‘Lanterns’ series review: Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre overcome the fears of greening out

How exactly do you make the Green Lantern gritty? Anyone who has endured Martin Campbell’s campy catastrophe from 2011 knows how ludicrous that question sounds, with an earnest Ryan Reynolds rollicking through that neon-green CGI fever dream he would later spend years brazenly lampooning from the safer perch of his wisecracking antihero at Marvel. This is, after all, a character whose job description involves a magic ring, an intergalactic police force and a battery that runs on willpower, so HBO’s decision to give him the prestige-procedural treatment by transplanting all that cosmic hokum into a True Detective-adjacent rural Americana did initially feel like another miserable indignity to inflict on this notoriously inadaptable DC superhero.Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and comic-book writer Tom King, with Mundy as showrunner and James Gunn and Peter Safran among its executive producers, Lanterns is clearly made by people coming at the material from very different directions. You can feel that tug throughout its eight episodes, which keep bouncing between small-town crime drama and character-heavy television, occasionally punctuated by bursts of IP mythology. Fortunately, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre are so damn good together that they make the whole thing feel considerably more coherent than it actually is, giving the series a human core without sanding away the ridiculousness of being a Green Lantern.Lanterns is essentially about two very different men trying, with varying degrees of spite, to work out what the hell they are doing with each other. The pilot begins in 1996, when a young John Stewart watches Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) on television, already established as one of the intergalactic law-enforcers chosen by the Guardians of the Universe to protect different sectors of space. Twenty years later, John (Aaron Pierre) is himself being trained as a Lantern under Hal, who has been tasked with preparing him as his eventual replacement. Their assignment takes them to Rushville, Nebraska, after four people are found dead at a high school football field, all apparently victims of a shooting but with something sus afoot. Hal suspects the victims are aliens, which makes the case his jurisdiction, while Rushville sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) couldn’t care less about the space police getting involved and just wants to figure out who has murdered people in her town. Lanterns (English)Showrunner: Chris MundyCast: Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Shea Pritchard, Ulrich Thomsen, Jason Ritter, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Paul Ben-Victor, Laura Linney Episodes: 8Runtime: 52-60 minutesStoryline: Two Green Lanterns are drawn into a dark, Earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartlandThe investigation leads Hal and John to a mysterious local man who reveals himself to be an alien and warns that a war is coming. When the accused detonates himself in police custody, Hal barely manages to contain the blast with his ring, confirming that the Rushville killings are connected to something far larger than a small-town murder case. The pilot concludes by jumping forward another decade. In 2026, John returns to Rushville and meets Kerry at the same football field where the investigation began, only to discover Hal sitting dead in the snow, apparently shot in the head. His Green Lantern ring is missing. The rest of the season is an anti-buddy-cop drama, with Hal and John forced to investigate the fine denizens of Rushville while trying to solve this extraterrestrial mystery, slowly leading upto Hal’s death.Chandler’s Hal Jordan is a deeply funny bastard. As Earth’s first Green Lantern, he has inflated intergalactic credentials and enough accumulated heroism to wallpaper a moderately sized ego, yet he carries himself with the irritated resignation of accidentally becoming important at work. The clean-cut test-pilot hero of older Green Lantern stories tends to treat Hal’s quintessential fearlessness as proof of character, but here it has curdled into something less flattering. He takes risks because caution requires him to imagine a future in which he might have to deal with the consequences, and Hal has become remarkably bad at imagining one. Chandler plays the arrogance splendidly, never once dulling the uglier bits to make him more conventionally charming. This Hal is petty, smug, obnoxious, childish, intermittently pathetic and an absolute pain in the arse. But despite being so thoroughly pleased with himself, Chandler subtly gestures that the incessant wisecracking masks an existential panic about becoming obsolete. A still from ‘Lanterns’ | Photo Credit: HBO Max That is where John Stewart makes Hal’s anxious brand of self-destruction harder to dismiss. Pierre plays John with almost none of Hal’s appetite for performance. He has been trained within an inch of his personality, and is controlled to the point of seeming offended by the existence of impulse. The flashbacks to John’s upbringing are among the series’ strongest material for subverting the idea that fearlessness is inherently heroic. John has been taught to conquer