TV Review: Lanterns

Is this the kind of hero you should want to be?

The Guardians of Oa could have avoided a lot of misunderstandings if they had watched the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out, where we all learned that it’s very unhealthy for humans to try to ignore one of our basic emotions. In order to become a Green Lantern, you must be fearless. I don’t know how other species in the galaxy deal with that requisite, but it’s easy to imagine how it wouldn’t sit well with humans. We need the information that fear gives us. When balanced with the rest of our emotions, fear protects us. It helps us prepare for the unknown. It motivates us to care for one another. It keeps us humble.

So when the first Green Lantern from Earth is selected, and the same rule of fearlessness is imposed on a species that needs fear to survive, what can you expect, other than terribly messed up people being chosen for the job? The TV miniseries Lanterns dares to question a fundamental rule of its own lore, a view of heroism that breaks something precious in the hero’s soul. You shouldn’t have to renounce the fullness of your humanity in order to be heroic. Fear can be heroic. And pretending to be fearless makes you a danger to those you want to protect.

Lanterns integrates these abstract preoccupations with the specificity of its characters: Hal Jordan, a white Boomer who embodies the “men will join the space police rather than go to therapy” meme, and John Stewart, a Black Millennial who was raised to be the perfect poster boy for respectability politics. The show uses extensive flashbacks, which usually is a problem for pacing, but somehow each of these flashbacks is thematically coherent with what is happening in the present-day plot.

Learning what makes these men tick reveals the inadvertent cruelty of the Green Lantern Corps. Hal qualifies to become a Green Lantern because of unexamined toxic masculinity. He has a family history of suicidal depression that he suppresses beneath a mask of toughness. As for John, he qualifies to become a Green Lantern because his parents committed years of severe emotional abuse to purge him of fear. He experienced the equivalent of growing up in a cult that indoctrinated him for an otherworldy mission he never asked for.

John’s case is even more complicated by the fact that a Black man in the US has countless daily reasons to exist in a perpetual state of fear. John‘s parents aren’t innocent of the horrific way they raised him, but they were pushed into that choice by the unequal circumstances that allow an average shmoe to declare he’s fearless just because he lucked into playing the game of life on Easy Mode.

With all these heavy themes dominating the story, the actual events seem almost secondary. Setting aside the flashbacks, the plot consists of a hunt for an alien assassin hiding in a town in Nebraska, followed ten years later by the mystery of who has just killed Hal Jordan. In the first part of the plot, John has been appointed by the Guardians of Oa as Hal’s apprentice, which Hal resents at every step. In the second part, John has been trying to build a life that isn’t defined by the purpose his parents chose for him, and ends up finding his own reasons to become a hero.

This would suffice for an interesting setup even if it didn’t also include tons of delightful banter between its two main characters. Matching Hal’s smug, entitled condescension with John’s obsessive adherence to rules creates a volatile friction that soon enough explodes in satisfying manner. The show plays with this dynamic by reversing it in the scenes set ten years later, when John has outgrown his ingrained urge to obey and has to team up with a less jaded version of Hal.

Some viewers have complained that this plot is too mundane and doesn’t do justice to the colorful variety of alien weirdness that is typical of Green Lantern adventures. That may be so, but it’s not a point against the show. This is the type of science fiction that considers the inner space of the human mind as vast and fascinating as outer space. Planet-hopping romps can wait. This story is about the mismatch between the Guardians’ idea of heroism and the basic facts of human nature. It’s about what being a Green Lantern does to you. I’ll take such deep analysis over flashy pew pew any day.

This is the kind of reexamination of core assumptions that legacy franchises need from time to time to avoid feeling stagnant. Green Lantern has existed since 1940. It didn’t always center on John Stewart, or on Hal Jordan. It didn’t always feature space cops. It didn’t always associate superpowers with emotions. This new take on Lantern lore may not necessarily lead to a complete reinvention, but if it does, it should be welcomed.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Superman (2025)

Who knew you could laugh during a Superman movie?

After the long night of the Snyderverse, the new Superman feels like a much-needed palate cleanser. Features of superhero stories that you'd think are commonplace feel new again: Look, this movie has colors! The jokes are funny! Team Good is fun to be around! The plot respects Jimmy Olsen! Superman is actually a hero this time!

