Matt Reviews: Power Rangers (2017)

This is the tale of how five teens with attitude defended a Krispy Kreme against Effie Trinket’s Poison Ivy cosplay.

The story is pretty simple: In the town of Angel Grove, five teens discover mystical coins that grant them superhuman powers. They are recruited by an alien named Zordon (Bryan Cranston) to become the newest iteration of the Power Rangers, an intergalactic team of warriors designed to protect all life in the universe. With the reawakening of the Rangers also comes the resurrection of their greatest enemy: Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks), the former Green Ranger who wishes to use Earth’s Zeo Crystal to cause planet-wide genocide. Despite the fact that none of them really know each other and are all a bunch of jaded, angsty teens, the Rangers must learn to work together as a team to stop Rita and save the world.

Full disclosure: I was never super into Power Rangers. Sure, I watched the original series on re-runs as a kid, but it was never my favorite thing. Maybe it was because I didn’t grow up in that era. The two Power Rangers shows I did grow up watching were SPD (in which the Rangers are space cops in the future) and Mystic Force (where the Rangers are wizards), and I remember liking them just find. But honestly, I think I liked them so much because they capitalized on my two main obsessions as a kid: aliens and wizards. So with that background, I didn’t go into the movie with the mindset of “If they screw up Power Rangers, I’m gonna burn their house to the ground.”

The film works hard to give the Rangers more complex character and more modern and sympathetic backstories. These are not the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers who are just the all around stand-up kids you’d find in a lot of cheesy kid’s shows. These Rangers have an edge to them. Their lives are plagued with bullying from school and from home, from hardships out of their control and stupid mistakes that sabotage their own happiness. They’re not perfect, and the movie makes sure to hammer that point home.

Red: the blood of angry fans/Black: the dark of reboots past

Granted, it can get cringy how hard the movie forces the “teens with attitude” bit down our throats, but at least the movie is trying to make them more believable as modern-day teenagers. The standout Ranger I believe is Billy, played here by RJ Cyler. Where the rest of the Rangers are jaded cynics who rebel with wild abandon of their parents opinions, Billy comes out as the comparative “goody two-shoes” of the bunch, which I found refreshing. He’s easily the most sympathetic and likeable of the Rangers due to just how different he is from the rest of them. The choice to also make him autistic was a bold one, but I think it worked out. To my knowledge, there aren’t a whole lot of superheroes representing those on the autism spectrum. The first one that comes to mind is Symmetra from Overwatch, and even then, it’s not a hero from a big blockbuster movie like this. It’s a minority that I think needs way more representation in movies like this, and maybe after this film, we could see more heroic role models for autistic children.

Speaking of representation, Trini is apparently supposed to be gay in this movie. I say “apparently” because this movie dances around the topic more than Beauty and the Beast did with Le Fou. There’s a total of one scene where it is vaguely alluded to, and it would have been interesting to go down that route since Trini is talking about how her parents like to use “labels” and want her to act more “normal” or whatever. That would have made an already heartbreaking scene that more emotional. But of course, they missed their chance to be out with it and have the first blatantly homosexual superhero in cinema. What was so wrong about Trini just coming out and saying “Yeah, I’m gay”? Billy’s autism was better represented than Trini’s sexuality, and the latter was the one that got more media attention! Studios should stop making a big deal about characters’ sexualities in press releases if it’s not going to be a big deal in their movies.

Aside from the Rangers, Zordon also gets a more complex characterization here. From what I remember from the original, he was just the big floating head that alerted the Rangers to when there was a new monster in town and was just the standard emotionless, incorruptible mentor figure. The most I remember him doing is when he died in the Mighty Morphin’ movie. (He did die, right? It’s been forever since I’ve seen that movie.) Here, he’s a more complex and flawed character. He’s selfish; the only reason he’s so adamant about the Rangers morphing for the first time is because it will allow him to use the Morphing Grid to come back to life so he can defeat Rita…somehow. But he goes through an arc, too, as shown when he sacrifices his only way to return to gain his body back in order to resurrect Billy. The choice to make him the former Red Ranger was one I also enjoyed, and it gives him a more personal history with the Rangers. Along the same vein, Alpha 5 is considerably less annoying than in the original series. And he’s an itty-bitty badass when he’s training the Rangers in fighting.

"Ah, after 22 years, I'm free! It's time to conquer the box office!"

On the other end, Rita is not a particularly developed villain. Elizabeth Banks does provide some genuinely unsettling scenes, and her performance is delightfully hammy. But the real shame here is that they make her the former Green Ranger, which gives her an immediate connection to Zordon, but they barely explore that aspect. I don’t think Zordon and Rita ever have an interaction aside from the beginning scene (ya know, the part where Zordon orders an aerial strike on prehistoric Earth that kills the dinosaurs).  We don’t even get to explore the reason Rita betrayed the Rangers other than, “I’m crazy and want to destroy everything that lives!”