and contain his fear, and his parents have drilled that lesson into him so thoroughly that his courage has turned into an inheritance he is not permitted to refuse. Pierre initially keeps John so tightly wound that there are moments when the character seems almost imprisoned inside his own posture, but the steady easing up of that restraint as the season progresses gives Pierre a lot to chew on.Macdonald’s Sheriff Kerry also makes a convincing case for being the show’s third protagonist. She knows the town and its people, knows which rules can be bent and which ones will come back to bite her, and she is deeply cynical of the two Lanterns who have wandered into her jurisdiction with multiple layers of classified nonsense. Hal gets under her skin almost immediately. Then, rather inconveniently for both of them, he starts to get under it differently. Macdonald and Chandler have terrific chemistry because neither of them pretends these two have stumbled into some grand, swooning connection. They flirt and irritate each other before growing genuinely fond of each other; Macdonald is particularly good at letting the sheriff’s professional confidence buckle just enough for the compromises underneath it to show. A still from ‘Lanterns’ | Photo Credit: HBO Max The supporting characters fare better when they give the superhero mythology something to actually rub against. Garret Dillahunt’s William Macon is good at making Rushville’s combination of old money hospitality and militia paranoia feel unpleasant without turning him into some cartoon redneck villain. Poorna Jagannathan’s Zoe is another standout, giving the series a way into the parts of John that all that military discipline keeps tightly padlocked, while also bringing racial politics of Rushville into the foreground — Jagannathan gives their adulterous relationship a giddy dose of tension. Shea Pritchard also pulls off a terrific scene-stealing turn in the finale as teenage Noah Macon, but saying anything more about it would be to rob the moment of what makes it work. The rest of the ensemble, unfortunately, is considerably less compelling.Lanterns is structurally uneven to a fault. The constant hopping between timelines eventually pays off, filling in the characters and retroactively loading earlier scenes with context, but it also has a maddening tendency to yank us out of the moment just when a scene begins to gather some semblance of momentum. The writing wants credit for having things to say about fear, courage, race, ageing, succession and masculine pride, and there are moments when those subjects genuinely intersect with the characters. Too often though, the writing considers the mere presence of an idea as evidence of having explored it. Also, nothing quite captures the unvarnished bluntness of Tom King’s thoroughly militarised imagination like making one of the series’ few alien races a population of genocide survivors who exist only to detonate themselves in vengeful martyrdom. It is such a spectacularly naked bit of propagandist storytelling that you almost admire the lack of euphemism, but I’d expect nothing less from that CIA mouthpiece.At its most interesting, though, Lanterns tries to dismantle the poisonous notion of fear as a defect to be eradicated. Hal and John have both been shaped by that belief, one through years of reckless bravado, the other through a lifetime of pathological self-command, and the series gradually reveals how much of themselves they have surrendered to it. Fear, properly reckoned with, is information; deny it completely, and you become available to anyone willing to tell you what courage is supposed to look like. The tragedy is that these men have been conditioned to regard the admission of fear as a forfeiture of themselves, and frankly, I find that considerably more interesting than watching two traumatised men whine about losing/inheriting a magic space cop ring. A still from ‘Lanterns’ | Photo Credit: HBO Max The bigger problem is when its decidedly stripped-down approach meets a property with an identity built around the pleasure of visualising the impossible. Lanterns uses the green constructs so sparingly and uncreatively that their absence/egregious lack of imagination feels more conspicuous than their presence. That isn’t to say that there is anything inherently counterintuitive about making a Green Lantern story feel small. But it does feel ridiculous to have spent this much time and money on such self-important verisimilitudes when your protagonist can conjure a giant green whatever-the-hell-he-wants out of thin air. You are not Andor, darling.This is also why comparisons with Watchmen are at once understandable and unfair. Damon Lindelof’s fingerprints are all over the show’s pedigree, but they also give Lanterns credit for a degree of control it simply does not have. Watchmen knew exactly what it was doing with its elaborate machinery of political ideas, but Lanterns is messier, more conventional and considerably less assured about how its disparate pieces should fit together. What it does possess is a warmer, more immediately accessible entertainment value in watching its characters bounce off one another, not least the recurring pleasures of watching John contemplate homicide whenever Hal deploys that patronising little “Junior”.Lanterns is currently streaming on JioHotstar