Spoilers ahoy! 15 years ago, there was a Green Lantern movie, starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan. It flopped rather notably, falling prey to one of the great rules of movie making: do not have an angry cloud as your villain. In my review, I wrote:

Similarly, his character arc is a wisp of plot at best — some doubts about whether joining the space cops is going to eat into his quality time chilling in that swanky apartment lead him to briefly quit the force, but as soon as the world is threatened by a space octopus he’s back on his beat.

The failure was yet another setback to Warners’ plans to expand outside the Batman/Superman movie axis, and led to more years of DC movies wandering in the wilderness. 

At the time, I also explained how I Just Didn’t Get Green Lantern and never had. 

While I’m willing to shoulder the blame for shunning Green Lantern over the years, as I’ve been learning and growing, I have noticed a few things about the character that do strike me as flaws, dramatically speaking. It’s often noted that DC’s heroes for the most part lack the melodramatic emotional flair of the Marvel heroes, Batman and Superman being the notable exceptions. Marvel’s heroes are flawed and troubled and their powers echo and magnify those flaws and troubles; DC’s leads, generally speaking, are dudes who get some great idea to shrink or go fast and then proceed to shrink or go fast. Green Lantern is a prime example of this.

…So basically, this is the story: a guy is a cocky jerk, and then one day he gets amazing powers and gets to be a space cop….It’s pretty straightforward…probably just too straightforward for my tastes. Over the years, I didn’t get why so many guys identified with Green Lantern, but I think now it is just this simple storyline: cocky guy gets great powers. Who wouldn’t identify with that?

While I am Green Lantern agnostic, many, many people take him  – or them – as an article of faith. The Green Lantern fandom is very strong indeed, and over the years they have spoken out against editorial moves. In the 90s, Hal Jordan, the original Lantern, turned bad guy in a storyline called “Emerald Twilight written by Ron Marz, resulting in a NEW lantern, Kyle Rayner. It also spawned a fan organization called Hal’s Emerald Attack Team, or H.E.A.T., which launched a vigorous attack against DC’s editorial team. This was long before the internet but the dispute had all the psychotic parasocial behavior we’ve come to know and love, including death threats against the editor and Marz and much more. 

There’s a longer version of this in the Hobby Drama Reddit if you want all the gory details, but suffice to say, Lantern fans like their lanterns! 

So when Lanterns, the new show featuring Hal and John Stewart (another Lantern from the lore), debuted on HBO on Sunday with a very, very different take, I knew there would be some strong reactions. 

As a Lantern agnostic, I came here to say: I really enjoyed Lanterns! Kyle Chandler is eminently watchable, and when the gods were putting together the DNA for Aaron Pierre, they mused “Is it possible make a human who looks just like the animated John Stewart?” and the answer is, “Yes it is!” The two had great chemistry and the writing was sharp.

Perhaps I was inclined to like Lanterns because I liked True Detective Season One, and clearly so did showrunners Damon Lindelof, Tom King and Chris Mundy. Two guys wearing bomber jackets in a rustic field investigating grisly murders: it’s a formula that always works. Lanterns also has the remote sadness of Lindelof’s Watchmen (it reminded me a lot of those Ozymandias interludes.) And some of the plot twists made me think “Wow that’s a Tom King thing!” 

I was amused to note that John Stewart did something that no MCU hero has done for 16 years: he got laid! The MCU’s insistence on superheroes as a sect of celibate ascetics is partly because of modern audiences’ squeamishness with on screen sex, and mostly because you can’t show snu-snu in China, where movies make much of their money. (You may recall that the Vision and Scarlet Witch’s romance, for instance, consisted entirely of the Vision making her a tasty bowl of stew.) HBO has no such squeamishness. 

The episode even ended on a stunning twist, flashing forward from the main timeline in 2016 to show one of the main characters dead in 2026 – shocking yes, but in a show where we’ve already seen that character as a sentient projection, we’re told aliens can shape shift, and it’s a comic book for gosh sakes, I’m not too concerned about that actor’s future appearance on a Lanterns Season Two call sheet.  

