It's a damn good thing I just watched the GL movie, read a hundred pages of the Showcase collection, read GL for three years post-Coast City destruction and been keeping up to date on what's going on in GL land. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a clue what was going on in 95% of this book.
As far as the reading experience goes (knowing all I know), this was still an awkward collection. There are three issues of the regular GL series, two issues of the GL Corps title and a Sinestro Corps one-shot/kick-off issue. No single issue is stand-alone on any level and that's okay until the end when there is ZERO resolution to this collection. Absolutely nothing is resolved making for a frustrating read to say the least. Every issue ends in a cliffhanger, but since the presentation is alternating between GL and GL Corps and the one title isn't immediately picking up from the last, the cliffhangers just hang for 22 pages. Meh. The GL Corps issues are both ugly (a problem I had when reading the first collection last year) and, frankly, kind of pointless. There's nothing to them that couldn't be contained in the regular series and written better by Johns.
That's right, I said Johns is doing a much better writing job than Gibbons. While Johns is clearly setting up the rainbow corps and Blackest Night throughout his issues and references a million and one continuity points to the point of annoyance, at least the writing flows nicely and has relevance to the bigger picture. Gibbons' GL Corps pages just sort of lay there as a way of reaffirming... well, I guess the Sinestro Corps badassness. I guess.
Instead of spending endless pages showing fight scene after fight scene, how about showing us some of the background players - Superboy Prime, Cyborg Superman, Anti-Monitor. I know there were tie-in one-shots for them. Those absolutely should have been included in this collection.
The ideas Johns is working with are genuinely interesting. The execution of half this collection is terrible and the presentation of the collection as a whole is insanely disappointing and unfulfilling.