This is a promising start for the new universe of DC movies under the lead of James Gunn. Without losing any time in recapping the origin story we all know, without flashbacking to how Clark Kent moved to Metropolis or met Lois Lane or discovered his true origin or became a superhero, we jump right into the action and, curiously, address the same question that the Snyderverse raised but didn't know how to handle: can a world of squishy, breakable humans trust a Superman? The movie immediately exposes the question's disingenuousness: this version of Superman is not a newcomer. He has spent day after day doing nothing but help people. Anything he might need to prove to humanity is already proven. If by this point Lex Luthor still has an obsession with exposing Superman as a threat, that's a Lex problem.

I've always liked the versions of Lex Luthor that view Superman's existence as a personal insult, as a negation of all the human effort and potential that Lex obviously sees himself as the apex of. It's fun enough to have a Lex who is just a greedy businessman whose unethical corporate practices get thwarted by the Daily Planet, but it's far more interesting to have a Lex who can't resist comparing himself to Superman. I was skeptical about the casting of Nicholas Hoult, but upon watching the finished movie, I was sold. Hoult brings a burning intensity to the role, a consuming rage that prevents Lex from noticing the incongruity of his cause: one of the superpowered soldiers he builds to kill Superman says, "I gave up my humanity for this." Lex claims to be a defender of humanity, but in the process he breaks every standard of human dignity. The fact that he can't see how his methods contradict his goals turns him into a tragic character in the classical sense.

Lex is so focused on his quest that he doesn't even realize that the world has already shown him to be wrong. His assumption is that an uncontrollable Kryptonian is a threat to everyone. But there's already an uncontrollable Kryptonian flying around: Superdog, and he's the sweetest, most adorable chaos beast. (As the perpetually exhausted guardian of a chaos beast, I can relate to Superman's frustrations.) The interactions between Superman and his indestructible pet are among the high points of the movie; they make for great comedy and reveal important sides of both characters: Superdog is playful but not malicious; Superman can get exasperated but never lashes out.

This characterization of Superman as played by David Corenswet is fundamental for the tone of the movie. Whereas the Snyder version would get back at a bar bully by destroying his means of subsistence, the Gunn version braves a river of antimatter to keep a baby safe, and feels sad when a rampaging kaiju is killed. This Superman is genuinely kind, to the point of wishing to save the enemies that are punching him in the face. Other superheroes think he's too naïve, but it's that solid trust in the best side of people that ends up saving him at a key moment in the plot.

The implied rebukes to the Snyder Superman don't stop there. The Kents are infinitely better human beings in this version; in particular a touching scene with Jonathan Kent helps Clark sort out how to make sense of the revelation that he was sent to Earth as a conqueror. Even when he has his hands occupied fighting superpowered monsters in the middle of Metropolis, he goes out of his way to minimize collateral damage (again, such a basic display of goodness should go without saying, but remember that Snyder's Superman lowered the bar beneath the Earth's mantle).

As great and awesome as Superman is in this incarnation, he doesn't save the world alone. Lois Lane isn't afraid to question the political implications of his actions in his face, and she convinces the rest of superheroes to grow past their motivated apathy. One character whom Lex had blackmailed into villainy switches to Team Good upon seeing Superman's kindness firsthand. And Eve Tessmacher, the trophy girlfriend that Lex parades everywhere, turns out to be the most important character in the movie: even as Lex uses her for her shallow bimbo image, she cleverly weaponizes that same shallow bimbo image to help defeat Lex.

The relevance of Superman has been questioned many times, usually in the form, "If he can punch anything, what is a challenge for him?" This movie gives him a problem he can't punch his way out of: a crisis of identity exacerbated by the manipulation of public opinion. This mirrors the status of the character in real life: both Superman (the heroic icon) and Superman (the movie) need to prove themselves to a world that has stopped believing in Superman. Both emerge victorious because they don't stop believing in goodness. Ironic cynicism is soooo tired, and it should never have been mixed with this character. Gunn understands that a successful story about Superman is one that sticks to the simple ideals that have always defined him, not as lip service, but as a guiding theme of the action. Superman shouldn't win because he punches harder. He should win because decency and compassion are actually stronger.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Creature Commandos

