Power Rangers Summary & Review
While teenagers and young adults have the Marvel and DC brands of superheroes to enjoy, the younger kids have much more fun heroes to be fans of. One of which is Haim Saban’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. While none of that show was very well made, the point was to appeal to a much younger audience than most of the gritty superheroes, so it didn’t need to be perfect. The original series quickly grew in popularity and, like most superhero-based properties, expanded into a franchise of multiple shows, movies, toys, etc. Now, the newest rendition of Power Rangers is here, and I wouldn’t say this is exactly “kid friendly.”
In this new film, five high school outcasts, Jason (Dacre Montgomery), Billy (RJ Cyler), Kimberly (Naomi Scott), Zack (Ludi Lin), and Trini (Becky G), discover five colored coins buried in the local gold mine. The next day, they discover they all have amazing, superhuman abilities. Searching for answers, they discover a buried spaceship, and meet the powerful Zordon (Bryan Cranston) and his robot assistant Alpha 5 (Bill Hader). Zordon tells them that they have been chosen to become the next generation of a team of superheroes known as the Power Rangers. Together, they must stop the evil alien Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) before she destroys all life on Earth.
I was never a Power Rangers fan growing up. I think I have seen one episode of one of the newer shows on Nickelodeon, and decided that it’s not for me. The reason I wanted to check this out is because the director, Dean Israelite, made the film Project Almanac. I thought he could make a property I wasn’t a fan of fun and exciting. Sadly, this film was the opposite of that. Power Rangers was a pretty bad movie.
Let’s start with what very little I liked about it. I thought the visual effects and the costumes were really cool. I like the way everything in the film looked. I thought the Rangers had a nice design, and the visuals looked well rendered. I also enjoyed that it was on a much smaller scale than most of the superhero movies out today. The event was contained to one town rather than the entire world. That was a nice change of pace.
However, there was so much wrong with this movie. First off, the five leading kids could not act. They all were playing your standard, moody teenager characters, and they don’t play them well. They all look like they came from the set of some Nickelodeon show (coincidence?), and never tried to act any better. Aside from them, Cranston, Hader, and Banks have all done much better movies than this. It was a depressingly low point for the three of them, especially since they’re all talented.
While I thought the visuals were well done, the action scenes were not. All of the fight scenes were predictable and uninspired. They looked like they were just copying moves from the series rather than try to do something different. Action scenes need to have fast-paced fights where we can’t predict what will happen next, but I could see exactly what was going to happen way before it did.
The film’s biggest problem, however, was the tone. From the day the first trailer came out, I have said one thing about this movie, “They are trying to make a serious movie based on a concept that was never meant to be taken seriously.” The whole movie tries to act like its campy, TV show predecessor, but when that conflicts with the dark and serious atmosphere they’ve created, it does not work. I thought it would at least come off as stupid fun, but it came off as just stupid.
Power Rangers is a bad movie that has some nice visuals, but is weighed down by wooden performances, uninspired action scenes, and an inconsistent tone (about the third movie this year to have that problem). However, if you are a fan of the series and are up to date with the mythology, you might like it. I’m not saying you will like it, but I am not of fan of the franchise. There are things in this movie I know were references, but I didn’t get them. If you know the world of the Power Rangers, you might get them, and you might have a good time.
