Let’s be honest: fans have a lot of major criticisms of the Green Lantern movie, leaving plenty of room for HBO’s Lanterns to go in a different direction.. Director Martin Campbell and star Ryan Reynolds both blame the script, which Campbell once said he wished Reynolds had written. Comics fans had even more to critique when it came to the powers of a Green Lantern. In theory, a power ring enables its wearer to create absolutely anything out of hard light, for use in superheroic situations. Certain constructs are common and inherent to the material: a flying force field to enable space travel, for one, and a giant fist to punch out villains, both often used on the page.
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Ryan Reynolds’ Hal Jordan, however, didn’t use that imagination very far — at his most creative, he makes a giant toy car set. Mostly, though, he makes ordinary weapons. Yeah, he’s a military guy, so that tracks in some ways, but given the ability to make literally anything, he goes with guns, swords, and fighter jets? Part of the appeal of replacing Hal with Kyle Rayner in comics was that Kyle is an artist, and part of a generation that watched anime, so he could create imaginative constructs like giant mechs that don’t actually exist in our world.
The DCU Raised the Bar For Lantern Constructs
IMAGE COURTESY OF HBO
In James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Universe, the first Green Lantern we saw was Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) in Superman. Gardner also mostly thought up weapons, but was more creative about it. Rather than simply reproducing things that exist on Earth, Guy used his ring to create a custom kaiju muzzle, not to mention a device uniquely shaped to pierce the monster’s eye. When he finally found himself in an active war zone, his particular attitude led him to create and use giant middle fingers as weapons and shields. Ryan Reynolds’ other major superhero character, Deadpool, would surely have thought of that, though frankly, Deadpool with a power ring would probably also conjure horrors enough to make a movie NC-17 rated.
This was the beginning of fixing the major issue with unoriginal use of the power ring. When the first clips of Lanterns came out, however, making the show look like True Detective and hiding its comic-book elements, fans didn’t expect a whole lot of ring usage to be forthcoming, especially on a TV budget.
IMAGE COURTESY OF HBO
Sometimes, though, limits force creativity. HBO may not have the budget to create a holographic robot monster that stomps on buildings, but Lanterns has writers who think in terms of functionality rather than spectacle. Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is now a burnout and a drinker; offered a beer, of course he’d make a green bottle opener. And when he needs to provoke a fight, rather than making a giant, conspicuous fist, he goes for a psychological tactic: forging green, hard-light money so he can play the same annoying song on a bar jukebox over and over again, after he’s been warned to stop.
Meanwhile, protegee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) creates bubble wrap (off-camera) to break his fall in a car crash, and generates a bird sidekick who outlasts his use of the ring. John in comics was an architect; here, like Kyle Rayner, he’s an aspiring artist, which makes him more creative. Like a method actor, he can work from the inside out.
We Probably Haven’t Seen Lanterns‘ Best Ring Constructs Yet
IMAGE COURTESY OF HBO
Classic Lantern constructs aren’t entirely absent, as Hal creates a shield to protect Earth from a nuclear self-destruct by a cornered alien. He also uses the ring to fly, not just across America but also into outer space and intergalactic jail. These serve as essential plot transitions above and beyond anything else, and fans of Green Lantern should automatically accept them as such.
As for bigger things, as of this writing the trailer for episode 4 suggests Hal and/or John (or perhaps both together) will use the ring to create some kind of tunnel-boring device — one that is anything but dull.
It may not exactly be a construct, but the ring on Lanterns can also create a holographic doppelganger backup of Hal himself, which should prove useful in the 2026 timeline in which he at least appears to be dead. If the death isn’t undone, like so many deaths in comics and superhero movies are, it’s also a clever plot device to allow Hal to return, like a character on Red Dwarf.
New Lanterns Fan Theory May Confirm Who the Real Villain of the DC Series Is
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