Spoilers ahead for Season 1 of Lanterns. There’s a frustrating contradiction at the center of HBO’s Lanterns:
I liked it.
Quite a bit, actually.
As an HBO prestige drama, Lanterns works. It’s atmospheric, well-acted, deliberately paced, and built around a genuinely compelling mystery. Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre are excellent together. The cinematography is handsome. Their performances have weight. And unlike some comic book adaptations that simply collapse under bad dialogue or sloppy storytelling, I don’t think the problem here is that Lanterns is poorly written.
The problem is that after eight episodes, I’m still waiting for the Green Lantern series to begin.
And once again, comic book fans are being asked to be patient.
From the beginning, James Gunn and Peter Safran told us this would be a grounded, True Detective-inspired take on Green Lantern. Fair enough. There’s nothing inherently wrong with approaching superhero material from a different direction. In fact, it can be exciting. Watchmen proved HBO could take comic book mythology, radically reinterpret it, and still embrace what made the source material extraordinary.
But there is a difference between reinventing something and continually withholding it.
For much of Lanterns, the Green Lantern mythology feels like something happening just outside the frame.
We hear about the larger universe. We get hints of the Guardians. Breadcrumbs point toward the Sinestro Corps. The rings are constantly described as among the most powerful weapons in existence.
Then we watch them create another shield.
Or a drill.
Or, yes, a bottle opener.
At some point, “grounded” starts to mean afraid to go there.
Chandler and Pierre shine bright
If Lanterns has an unquestionable strength, it’s the pairing of Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre.
Chandler gives Hal Jordan a bruised, weary quality that makes this older interpretation fascinating even when I don’t agree with every choice the series makes with the character. There’s history in his performance. Regret. Arrogance. Humor. The feeling of someone who has seen things John Stewart can’t yet comprehend.
It also makes what happens to Hal even more frustrating.
Chandler is so good that I found myself wishing we had gotten years with his version of Green Lantern before meeting him at the end of his journey. An entire cosmic career sits somewhere in the character’s past, and Lanterns largely asks us to imagine it.
Pierre, meanwhile, has everything necessary to become a terrific John Stewart. He has presence to spare, and his restraint works beautifully against Chandler’s more weathered Hal.
But here again, the series holds back.
For most of the season, John is becoming Green Lantern rather than truly being Green Lantern. When he finally takes flight in the finale, it works. It’s a strong moment.
It’s also eight episodes late.
I don’t need bad writing to be disappointed
This is where I part ways with some of the harsher criticism of the series.
I don’t think Lanterns is badly written.
Its mystery structure works. The character scenes largely work. The themes surrounding John’s identity, Hal’s failures, and the burden of carrying power are legitimate ideas worth exploring. Making Green Lantern into a murder mystery was actually a smart way to differentiate the series from the avalanche of superhero television we’ve already seen.
My issue is the bargain the show makes with the audience.
It wants all the credibility of being an HBO drama while keeping the comic book mythology on a very long leash.
Why?
Green Lantern is one of the few DC properties where the mythology should be absolutely enormous. This isn’t Batman patrolling Gotham. This is an intergalactic police force made up of thousands of beings from across the universe, armed with rings that can transform willpower into virtually anything their minds can imagine.
That premise is gloriously ridiculous.
Embrace it.
Instead, the first season repeatedly seems worried that too much Green Lantern might interfere with the serious television show surrounding it.
But the Green Lantern part is why we came.
And sometimes the series seems a little too eager to remind us that this is HBO.
The constant use of “fuck” in the dialogue is a good example. I’m not offended by the word. Far from it. But after a while, it stops sounding organic and starts feeling like the series is trying to underline its adult credentials.
“Fuck” does not automatically make dialogue edgy
Sometimes it gives a line punch. Sometimes it’s exactly what a character would say. But when everybody keeps reaching for it, the word stops being dangerous, surprising, or even particularly real. It simply becomes another way for the show to announce, See? This isn’t your dad’s superhero series.
We already knew that.
The performances, themes, and tone establish that without needing to salt every other conversation with profanity.
More importantly, where is that same willingness to push boundaries when it comes to the thing that actually makes Green Lantern unique?
Where are the constructs?
Nothing encapsulates the problem better than the constructs.
Green Lantern’s ring isn’t simply a laser gun. The fun is that its power is limited by imagination. Different Lanterns should fight differently because their personalities inform what they create.
It is one of the most visually cinematic superhero powers ever conceived.
And somehow Lanterns makes it feel mundane. It’s like Batman without his utility belt. Spider-Man without webbing.
I understand not wanting every episode to become an expensive CGI light show. Television has budgets. Restraint can even make the big moments more meaningful.
But by the end of eight episodes, I shouldn’t still be thinking:
Can somebody please make something cool with the damn ring?
The lack of imagination becomes especially noticeable because the show keeps reminding us how extraordinary these weapons supposedly are.
