‘Lanterns’ Is Off to a Promising (If Not Very Green) Start

Few DC characters have longer or more storied histories than Green Lantern, who dates all the way back to 1940 in his earliest form. Besides a period in the 1950s, when superhero comics in general hit a low ebb in popularity, he’s rarely been out of print in the 80 years since. But unlike GL’s colleagues in the Justice League like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, he’s never had a live-action adaptation that captured the things that made his comic so beloved to generations of readers. There was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern film from 2011, of course, but that movie was only beloved in the Bizarro universe, and it captured little of what people who love Green Lantern comics (this writer included) enjoyed about the character.After only one episode, it’s still very early. But so far, Lanterns has the makings of finally being the thing that gets live-action Green Lantern right. Admittedly, the series’ pilot seems a little bashful about its own superheroic premise; neither lead character appears in any sort of costume for more than a couple seconds, and the pilot is much closer in tone to a detective story or police procedural than a sci-fi adventure about a spacefaring warrior.That sa...