A raunchy, visceral, uncompromising statement of intention

The new iteration of DC-derived stories has a curious choice of opening chapter. With narrative threads vaguely connecting to The Suicide Squad (the good one) and its spinoff series Peacemaker, the HBO Max series Creature Commandos reanimates a discussion that should have been declared resolved decades ago, but that the current era of superheroes seems to have forgotten: What if you could fix the world with just one little murder? Never mind that the first half of the series is about trying to prevent that murder; if you've met self-appointed protector of humankind Amanda Waller, you know that her extensive skill set doesn't include moral consistency. So throwing away money and lives to defend the princess-heiress of Pokolistan from sorceress Circe and her army of easily duped incels, only to change her mind and throw away more money and lives to have said princess-heiress murdered anyway, is exactly on brand for her.

Writer/producer/director James Gunn surely knew that starting this new DC saga with a team story would prompt parallels with the Justice League. Namely, how is this team different from its more heroic counterpart? What is it that makes the Commandos a dark mirror of the League? That kind of comparison isn't new. If you want answers about why Superman doesn't kill (and, therefore, why Zack Snyder doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle the Justice League), all you need to read is the 2001 story What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way? by Joe Kelly. Much like the Snyderverse drew from the gray worldview of The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman, it seems the... Gunnverse? is drawing from the genre's own reaction to that excess of cynicism.

So let's return to our initial question, which can be rephrased like this: Can the value of one life be purely instrumental? In such Kantian terms, the question touches the core of why Amanda Waller operates the way she does. Her extreme brand of pragmatism bypasses any consideration of principle, and the same logic that makes her stage a clandestine operation to protect a foreign head of state can as easily move her to favor the opposite strategic objective. How does this make sense to her? Easy: a high-profile political assassination with unknown cascading repercussions isn't any more problematic to her than forcing inmates to risk their necks for uncertain gain. The life of a princess-heiress or the life of an unjustly incarcerated metahuman are just assets to her, usable or disposable according to whatever arcane moral calculation is going on in her head.

And this is why Gunn chose Creature Commandos as the first entry in the new DC-verse: to establish a clear demarcation over against the messy position the Snyderverse started with. The version of Superman that Snyder presented in his 2013 film Man of Steel is a semidivine figure whom puny mortals should look at in awe, but not look up to; one with no ties of loyalty to humankind beyond his personal attachments: he fights to defend his adoptive mother, but he couldn't care less about innocent bystanders. That's how he was raised: Jonathan Kent taught him that he should let people die if helping them would expose his secret. Martha Kent taught him that his immeasurable power came with no responsibility. With the worst role models in the history of the character, the result couldn't be other than what we got: a Superman who is no hero. The absurdly contrived scene where we're expected to agree he had no other choice available but to kill General Zod set a dour tone that persisted for the rest of the Snyderverse. A Superman who kills was joined by a Batman who tortures and brands people and a Wonder Woman who has lost her faith in humans. That is not how you build a team of heroes.

Creature Commandos exposes what happens when your idea of saving the world doesn't contain an iron clause on the absolute value of every life: you lose sight of what you were trying to fight for. Waller's ill-fated adventure in Pokolistan ends with the death of the victim she was supposed to protect, as well as the deaths of members of her own team who shouldn't even have been in prison. The reason why they were available for her to exploit in the first place is the same broken logic that ranks lives in order of importance. You can't call yourself a defender of the world if you don't equally care for every single life in it. The numerous flashbacks that reveal the origin of each member of the Commandos go back to the same theme of according life an instrumental as opposed to absolute value. Waller believes she's using a team of monsters, creatures whose past misdeeds render them only worthy of being used, but the truth is they're all innocent. She's the real monster, and the unstated implication of the show's message is that Snyder's Superman is a monster on the same scale as Waller. Gunn needed to make that clear before introducing his own take on Superman.

There's nothing naïve about a Superman who doesn't kill. Via reductio ab absurdum, Creature Commandos shows the natural result of abandoning that basic principle, and helps set the tone for a renewed view of superheroism that doesn't fetishize power for its own sake or treat conflict as a utilitarian calculation. The superhero genre is in crisis because it's embarrassed of itself, averse to sincerity, willingly corrupted by cynicism. However tonally voluble and structurally disjointed, Creature Commandos was a necessary laxative for all the rotten beliefs that have clogged up the genre. With the slate clear, it's time for Superman to once again show the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.