The ring is sitting on the dashboard and Hal Jordan has already jumped out of the car. That is the image DC chose to lead with, and it tells you more about this show than any logline has managed in two years. No cape shot. No slow-motion hero landing. Just a veteran space cop bailing out of a moving vehicle and leaving the most powerful weapon in the universe with a rookie who has never used it, seconds before the car goes over a cliff.
“Lanterns” finally dropped its full trailer at San Diego Comic-Con, and after months of teases that showed almost nothing, this one shows the thing everyone actually wanted. It is the first look that treats Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) like people rather than concept art. The series lands on HBO and HBO Max on August 16, running eight episodes, and the pitch that has followed it since day one — a grounded murder mystery in the American heartland that happens to involve intergalactic law enforcement — is right there on screen. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for “Lanterns” and the plot beats, character reveals and villain details contained in the Comic-Con trailer.
No cape shot. No slow-motion hero landing. Just a veteran space cop bailing out of a moving vehicle and leaving the most powerful weapon in the universe with a rookie who has never used it, seconds before the car goes over a cliff.”
Let us walk through what is actually in it, because the BR team has watched enough superhero trailers to know the difference between a shot that means something and a shot that exists to fill a cut. One note first, and it matters: the trailer is only half of what Hall H got. Warner Bros. also screened five or six exclusive clips that have not gone online, and a lot of the coverage floating around today quietly blends the two. Everything below is from the trailer unless we flag it otherwise.
The car sequence is the spine of the whole thing. John and Hal are arguing — John has been training for two months and is tired of it. Hal, driving, flips him the ring. John’s objection is the most comic-accurate line in the trailer: “I haven’t worked the ring yet, I thought the point was the Guardians choose me.” Hal’s answer is pure condescension. “Don’t get hung up on the jewelry, junior. You’re just a f***ing substitute teacher. You aren’t ready to get up in front of the class until the ring says you are.” Then he leaves the ring on the dash, opens the door, and jumps. The car goes off the cliff with John still in it.
What John does next is the single best detail in the trailer and the one that should reassure anyone who worried this show would be embarrassed by its own premise. He saves himself with a construct made of bubble wrap. Actual green bubble wrap. It is a joke and a character beat at once — a man reaching for the first dumb thing his panicking brain can picture, and the ring taking him at his word. If you have spent years watching Green Lantern adaptations serve up generic green fists and glowing walls, that one shot is worth more than a hundred million dollars of cosmic vista.
From there the trailer scatters across the season. Hal turns up at a taco stand getting recognized and photographed, leaning into being a celebrity in a way that reads more washed-up than heroic. Hal and John arrive at a small-town city hall where the sheriff and half the residents are already waiting. The two of them get chased and shot at by masked figures. Hal flies — and pointedly, he does it in civilian clothes rather than the uniform, which is a choice. John holds the Power Battery. Somewhere in the mix, the oath gets spoken out loud.
Then the trailer plays its best card. Hal, this time in full uniform, walks into the Sciencells to interrogate a prisoner, and the prisoner is Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen). He wants information about the Manhunters. Sinestro, being Sinestro, turns the conversation back on him and needles him about the kid — the read being that if the Manhunters really are out there, they would still only be the second biggest threat in Hal’s life. Hal’s response is the line the marketing is built around: “He’s not my trainee, he’s my contingency.” Nobody has published a clear description of how Sinestro actually looks in the scene, so we are not going to invent one for you.
The Manhunters are the season’s engine, and the trailer establishes them as shape-shifting aliens who can wear anyone’s face, described in voiceover as the most dangerous species in the universe. That is a smart villain for a murder mystery — it turns every guest actor into a suspect and gives an eight-episode season a reason to keep its cast small and paranoid. It has also set off a round of speculation that a certain green Martian is being seeded, since shapeshifting plus “Manhunter” is not a subtle pairing. We would pump the brakes there. No outlet covering the trailer has described an actual on-screen appearance, silhouette or name-drop for J’onn J’onzz. That connection is currently something fans are drawing, not something the footage confirms.
What the trailer does confirm is that this show is wired into the wider DCU rather than sitting off to the side. Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) turns up, the same version from “Superman,” which welds this directly into James Gunn’s continuity. Comic-Con added another piece on stage: Laura Linney has joined as one of the Guardians of the Universe, the founders of the Corps themselves. Pierre described her on the panel as “an auntie to me,” which is a lovely way to say the show is going somewhere with the Oa side of the mythology even if the trailer keeps its boots in Nebraska.
Here is where we separate the footage from the fan chatter. Those Hall H clips — not in the trailer, not online — are where the wildest material lives. There is a flashback to John in Marine uniform being handed an impossible target and told his kill record is impeccable, then parachuting through a storm. There is an interrogation where Hal tests a suspect named Waylon by quizzing him on Nebraska trivia and who was president, clocks him as alien when he fumbles it, and gets a confession that ends with Waylon revealing a bomb in his spine, reciting the Green Lantern oath, and detonating while Hal throws up a barrier. There is a bar sequence where Hal deliberately picks a fight over the jukebox so he will get thrown in a cell and can question someone inside. If you see those described as trailer moments, they are not.
The tone is the part we keep coming back to. “True Detective in the DCU” has been the shorthand since the show was announced, and the trailer earns it more than we expected — dusty small-town interiors, an investigation structure, two men who clearly do not like each other yet. Director James Hawes, who handled the first two episodes, put it more bluntly at the panel: it is a “buddy cop movie, and then somebody flies!” Chris Mundy runs the show and co-wrote the pilot with Damon Lindelof and comics writer Tom King, which is a creative trio you would normally expect on prestige drama rather than a superhero series. Pierre also revealed the production barely lived on a studio lot at all. “Less than 20% of the shoot was at the Warner Bros lot. We were like a traveling company.” You can see that in the footage. The exteriors look like actual places.
Chandler, for his part, is not selling Hal as a hero. His summary of the man he plays: “He is kind of an idiot and an a**hole.” After a decade of DC leads being introduced as burdened messiahs, an eight-episode murder mystery where the famous one is a jerk and the rookie is the interesting one feels like a genuinely different swing. Whether it holds for eight weeks is another question, and it is a fair one — grounded superhero television has a habit of running out of mystery before it runs out of episodes. But the bubble wrap bought a lot of goodwill around here.
What Do You Think? Is the shapeshifting-Manhunter angle genuine Martian Manhunter groundwork, or are we all pattern-matching on a word that DC has used for two unrelated things since 1955? Does making Hal Jordan the washed-up jerk and John Stewart the emotional center fix the character problem every Green Lantern adaptation has crashed into, or does it just move it? And after the Hall H clips showed a suspect with a bomb in his spine reciting the oath before he detonates, how far is this show willing to push the Corps mythology before those eight episodes are up?
See you on the next binge!
