‘Lanterns’ Is Off to a Promising (If Not Very Green) Start

Few DC characters have longer or more storied histories than Green Lantern, who dates all the way back to 1940 in his earliest form. Besides a period in the 1950s, when superhero comics in general hit a low ebb in popularity, he’s rarely been out of print in the 80 years since. But unlike GL’s colleagues in the Justice League like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, he’s never had a live-action adaptation that captured the things that made his comic so beloved to generations of readers. There was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern film from 2011, of course, but that movie was only beloved in the Bizarro universe, and it captured little of what people who love Green Lantern comics (this writer included) enjoyed about the character.

After only one episode, it’s still very early. But so far, Lanterns has the makings of finally being the thing that gets live-action Green Lantern right. Admittedly, the series’ pilot seems a little bashful about its own superheroic premise; neither lead character appears in any sort of costume for more than a couple seconds, and the pilot is much closer in tone to a detective story or police procedural than a sci-fi adventure about a spacefaring warrior.

That said, Lanterns’ atypical structure suggests the series’ creators understands their source material way better than Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern did. (To be fair, it would be tough for them to understand it worse than Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern.) Every Green Lantern is essentially a cop, albeit one who patrols a sector of outer space and wears a green ring that can conjure anything its owner wills into existence. Using the concept to make a gritty, adult crime drama for HBO Max makes a certain amount of sense.

The first episode of Laterns takes place in multiple time periods, and introduces the most famous Green Lantern, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) as a cynical, battle-hardened veteran of decades of successful campaigns to save our world and others. With Hal getting up there in years, he’s been tasked with training an understudy who can take over in the event he’s ever incapacitated. That’s John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) a former Marine sniper who respects his new mentor’s experience, but has little patience for his sarcastic attitude and showboating.

Hal is supposed to teach John how to use a Green Lantern’s ring, but right in the middle of one of their lessons, Hal receives a vague warning that sends him to the tiny (and quite real) town of Rushville, Nebraska. When John arrives there hours later (after flying commercial; Hal jetted off with his ring and left him behind, a nice detail), he finds Hal investigating a murder filled with peculiar specifics that don’t quite add up. The pair’s search for the killer brings them into conflict with the local sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) and the family, led by Garret Dillahunt’s William Macon, that essentially act as the unelected leaders of the area. (They also have a private militia at their disposal.)

The basic premise set up multiple mysteries, some of which barely even begin to unfurl in Lanterns’ hourlong series premiere. There’s definitely more to come as well; the pilot ends on a whopper of a cliffhanger, and the show’s trailers mention a key piece of Green Lantern lore that hasn’t even come up yet.

Series co-creator Damon Lindelof (Lost, Watchmen) knows a thing or two about creating and judiciously parceling out puzzles across a TV series, and in its first hour Lanterns definitely delivers in that regard. The show was also co-created by showrunner Chris Mundy of Ozark and True Detective, and comic-book author Tom King, both of whom bring plenty of their own earlier professional experience to bear on Lanterns as well.

The pilot, directed by James Hawes (Slow Horses) does a nice job of dropping the viewer right into the middle of its fast-moving riddles, parceling out the absolute minimum of information about Hal’s history as a Green Lantern and the way he fits into the broader DC Universe. At times, that left me with a lot of questions about the character; he seems to be a massive celebrity, but only some of the people he meets treat him that way. He also gives an unconvincing answer for why he doesn’t wear his famous comic-book costume anymore, and it’s tough to square the Green Lanterns we meet in Lanterns with the one played by Nathan Fillion in Gunn’s Superman.

Presumably all of these things will be explained gradually over the course of Lanterns’ seven remaining episodes. (Fillion appears in one of Lanterns’ trailers, so he will show up at some point.) The rest of the show is smart enough and intriguing enough, to give it the benefit of the doubt for now.

The disastrous Green Lantern movie was big and loud, with garish aliens, lots of broad humor, and Peter Sarsgaard as a man with a giant testicle growing out of his forehead which, if nothing else, was certainly a ballsy approach for a big blockbuster intended for a mainstream audience. In most ways that matter, Mundy, Lindelof, and King took the opposite tact with Lanterns. The show’s color palette is dusty, with lots of muted Earth tones and very few pops of color, green or otherwise. The dialogue is decidedly R-rated and the show already threw in a sex scene — it’s HBO, after all — giving it one more than the earlier film, not to mention almost every other DC Comics movie combined.

Part of what makes Green Lantern such a fun comic is the juxtapositiion of its relatively ordinary hero and their place in this large-scale cosmology of strange extraterrestrials and unfamiliar worlds. But it is also a book rooted in policing and partnerships, and that stuff Lanterns has already nailed. The competition is pretty meager, and the sample size is small, but it’s already off to a solid start along the way to becoming the best live-action Green Lantern ever.