This True Space Cops approach eschewed the galactic gallivanting that the Green Lantern movie showcased – maybe it was just to keep the budget down, or we like things grounded, or whatever. But in keeping the focus on Hal and his trainee and their testy relationship, it did what all good episodic television should do: made us want to know more about these characters ad the mystery they are trying to solve. And oh yes, there is a power ring. 

But as I was watching I did think, oh man, fanboys are gonna hate this. I was only half right, surprisingly. I didn’t take notes or links, but most of the audience felt as I did. But a significant portion – including may long time comic book professionals – were in the “THIS IS NOT MY GREEN LANTERN!” camp. 

The Beat’s own Russ Burlingame had a good take for the doubters, but his criticisms come down to “I didn’t love it.” 

To be honest, I expected more flame wars about this, given the volatile history of Messing with Hal. But that was many generations of fans ago…in 2026 people want their own Green Lantern….and now they have him. 

Or maybe I’ve missed the battleground states in this. What do you think? A clever reinvention for modern tastes or not my Green Lantern? Sound off in the comments! 

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7 COMMENTS

  1. I’m a hardcore Hal Jordan fan, and I loved the new take. I grew up with Justice League unlimited, so John Stewart kind of filled the spot as the main green lantern for many years for me. Hal Jordan is fucking boring as a character, so it’s really satisfying when he’s well written

  3. I think grounding it on earth makes a lot of sense and I haven’t seen many complaints. Hal Jordan is “my” green lantern, the first comic book I ever read was emerald twilight so he’s always been that introduction to comics for me but green lantern lore today is more than deep, it’s convoluted and inconsistent and the 2011 movie made absolutely no effort to streamline it for new audience hell, sinestros qwordian ring was put in a post credit scene after the introduction of parallax which is a totally backwards way of introducing things, sinestro should have been the main antagonist and should have used the yellow ring for it with the formation of the sinestro corps being the post credit scene. You mentioned in the article that Hal has basically nothing to do through the movie and that’s also true, lanterns has used a similar approach when it comes to power rings but I think it’s to it’s benefit, it shows that not every problem can be punched and sometimes you have to do the boring police stuff to solve the problem, yeah minigun constructs are fun but the green lanterns are peacekeepers for a group of indifferent and ancient people who rarely see the actual universe so going in guns blazing might line up with what the guardians want but locals probably aren’t too keen on the collateral damage and death but on top of that lanterns has succeeded by having 2 mysteries in (I’ll try not to spoil) what Hal thought would happen and the end of episode 1, I’m actually excited for the rest just to see that plot unfold which is something superhero stories don’t really do.

  4. Old School Comic Book fanboys should recognize there’s a famous storyline that LANTERNS echoes and that’s the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Hard Traveling Heroes arc from the 1970s: two super-heroes in a grounded reality dealing with themes of a troubled America

  5. It was pretty all right. I like Kyle Chandler’s take on Hal “I’ve seen some shit”Jordan. Aaron Pierre brings a lot of dimension to what could have easily been a cardboard cutout of a character. The supporting cast is a who’s who of rock-solid veteran actors and the show promises more of Nathan Filion’s absurd (complimentary) Guy Gardner. I’m on board.

  6. One of the strongest out-of-the-gate series (of any kind) I’ve watched in years. (I had a very similar reaction to the premiere of Lindelof’s Watchmen series.) I had expected to be interested in, but I just got completely pulled in. Great script, great plotting — characters are excellent. I’m not a GL fan (haven’t read any of the GL titles for a good decade — right about the time Geoff Johns got his hands on it), but Imma gonna watch this.

  7. We just finished watching all four seasons of True Detective. It’s not quite that good, but maybe… I have enjoyed some GL in the past, up to about issue 200. Haven’t read much since. My partner read it as a kid, but isn’t a huge fan of superhero TV and movies, but is enjoying this. About as good as Spider Noir we think.

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