Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy’s Lanterns premiered on HBO Sunday night, 16 August, after a review embargo that lifted the Friday before, and the critical reception is strong: I count six named outlets — ScreenRant, IndieWire, IGN, Empire, AV Club and Slant Magazine — publishing a numeric or letter score, and the aggregate sites back them up, sitting at roughly 91% on Rotten Tomatoes across more than thirty reviews and 72 on Metacritic as of this writing. That is a real consensus, not a handful of early takes, and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart are getting singled out across the board.
But the thing every review keeps circling, praise or complaint, is not the performances. It’s a production decision: the ring costume is a real, physically built suit, not a digital effect.
The scoreboard
Scores below are converted to a 1-10 scale following the usual rule — out of 5, multiply by two; out of 100, divide by ten; letter grades follow the standard A-to-F conversion. Slant Magazine scores on a 4-star scale, so I scaled proportionally the same way.
| Outlet | Score | The gist |
|---|---|---|
| ScreenRant | 9/10 | Calls the practical suit proof the show is “no longer DC’s worst” — a direct dig at the 2011 film |
| IndieWire | A− | “Powerfully bright,” praises Chandler and the buddy-cop structure |
| IGN | 8/10 | A “reassuring, strong start” for the DCU under James Gunn |
| Empire | 4/5 | “The grounded and gritty approach pays dividends… gives the DCU a much-needed win” |
| AV Club | B | Singles out the Hal-and-John dynamic as what actually powers the show |
| Slant Magazine | 2.5/4 | The most skeptical of the six — likes the noir instincts, thinks the visual restraint undersells the cosmic scale |
Six scores, arithmetic mean of 8.04, which rounds to an 8. Worth flagging: I could only confirm a numeric or letter grade for these six. Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, Collider and TVLine all reviewed it too, but I could not pin a published grade to any of them through search, so they’re left out of the average rather than guessed at — same logic Metacritic itself uses when an outlet doesn’t publish a score.
A suit built on an actor, not rendered in a GPU
Here’s the production detail that’s actually worth an artist’s time. Costume designer Cynthia Summers built Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern suit as a physical costume, constructed directly on Kyle Chandler, reportedly taking around 45 minutes to put on and going through three full design iterations before Mundy and director James Hawes signed off on the final version. Per Chris Mundy, that wasn’t a budget call — it’s a stated philosophy. The show was shot practically, on real LA sets and locations (Warner Bros. Burbank, plus location work in Piru, California, between February and July last year), with CG and volume work reserved for whatever genuinely couldn’t be built. And the ring constructs — the show’s version of Green Lantern’s signature power, solid light shaped into whatever the wielder imagines — were built to carry visible physical weight when they do appear, rather than read as weightless CG the way they famously did in the 2011 Ryan Reynolds film.
I get why that’s the pitch. A CG suit is a lighting and shading problem that never fully resolves — the material has to survive every angle, every set, every DP’s key light, and a suit an actor can shrug their shoulders in tends to read as there in a way a rendered one rarely does, no matter how good the shader. Practical costuming also buys you something a VFX pipeline can’t easily replicate: an actor who can feel the weight of the thing and perform against it, instead of acting opposite a tennis ball on a stick.
But a physical suit is also a constraint you cannot software-patch your way out of once the season is locked. If the ring’s signature trick is “anything the wielder can imagine,” a practical build caps how far that can stretch before you’re back to a digital extension anyway — and that’s exactly where a chunk of the more mixed reviews are landing. Slant’s critique in particular is that the visual palette, described elsewhere in the roundup as muted grays and dust, keeps the fantastical elements looking “oddly restrained rather than awe-inspiring” — the show stays so committed to looking like True Detective with a ring in it that when the aliens and constructs do show up, the CGI deliberately doesn’t bloom into the Technicolor spectacle the premise could support. Several critics used a version of the same line: this is a superhero show for people who don’t like superhero shows.
That’s a legitimate creative choice, not a mistake — restraint is a real visual strategy and I don’t think the critics who dislike it are wrong to notice it either. What I find genuinely interesting is that it’s the same trade-off environment artists hit constantly at a smaller scale: how much of the fantastical do you ground in something physically plausible before the grounding starts working against the sense of wonder the fantastical element was supposed to deliver in the first place. Lanterns picked a side of that line hard, on purpose, across an entire season — and the reviews are essentially a referendum on where that line should sit.
The credited VFX houses — Digital Domain, Image Engine, Spin VFX, Ghost VFX, El Ranchito, Distillery VFX, Fin Design + Effects, Twin Pines and Refuge VFX among them, per Art of VFX — are not small shops, which tells me the restraint in the finished frame is a directed choice by VFX supervisor Greg Steele’s team, not a budget shortfall dressed up as an aesthetic. It’s a grounded show that spent real digital-effects money to look like it barely used any.
Sourced from published reviews and trade reporting on Lanterns (ScreenRant, IndieWire, IGN, Empire, AV Club, Slant Magazine, The Wrap, Dark Horizons, The Ringer, Slate, TheCinemaholic, Art of VFX), plus Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic aggregate figures as reported by those outlets, all as of 17 August 2026. No production stills were available through a source I could verify as an official press asset, so this article ships with an original cover graphic instead.