Here’s an example of the kind of backstory they could give her: Maybe Rita thought that she deserved to be the Red Ranger over Zordon, believing that he didn’t have the strength or merit to be the lead Ranger and she did. She grew a jealous superiority complex over Zordon being chosen (or however this stuff works), and strived for a way to prove she was more powerful than he. She became obsessed with unearthing and controlling the Zeo Crystal – which she saw as her key to true, incomparable power – and her betrayal of the Rangers is deeply rooted in her own lust to prove how better she is than Zordon. Her genocidal plan could be explained as her insanity caused by her Zero Crystal obsession coupled with the disillusionment of a universe that would pick Zordon as the Red Ranger (thus making her just as jaded and angsty as the new Rangers). The fact that they didn’t kill Rita off at the end of this movie makes me hopeful that the next will get to expand on her character and motivations a lot more.

The movie is also quite inconsistent with its tone. It can’t decide whether it wants to be a darker, more mature reboot of the franchise or something goofier like its predecessors. It can go from Zack monologuing about his fear of being alone after his mother dies, to discovering that the all-powerful Zeo Crystal is buried underneath a Krispy Kreme, in an act of product placement so egregious that it transcends all pre-existing concepts. Between the two tones, I would have probably preferred if the movie stuck with the darker, modern option. Those parts of the movie really played to the strengths of the actors and added more emotional weight. And I never felt like those parts went too dark and dull like Fant4stic. Then again, witnessing the Megazord pimp-slap Rita into the stratosphere was pretty fun.

"But Zordon, what does cooking meth have to do with becoming Power Rangers?"
"Becoming what now?

The film’s other major problem comes from the Rangers themselves. Oh, not the kids. The Rangers. As in the costumes. The costumes that only show up in the last twenty minutes of the movie.

Yeah.

Like I said before, the movie takes a lot of time developing the characters, their personalities, their backgrounds, and their relationships, but maybe they could have shaved off a bit of that time for actual Power Rangering. Granted, we do get to see the kids train a lot with Alpha, so we get some fight scenes with their powers. But the movie isn’t called Angsty Teens with Superpowers (although that was the unused alternate title for Chronicle). It’s the same problem people had with the 2014 Godzilla movie: With a movie titled Power Rangers, you’d expect to see more Power Rangers than what we got.

Power Rangers is not a great movie. It is also not a terrible movie. To me, it is very middle-of-the-road. It never does anything too horrible that makes me want to punch the nearest person, but it also never does anything adrenaline-pumping that makes me want to punch the air in excitement. The closest thing we got to the latter was when the Rangers FINALLY morph and head out in their Zords, scored by the classic “Go Go Power Rangers” theme in the background. But even then, it only lasts like fifteen seconds before switching to Kanye West’s “Power.” Had they kept the Mighty Morphin’ theme go-going, maybe the climax would have been more exicting to me.

In terms of modern-day reboots of kid’s properties from late 20^th century, this movie is much better than the Transformers series. More effort is put into the characters and story here, and the action is more exciting, with actual humans fighting sometimes and not just constant CGI vs CGI. The best fight scene in my opinion isn’t even the final fight with the Megazord vs. Goldar; it’s the first fight the Rangers have with the Putties after (FINALLY) suiting up. It’s also MUCH more mature than Transformers could ever be. Whereas Transformers continues to put in juvenile jokes that it thinks its audience will love, Power Rangers mostly shies away from that. The only joke of Transformers caliber is at the beginning with the tired “Milking a male cow’s udder” gag. I haven’t seen either of the new Ninja Turtles movies yet, but I’m gonna take a stab from what I’ve heard and say that this movie’s better than both of those two. Moral of the story: Don’t let Michael Bay near your childhood if you don’t want it turned into dick jokes.

"So how come we keep our faces out even though it decreases our armor?"
"Shut up, I'm not being paid to be stuffed in a CGI Iron Man reject for two hours."

Now, if you want a recommendation for a really stellar Power Rangers film, check out the short film Power/Rangers starring James van der Beek and Katee Sackoff. It’s much darker and more emotional than this movie, but it’s written almost as a self-aware parody of darker and grittier reboots of children’s entertainment. But as for the 2017 Power Rangers flick: it has its problems for sure, but it’s a solid framework for bigger and better movies in the future. Apparently they’ve got six or seven of these things planned. Yeesh…

Final verdict: 6/10

Also, not a critique on the movie itself, but the theater I went to has one of those big drink dispensers that has all the flavors of soda imaginable, and it was out of everything that wasn’t diet, lo calorie, or lo sugar. I had to settle for Diet Orange Fanta, which was the least disgusting option I had. AND my friend bought the last thing of Red Vines. Ugh.