The New Lanterns Trailer Finally Unleashes the Full Power of the Green Lantern Corps

Let’s all face the facts. The first Lanterns trailer landed about as well as Supergirl did at the box office.

Instead of selling an intergalactic police force powered by imagination, HBO gave us two grim-looking detectives wandering around Nebraska with almost nothing that looked or felt like Green Lantern. The online reaction was brutal, and that terrible first impression has probably hurt the series more than the trailer ever helped it.

As someone who has been a massive Green Lantern fan for most of my life, that first trailer didn’t leave me cautiously optimistic. It left me wondering why HBO seemed determined to hide nearly everything that makes Green Lantern worth putting on television in the first place.

The new Comic-Con trailer wastes no time fixing that mistake.

Trailer via HBO Max / YouTube.

This time, the rings actually glow. Novel idea, right? I know.

The murder mystery is still here, along with the uneasy partnership between an experienced Hal Jordan and a John Stewart who clearly isn’t interested in following every lesson exactly as it is presented. This time, however, HBO finally lets the green flag fly.

There are energy constructs, battles in the sky, enormous explosions and enough glowing green destruction to make it clear this investigation is leading somewhere much larger than some bodies lying in the American heartland.

This is the material Green Lantern fans have been waiting to see. The mythology has always been too large, strange and visually interesting to be reduced to two detectives driving through Nebraska while occasionally discussing something that may have happened in space.

Hal is also finally allowed to look like a Green Lantern.

Kyle Chandler’s version of the character still appears older, tired and slightly worn down by whatever he has already seen during his years with the Corps, but the trailer gives him several opportunities to stop looking like a detective who misplaced his gun and start looking like one of the most powerful people in the DC Universe.

Hal Jordan has always been my Green Lantern. Reckless, stubborn and occasionally convinced that charging directly into the worst possible situation counts as a plan, he is exactly the kind of character who should feel larger than life. This trailer is the first time Chandler’s version begins to feel like that.

John Stewart is right beside him, although the trailer continues to present him as far more than a passenger being dragged through Hal’s final case. Aaron Pierre brings a quiet intensity to John that works particularly well when the ring comes out and the situation begins falling apart around him.

He doesn’t look overwhelmed by the power. He looks like someone trying to determine how much of it he is willing to use. That distinction could become one of the most interesting parts of the series, especially if Hal and John have very different ideas about what being a Green Lantern is supposed to mean.

Then Sinestro walks into the room. Or rather stands in one.

Ulrich Thomsen’s Sinestro only receives a handful of moments in the trailer, but there is no mistaking who he is or what his presence means. His relationship with Hal has always been one of the strongest and most complicated pieces of DC mythology, built around friendship, betrayal and the extremely reasonable belief that handing nearly unlimited power to people chosen by magical space rings might eventually become a problem.

For longtime Green Lantern fans, Sinestro appearing isn’t just another character reveal. His presence brings an entire history with him. He was Hal’s mentor, his friend and eventually the clearest example of what can happen when absolute certainty turns into absolute control.

The trailer also gives us the Manhunters, the robotic predecessors to the Green Lantern Corps and one of the clearest signs yet that the murder investigation is connected to something larger.

Guy Gardner also returns, once again played by Nathan Fillion and once again carrying himself like the Green Lantern ring selected him primarily because every other candidate in the sector had already blocked his number.

His appearance helps connect Lanterns more directly to the larger DC Universe following Superman and Peacemaker, but it also gives the series something the earlier footage desperately needed: a little personality that isn’t buried beneath the weight of the investigation.

Most importantly, the trailer finally shows how HBO intends to balance the grounded detective story with the enormous mythology surrounding these characters.

The earlier marketing made it easy to wonder whether “grounded” had become another word for “afraid of the source material.” This footage suggests the opposite. The smaller mystery appears to be the door into the cosmic story rather than a replacement for it.

That is exactly what the new Lanterns trailer needed to show us.