‘;
document.currentScript.insertAdjacentHTML(“beforebegin”, banner);
let giftListenerCb = function (e) {
let date = new Date(e.detail.expiration_date);
let formatted = date.toLocaleDateString(“en-US”, {
month: “long”,
day: “numeric”,
year: “numeric”,
});
document.querySelector(“.article__gift-banner-exp”).textContent = formatted;
document.querySelector(“.article__gift-banner”).hidden = false;
window.removeEventListener(“hasValidGiftLink”, giftListenerCb);
};
window.addEventListener(“hasValidGiftLink”, giftListenerCb);
}
Has there ever been a sillier comic-book hero than Green Lantern? Yes, of course there has. Without even changing the color, there’s the Green Lama and the Green Falcon. But for some reason, each time DC Entertainment tries to expand its TV and film offerings beyond its more dependable Golden Age characters—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman—he is usually the first major hero of the comics’ goofy, fun Silver Age of Cold War–inflected characters to get a face-lift. (Sometimes it’s the Flash.) As the new and much-improved universe of DC Comics adaptations shifts into gear, the challenge facing HBO’s Lanterns is a daunting one: How can it introduce Green Lantern without inviting the suspicion that in short order we will all have to do a lot of extra homework in order to watch various embarrassed-looking Oscar winners in the roles of Bee-Man, Matter-Eater Lad, and the Gay Ghost?
At the core of it all, of course, is the idea of the ring. The ring is good. Everybody at Warner Bros. knows how much an ordinary person with a TV likes a magic ring.
But so much demands explanation when a moviegoer or a TV watcher is faced with a supercop in a green jumpsuit, empowered by the Guardians of the Universe to keep Earth safe from alien invasion using a magic ring powered by will, which is in turn charged using a special lantern-shaped battery. Why is the uniform green? Why a lantern? If it runs on will, why does the ring need to charge up? Is law enforcement really the best career for a superhero? Did artist Gil Kane mean to put founding Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion’s face on the Guardians of the Universe, a race of aliens who look like blue Oompa Loompas? Or was it an accident? (It was intentional.)
The same era that produced Superman had a Green Lantern too, but he is even weirder and gets his powers from a mysterious portable lamp that was A) from China, B) powered by a meteor, C) foretold in an ancient book, and D) granted to him after a railroad crash. In 1959 Kane and writer John Broome tossed out most of the window dressing, keeping little more than the powerful ring, and added bells and whistles from their own era, which have now aged out of relevance just as the original conceit did. Today the makers of Lanterns—TV god Damon Lindelof, police procedural vet Chris Mundy, and comics writer Tom King—have to figure out which pieces to keep and which to toss away.
Accordingly, Lanterns is firmly rooted in today’s idea of the ordinary, rather than yesterday’s. (It might also be a budget thing.) It’s a clever conceit: a small-town noir like True Detective or Ozark (Mundy worked on both of those) in which the FBI-equivalent detectives are the DC Comics space police, and local Sheriff Kerry Kane (the amazing Kelly Macdonald) is just as formidable as her superpowered peers.
In the second episode of Lanterns, the series begins to follow a familiar film-noir path, albeit one with a science-fiction twist: The killings that brought our heroes to town are of greater importance than they first appeared. In fact, the fate of the whole world (possibly galaxy? universe? I’ve seen only the first four episodes) hangs on the identity of the last—maybe—remaining member of the Manhunters, a secret known, perhaps, to Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), the red-skinned, disgraced, imprisoned alien mentor of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler). (In the comics, both the Manhunters and Sinestro, Hal’s archnemesis, are gone-to-seed crime fighters who started off in the employ of the Guardians. The comics’ version of the Manhunters tends to be a bit more cyborgian than the show has thus far suggested.) This is a lot, and the show is full of satisfying Easter eggs and head fakes—when Hal has to speak the password to his voice-activated safe, it’s the name of the 1985 Alan Moore–Dave Gibbons comic that introduced Mogo the Living Planet—but it’s not yet too much. And Lanterns seems to have something to say about the past too.
