Power Rangers is the reboot movie of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tv series. It presents a slightly darker and grittier version of the Power Rangers but not as dark and gritty as the “fan-made” short film that came out a couple years ago.
The plot is simple: a group of kids gain superpowers and must defeat the evil enemy. While I liked most of the characters, they weren’t the characters I knew from the series. They are present in name but with different backstories and character traits. There’s a little shuffling of races to avoid matching with their ranger color and the cast ends up slightly more diverse because of it.
My main nitpick with the movie is that the five kids have no connection with each other or reason to work together until the film says they have to. I rewatched the first episode of the tv series after watching the movie and I buy those kids as a superhero team more than the movie’s kids. They’re all friends and supportive of each other and just nice kids. I’ll admit the show is a little rough to watch twenty-four years later but the characters are the rock of that show.
On to the costumes. I did not like the design of the armor. I get they were trying to avoid referencing the tv spandex too much but the low rent, bio-techno, Iron-Man look isn’t good. The color scheme is inconsistent across the armors with some having patches of white and others having shades of their primary color instead. It’s a nitpick but it bothered me as a fan of the old show.
The zords were honestly hard to look at. They looked like rejects from a Transformers movie. The mastodon zord had six legs for some reason. I did like that they had a chance to fight separately which they rarely did in the show. The Megazord was something of a let down since it wasn’t made from combining the zords in Voltron-esque sequence and instead combined offscreen into a giant robot that looked like the five robots had been melted down and recast into a man shape. Easily the most recognizable sequence from the show is the zords combining and it gets cut out and turned into a non-reveal since it was a foregone conclusion that they would be combining their zoids. Another nitpick from a fan of the show.
In fact, lots of things bothered me about the movie as a fan of the show. The movie is a fine superhero movie but is a below average Power Rangers movie. I will admit I came very close to tears during the emotional climax of the movie. The characters aren’t my Power Rangers but I’m in my late 30’s and the movie was aimed at a younger demographic.
Rating 2.5/5