UPDATE 9/10: They came back — Episode 4, the first episode after the backlash, matched the premiere’s peak on the charts. Nielsen’s independent read is still ahead.
UPDATE 9/4: The writer says the fight was the point — Vanessa Baden Kelly tells THR the abuse debate is exactly what the room wanted, and begs fans to keep watching.
UPDATE 9/3: Concept art from the canceled Green Lantern space series has surfaced — Kilowog and Tomar-Re as actual aliens, built for a show set in space instead of a mall.
UPDATE 9/3: HBO Max says Episode 3 drew 10 million viewers worldwide, a series high. Everyone watched it before the backlash hit, so whether they come back for Episode 4 is the number that matters.
UPDATE 9/3: The chart numbers came in anyway — Episode 3 held Lanterns at series highs on FlixPatrol as the show won its first week on HBO Max. Nielsen tells the real story later this month.
UPDATE 9/1: Justice League artist Jerad Marantz posted his Snyderverse Hal Jordan concepts and fans filled the comments comparing them to this show’s suit.
UPDATE 8/31: The episode’s writer studied the woke Watchmen backlash and pre-accepted “a million people” hating this — the rewritten origin was the assignment.
UPDATE 8/31: We owe Ryan Reynolds an apology for Green Lantern — the 2011 movie respected the mythology more than this show does.
I wasn’t planning to review HBO’s Lanterns.
After HBO hit us with copyright claims confirming our insider reports that Hal Jordan dies — information we first reported months ago and which turned out to be true — I felt there was a potential conflict there.
Then I watched Episode 3.
Forget the conflict.
This episode is so embarrassingly bad that I can’t let it go. It’s easily the worst of the first three episodes and, frankly, one of the worst episodes of television I’ve watched in my life.
James Gunn is burning down the DCU
I don’t believe James Gunn is the massive comic book fan we’re constantly told he is.
Gunn got lucky making his goofy Guardians of the Galaxy movies at the absolute height of the MCU. Release those same movies into today’s Marvel environment and I don’t believe they become anything close to the phenomenon they were.
Years ago, Gunn publicly mocked comic books and comic book characters in ways that always stuck with me. It made me ask myself a simple question: would I ever talk that way about characters I supposedly love?
Would I trash Quasar? Hulk? Nova?
No. When Marvel canceled my favorite characters, I created this website to support those characters.
Gunn can tell you he’s a comic book fan. YouTubers can tell you he’s the biggest comic book fan alive. I don’t buy it. You don’t claim to love these characters and then do what Lanterns is doing to Green Lantern.
This isn’t building the DCU. It’s burning it down.
Lanterns looks unbelievably cheap
Episode 3 also makes it painfully obvious that Lanterns has almost no interest in looking like a Green Lantern series.
Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan continues to take off and flies through the air, looking like a normal guy being yanked off the ground. No glowing green aura. No spectacle. Nothing that makes the moment feel remotely convincing.
It looks ridiculous.
Then we finally get what amounts to “Oa.”
It’s an abandoned mall. Seriously.
One of the Guardians is played by Laura Linney, wandering around Earth with virtually no understanding of human culture.
This is Green Lantern in James Gunn’s DCU: one of the most visually imaginative corners of DC Comics reduced to a dead shopping mall.
John Stewart’s father was supposed to be Green Lantern
The episode then rewrites what we thought we knew about John Stewart’s family.
Through the first two episodes, it looked as if John’s father had raised him to suppress fear, possibly because of PTSD connected to his service in the Marines.
Nope.
Episode 3 reveals that John’s mother is really the one who is not afraid and the one who raised him to live without fear, and that his father’s trauma comes from something completely different.
John Stewart Sr. was apparently supposed to become a Green Lantern before Hal Jordan.
The Guardians visit him while he’s sleeping and place him inside a green bubble. We don’t actually get to see much of this, naturally. We’re mostly told about it, which conveniently saves the show from having to spend money on the kind of visual effects a Green Lantern series should actually contain.
The experience terrifies John Sr., so when he’s asked if he is afraid, naturally, he admits that he is.
That’s it. He’s out.
The alien encounter then becomes the source of his trauma.
Nobody believes what happened to him, he begins falling apart, and what initially looked like military PTSD turns out to be the aftermath of a failed Green Lantern recruitment.
The Guardian’s solution is a giant diamond
Laura Linney’s Guardian eventually shows up and explains what happened.
We are told that the Guardians didn’t properly understand the emotional consequences their recruitment process could have on humans.
So how does an ancient cosmic being make things right?
She gives John’s mother a gigantic diamond.
Yes, seriously.
The diamond is so enormous that the episode later explains nobody believes John’s mother could possibly have obtained it legitimately.
Because she’s Black, people assume she stole it.
That leads directly into another lecture about race.
John’s mother tells the Guardian that Hal Jordan can live without fear because he’s a white man, while their family has to live with fear because they’re Black.
It continues the same material from Episode 2, where John and the GILF discuss how each of them has their own “white man.”
By the third episode, you get the message.
The show isn’t exactly subtle about it.
Hal Jordan ruined John’s military career before they even met
Back at the Mall of Oa, John literally lands on mattresses before beginning what amounts to his Green Lantern job interview.
Don’t ask.
The Guardian digs through John’s military history and we learn that he was sent on a classified mission to assassinate a target in Russia.
Except Hal Jordan gets there first.
Hal learns about the target while hanging out at a strip club with an intoxicated U.S. official, swoops into Russia, grabs the terrorist, takes him to Guantanamo and wipes out the compound in the process.
That creates an international mess. John is forced to take the fall and agrees to take an unconditional discharge from the military.
So before John Stewart even knows Hal Jordan, Hal has already wrecked his career and family.
John gets the Green Lantern job as Hal’s replacement
The Guardian naturally wants to know whether John resents Hal for what happened.
John says no.
Then she asks whether he would have a problem replacing Hal Jordan as Green Lantern.
Again, John says no. If those are his orders, he’ll do the job.
And that’s apparently enough. John Stewart is hired.
Since John has been preparing for this his entire life, he’s thrilled and can’t wait to tell his parents.
Too late.
Hal has already beaten him home and told John’s parents that he’ll be training their son to become a Green Lantern.
Then Hal drops a Cosby Show joke
As if the episode hasn’t already embarrassed itself enough, Hal looks at John Stewart’s family and compares them to the “Huxtables of the Midwest,” referencing The Cosby Show.
That’s the level we’re operating at here.
Hal then pulls John aside and tells him that he’ll basically get the Green Lantern ring over Hal’s dead body, while the episode checks off its required quota of f-bombs.
And considering where we already know this story is headed with Hal Jordan, that line isn’t exactly difficult to figure out.
Cancel the DCU
Lanterns is complete garbage.
I genuinely don’t understand how this version of Green Lantern got greenlit. There’s barely any cosmic spectacle. Oa is effectively a shopping mall. The Guardians look like ordinary people. The mythology has been stripped down and rewritten into something almost unrecognizable.
And this isn’t even anything original or a James Gunn idea. It was an HBO pitch from a previously canceled version.
We’ve watched the same kind of woke approach hollow out Marvel, Disney’s Star Wars, Doctor Who, and other once-massive franchises.
James Gunn says, “Hold my beer.”
If Lanterns represents where Gunn wants to take these characters, the DCU can’t hit the reset button fast enough. Bring on Paramount ASAP.
Rating: 0/10.
