Lanterns
Photograph by John Johnson/HBO Max
The DCU is on unsteady ground, but it is hoping that one new offering in particular will deliver it from blackest night. That would be Lanterns, the True Detective inspired Green Lantern series airing on HBO Max this Sunday. Reviews are in, and everyone from Warner Bros. to fans should be able to breathe easy.
As it stands, Lanterns has a verified fresh 90% Rotten Tomatoes review score from 40 critics, a sizable sampling, and almost everyone has something good to say. That puts it as one of the top-scoring DCU projects so far, but not quite touching the hem of Matt Reeves’ The Penguin at a 95%. Still, if it’s even close, that’s quite an achievement. Here are the other official DCU projects it’s competing against:
- Creature Commandos – 95% critic score, 79% audience score
- Peacemaker – 93% critic score, 83% audience score
- Superman – 83% critic score, 90% audience score
- Supergirl – 52% critic score, 73% audience score.
Lanterns is a test on two fronts. First, this needs to be good because of how badly Supergirl just made the DCU look. It’s not just a lackluster movie, it is one of the biggest superhero financial flops of all time.
Second, this is only the second DCU project that is entirely free of James Gunn’s writing or directing. He delegated Supergirl, and that did poorly. He delegated this, and well, it seems to be going great. Here, Gunn has gotten Damon Lindelof involved, who previously worked on Watchmen and The Leftovers, both great television series, with the former a (different kind of) DC superhero property. It’s a contrast to Supergirl, which had both a new writer and a new director in the genre.
Lanterns has had a bit of a rocky road to release here, at least in terms of fan perception, outside of all the DCU drama. Namely, it seemed to be very much downplaying the actual…Green Lantern stuff, and it was mostly just two guys walking around in dusty jackets. But in time, they showed the suits, they showed the powers, and the end result seems to be a good balance of realism and cosmic superheroism.
Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, who fans have calculated has been the canon Green Lantern for Earth for almost a decade before Superman arrived. Aaron Pierre is his protégé, John Stewart, an actor who was effectively fan-cast as soon as he showed up in the Netflix hit Rebel Ridge. A month after that movie was released, he had the job.
The plot is a murder mystery with broader implications for the DC universe, and it may, in fact, be a great way to introduce a core Justice League member at a moment when the DCU needs it. We will all find out this Sunday.
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