Show me.
Give me the crazy constructs. Give me the impossible ideas. Let John and Hal reveal who they are through what they create.
A Green Lantern ring should feel like imagination weaponized.
Here, too often, it feels like a very expensive flashlight.
Hal deserved more
My biggest disappointment is Hal Jordan.
I have no objection to an older Hal. In fact, Chandler proves what a great idea that could have been. A veteran Lantern who has spent decades protecting his sector and is now confronted with his own failures could have been a fantastic foundation for the DCU.
Instead, Hal is largely used as a bridge to John.
You can understand the dramatic logic. The old Lantern trains the new one. The baton passes. John becomes the hero who will carry the mythology forward.
But Hal Jordan is not Obi-Wan Kenobi.
He is one of the defining Green Lanterns.
Killing him just as audiences are finally getting to know him feels less like completing a story and more like skipping one.
And because Chandler is so damn good in the role, the loss feels even bigger.
I wanted to see this Hal Jordan in space.
I wanted to see what his constructs looked like at his peak. I wanted to see his relationship with the Corps. I wanted to see his history with Sinestro. I wanted to understand what decades of carrying that ring had done to him before the series started breaking him apart.
Instead, much of the most interesting Green Lantern material apparently happened before Episode 1.
That gets at my larger frustration with the season.
I kept waiting for Lanterns to expand.
Instead, it contracted.
Who exactly are you making ‘Green Lantern’ for?
The critical response makes this disconnect particularly interesting.
Lanterns sits at 91% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 73% with audiences. An 18-point gap doesn’t mean audiences rejected the show. A 73% audience score is hardly a disaster.
But the difference raises a question worth asking:
Who exactly are you making Green Lantern for?
Critics are responding to what Lanterns does extremely well: the performances, the atmosphere, the mystery, the HBO polish and its determination to treat superhero material like serious drama.
I get it.
I agree with much of it.
But audiences – particularly fans who have waited years to see Green Lantern properly realized – are also responding to what the series doesn’t give them.
Where are the spectacular constructs?
Where is the Green Lantern Corps?
Where are the bizarre alien Lanterns? Not just Earl the Space Plant.
Where are the Guardians?
Where is the scale, color, and cosmic imagination that separates Green Lantern from virtually every other superhero property?
You don’t have to sacrifice prestige television to deliver those things.
You can do both
That’s what makes the whole thing so frustrating.
Imagine this exact level of acting, this level of character work, and this HBO production quality applied to the full insanity of the Green Lantern mythology.
That could be incredible.
Instead, we get a television series that sometimes appears to think embracing its comic-book origins would somehow make it less sophisticated.
It wouldn’t.
The mythology is the feature, not the embarrassment.
The finale finally looks up
There are moments in the finale where you can almost see the show it could become.
John taking flight.
The growing suggestion of forces beyond Earth.
Hints that the Corps, the Guardians and the larger mythology are waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.
Those moments worked on me.
Of course they did.
I’m a Green Lantern fan.
Which is precisely why they’re frustrating.
Because once again we finish a superhero project being told, essentially:
Just wait until next time
We’ve spent years watching comic book movies and television series tease the thing we actually paid to see.
The costume is coming.
The villain is coming.
The team is coming.
The mythology is coming.
The universe is coming.
Eventually, you have to stop teasing Green Lantern and make Green Lantern.
Fans have already waited through one disastrous theatrical attempt at the property. They’ve watched DC repeatedly introduce and abandon characters, universes, and plans.
At some point, the reward has to exist in the story we’re watching now — not the one somebody promises we might get three years from now.
REELated:
After Supergirl, is James Gunn’s DC plan kryptonite for the brand?
A very good series that stops short of greatness
That is the strange final verdict on Lanterns. As television, it’s probably one of DC Studios’ stronger swings.
Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre carry the series. The mystery is engaging. The production has the confidence and texture you expect from HBO. There are ideas here worth exploring, and Pierre absolutely deserves the opportunity to continue as John Stewart.
I would watch Season 2.
But as a lifelong fan, I wanted to leave Season 1 staring at the screen thinking:
Holy shit. Green Lantern is finally here.
Instead, I left thinking:
Maybe next season.
And that’s the problem.
Lanterns doesn’t fail because it tried something different.
It frustrates because it came so close to showing us how spectacular this corner of DC can be – and then pulled back.
Again.
The critics may see a 91% prestige drama.
The audience may see a pretty good 73% superhero show.
I see both. And somewhere between those two scores is the Green Lantern series I’m still waiting to watch.
BOTTOM LINE: Lanterns succeeds as a smart, beautifully acted HBO mystery, with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre delivering terrific performances. But after eight episodes of teasing rings, Guardians, constructs, and the larger Corps, the series never fully embraces the cosmic imagination that makes Green Lantern special. Very good television. Not yet a great Green Lantern show. It’s still a REEL STREAM.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