The original Hal Jordan was modeled by Kane on one of his neighbors, the actor Paul Newman, but in Lanterns, Hal is a new kind of guy, also instantly recognizable to the audience: a smug, middle-aged rich dude who refuses to cede control to the next generation, who talks over every woman within 50 yards, and who probably wears a leather jacket to the office. If you’re a comics fan, this is in no way incommensurate with your understanding of the character, but it’s also not something that requires any background reading for viewers who’ve yet to attend Lantern Academy. Chandler exudes a perfect level of sunglasses-indoorsness that doesn’t quite make his character the villain but certainly makes him the antagonist.
Hal has his own trainee: our hero, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). John is doing his best and Hal is doing his worst, each in the hope of getting on the other’s nerves, in the grand tradition of buddy-cop shows from time immemorial. This is where TV genuinely has one up on comics: The original stories about John, by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, conceive of him as a sort of featureless Angry Black Man who can serve as the avatar for a pair of white creators trying to figure out how the Civil Rights Movement made them feel. There are good John Stewart comics, but none that can quite cover up the memory of the era when he ranked among the most embarrassing characters in DC’s long history, and in this accounting, I include Arm-Fall-Off-Boy. When contemporary comics creators succeed in using Kane and Broome’s notion of interplanetary police to talk about earthbound problems of race and law enforcement, they tend to invent their own characters. (One real virtue of the central idea is that it’s less work to draft a new space cop into the Green Lantern Corps than it is to, say, start adding batmen.)
The show plays up John’s history in the Marines doing morally suspect things in the name of an honorable code, something Tom King loves to write about. (King was a CIA operator before he started writing comics.) Pierre, a fantastically beautiful man, is something not quite sinister in this role: His John Stewart doles out charm in near-homeopathic doses and in doing so manages to suggest a deep well of inner peace that John has had to ration carefully to withstand a lifetime of provocations, from his abusive parents, from his conniving bosses in the armed forces, and now from his ego-tripping partner. As Lanterns continues to explore John’s horrifying past, it edges closer and closer to the question of how somebody so consistently mistreated and taken advantage of could end up solid and heroic and not a cold, amoral monster or a gibbering wreck.
You might think that an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe would help out the fans who want to predict which way things will go, but it doesn’t. DC Comics is a profoundly American company, stitched together slowly over decades of mergers and acquisitions and dubious lawsuits, conceived in sin between the Jewish and Italian mobs at the height of prohibition. (DC co-founder Harry Donenfeld madeMafia boss Frank Costellohis son Irwin’s godfather, according to Irwin.) For the right writer, it is a wonderful box of toys, most of them stolen from other children. Will the Manhunters join forces with Sinestro? Maybe! Is that one alien guy (The Wire Season 2’s Paul Ben-Victor) going to turn out to be Atrocitus? Could be! Will Hal go nuts and kill the entire Green Lantern Corps? It’s happened before. Will the Weaponers of Qward turn up? I hope so!
There is, it turns out, a right way to use all the goofy possibilities of the DC Universe. James Gunn, who is now in charge of the whole shooting match, was already doing it during his criminally underrated The Suicide Squad movie (not to be confused with the justly deplored Suicide Squad), in which he casually dropped in the Thinker (a humanoid supervillain played by no less an acting eminence than Peter Capaldi) and Starro the Conqueror (a giant alien starfish) and made their absurdity part of the movie’s grimy charm. They didn’t interfere with the more serious-minded moments because those moments didn’t depend on the audience caring whether they were strictly plausible. (Feel free to contrast this with poor Geoffrey Rush’s endless monologue at the beginning of the profoundly misbegotten 2011 Green Lantern film.) It turns out that if the people wearing the magic ring are real, it doesn’t matter as much whether the ring runs on willpower or the fires of Mount Doom. I hope the Matter-Eater Lad movie is good.
