I also think they're doing something really smart with this. One of the things the DCEU did was try to end-run storylines to catch up with the MCU with disastrous results. Something the MCU did an excellent job in the beginning was building to create the same stories but using different building blocks to speed up things that took years if not decades to develop. I don't particularly like the Jarvis/Vision/Ultron build up removing Hank Pym and putting Tony Stark in his place, but I can see how it shortened the evolution. Similarly, I really hate what they did to Extremis, but I can see how that moved everything together in a compact way and escalated the storyline.
Making Hal the hero for as long as he was in the comics before moving the needle (to be frank a lot of the earlier eras of comics were dedicated to keeping the status quo rather than moving the narrative), would mean a lot of movies that the general audience would grow bored with before we ever got to the major Lantern events. Having Hal this way now, and Sinestro playing him and him adversarial with the Guardians gets us to some of the most interesting Hal stories and gets us to other Lanterns in a manner that reminds me of how they built the MCU. It's a different road, but I can see Hal going down that road of good intentions to become Parallax and the Lantern War forming even now, and I'm loving the promise.
The DCEU wanted to speed run a bunch of origins because they had to catch up and people were like "The only way to do this stuff is if you establish all this stuff before you use it". It was a dumb thing to do because you don't
need to, but they tried and failed at it. Gunn showed well enough that you don't need an entire series of movies to do a superhero team, and that holds just as well for the Justice League (or Gang, I guess) as it does for the Guardians. If there is something that Gunn did that feels like it broke away from the MCU blueprint, it's just saying "This world is old and things have already started, you just have to be ready for things to start
en media res", and that helped make
Superman stand out a bunch compared to other stories.
Maybe. I know a few GL super fans and ones that really love Hal that feel he has been done dirty. Though, I don’t think they expected this show to be quite as noir as it turned out to be.
I like Hal, but don't love him, so... I dunno, I feel like Hal being your favorite is generally weird to me because he's the most nothing of all the Earth Lanterns. It's not that he
can't have character, but most of the time he's just sort of "Generic All-American Boy with a few Quips" in the mainstream canon. Everyone else has a bit more personality and edge to them, whether it be John Stewart (a guy who has gone through two different backstories and both of them have been interesting), Guy Gardner (Who stands out with his personality but his backstory is also great, particularly the Post-Crisis one we get to see in the Warrior run), and Kyle (Who has a great gimmick as the unlikely chosen one, who also happens to be an artist).
There's a great moment in Rebirth where Geoff Johns describes all the other Earth Lanterns and how the ring interacts with them: John creating constructs that are fully fleshed out rather than hollow, that Kyle's constructs have a sketched quality that is always changing as he improves it in his mind, or that Guy's ring leaks like an old faucet because the ring can barely contain his willpower. Those are great descriptions... but I don't think that Hal has anything like that other than "He's the best". It's hilarious that, in his own book, Johns gives us way better descriptions of the side guys than the main character.
If you had something like
The New Frontier, that'd be a little more compelling; I've always thought that Hal was more interesting as a period piece than as something contemporary, especially if you get to bring old Hal forward into the modern time, and I think this show kind of gets that: having a modern Hal isn't interesting, having an aged Hal is interesting because it allows you to do stuff you haven't seen on the screen before. I know that Snyder wanted to pitch Affleck as old man Batman, but I don't think that portrayal tapped into the same sort of unique energy that the Kyle Chandler Hal has. He's experienced, but he's rough. And while we haven't quite gotten there yet, I think it's less because he's old and more because whatever happened with Sinestro
truly hurt him, something that you can never really do in comics. You can't have Hal never really recover from that... but it also makes that moment so much more interesting and pivotal and meaningful, that is
broke a hero and put him in a tailspin he couldn't pull out of. He's just... not young enough any more to recover from that sort of thing.
The Watchmen comparison is apt, and honestly, I’m burned out on superhero deconstructions which is why while I find the whole of it somewhat interesting (as I always like a mystery and am a sucker for stories played out over different timelines), it’s also not what I wanted for this show.
To an extent, it
is a deconstruction... but also not fully. Hal is still a hero, just a damaged one. He's not a
Watchmen character, he's just something we rarely see: a hero at the end. That's what makes it really work for me. Similarly, John turning down the ring feels like the heroic action, instead of accepting it and the emptiness it brings. But yeah, I get how that doesn't play for everyone.
