That 2011 "Green Lantern" film was so bad it became a running joke in superhero cinema—even "Deadpool 2" couldn't resist having Deadpool shoot Ryan Reynolds' head off, with the excuse being "he read the script." Magic rings and an outlandishly absurd cosmic mythology have made Green Lantern one of the toughest superheroes to bring to the big screen. HBO's miniseries "Lanterns" has a simple solution: turn it into a detective drama.
This eight-episode miniseries was developed by Chris Mundy of "True Detective," Damon Lindelof of "Watchmen," and comic book writer Tom King, with Mundy serving as showrunner under the new DC Universe overseen by James Gunn and Peter Safran. The overall tone is more adult than anything recent in the DCU—profanity, sex, and violence are all present, clearly not the version of this character kids who know him from "The Lego Batman Movie" would be watching.
The story centers on two heavyweight Green Lanterns: Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, the veteran assigned to Earth's sector who solves cases on instinct, while Aaron Pierre plays John Stewart, the trainee successor whose rigor borders on obsessive. One is scruffy and freewheeling, the other rigid and restrained—this mentor-mentee friction never stays at the level of surface-level bickering; it genuinely carries the entire series' tension. The story kicks off with an incident at a high school football game in Rushville, Nebraska, where the pair encounters a sheriff played by Kelly Macdonald, whose role proves to carry significant weight as the plot unfolds.
Rather than cramming movie-scale spectacle into a TV format, "Lanterns" feels designed from the ground up with television logic in mind: the time-jumping narrative structure is laid bare from the very first episode, with its purpose gradually revealed as the series progresses. The visual effects are also deliberately restrained—aliens mostly retain humanoid forms, and the rings need charging before use. This limitation actually helps the show solve the old problem of "the ring is basically all-powerful, so how do you maintain suspense," while keeping the series closer to the crime drama genre it's aiming for, rather than becoming yet another spectacle of destruction. Reviews have also noted a paranoid atmosphere reminiscent of "Blade Runner" running through the pacing of how clues are revealed.
Race, generational family trauma, and contemporary political realities are all woven into the story, not just touched upon in passing. As of press time, critics had only seen seven of the eight episodes, so whether the finale sticks the landing remains unknown. But based on what's been shown so far, this is the strongest performance yet from the new DC Universe. "Lanterns" premieres August 16th on HBO Max, NOW, and Sky Atlantic in the UK.
