batman. A lot of lower-tiered DCU heroes and heroines have always had that problem, as the negative fan reaction to David E. Kelley’s failed Wonder Woman TV pilot most recently proved.

Not much is known about the plot of the Green Lantern movie except that it’s an origin story focusing on Hal Jordan (played by Ryan Reynolds, barely edging out Bradley Cooper for the coveted role) and it concerns an intergalactic threat known only as Parallax. Somehow it involves Blake Lively looking hot, a very David Crosby-looking Peter Sarsgaard turning into something that resembles the veiny-headed mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and lots and lots of aliens bearing power rings. Any studio would be understandably nervous.

With the movie’s release less than a month away, Warner Bros. has really been ramping it up on the Green Lantern publicity front., following a better-received second trailer and a four-minute WonderCon preview that showcased the expansive universe of the character and gave us an improved look at the Green Lantern Corps. Now the studio has released a new trailer that focuses on the history of the Corps and fills us on the background of Parallax. This trailer doesn’t give away any more of the plot but it acts as a fascinating companion piece to the preview clips released so far. In fact, Reynolds doesn’t actually appear until ninety seconds into this two-and-half-minute trailer, which you can see in 3D now in front of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides theatrical showings.

I am now fully psyched for Green Lantern. Between this, the recently-released Thor, and the upcoming X-Men: First Class and Captain America: The First Avenger it looks like the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight will soon have some serious competition at the box office in the years to come.

You can check out the new trailer (in regular old 2-D), complete with Geoffrey Rush voiceover — he provides the voice of Corps member Tomar-Re) here below.

Green Lantern opens June 17, 2011 in both 2D and 3D. Altogether now…. “WE ARE THE CORPS!”

Trailer