Okay, like, straight up? Power Rangers is dumb. The entire series or cannon or oeuvre or however you want to call it is actually pretty dumb. And I honestly mean that in the best possible way and as the highest possible compliment. It’s campy, silly, nonsensical, colourful, and downright weird (yes, I am aware that all the battle footage comes from Japanese sentai shows, and yes I think that is where a lot of that weirdness comes from). I think Power Rangers also has a lot of charm, which is born from all that delightful weirdness. Combining all that Japanese wackiness with American 90s attitude made for a helluva show. Even in Australia, Power Rangers was popular.
I wasn’t allowed to watch Power Rangers as a kid. My parents didn’t want me watching shows that they deemed too violent or were designed to sell toys. Despite Power Rangers trying to present hamfisted moral lessons, it definitely fell into those two categories. So Power Rangers was always this forbidden fruit to little Tom, something I wanted but could never have. This just made it doubly exciting when I visited friends’ houses that were allowed, and I could watch a couple of episodes and even play with some of the toys. Oh man, those toys. One of my friends had all five Zords that would transform and combine into this massive Megazord, it must have been at least a foot tall. So Cool!
So yeah, Power Rangers was a pretty big and important thing for me as a six-to-ten year old… right up until it wasn’t. I only saw tiny bits and pieces of the show, and so I wasn’t anywhere near as connected to it as my other friends were. And so one day I kind of just forgot about it. As far as I know, there has been a new season or series of Power Rangers every year since its inception, and I’d occasionally see snippets of it when channel surfing (back when that was even a thing), but that was about it for me and Power Rangers.
CUT TO 2017
The Nintendo Switch and The Legend of Zelda comes out and surprises the hell out of everyone by being actually really good.
North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan.
Bones finally finishes after twelve seasons, about seven seasons too many.
And a fetid, orange fungus somehow manages to ooze its way into the most powerful political office in the world.
(2017 was only three years ago? Ugh, what even is time anymore?)
I was… not excited when a Power Rangers reboot/reimagining-style movie was announced. I just didn’t care. Hollywood was still in full swing of its gritty reboot phase, and I was pretty sure Power Rangers was about to get the same treatment. I did not want to see this movie.
But my boyfriend dragged me to see it anyway. I was not happy. He told me that I needed to be more social, spend more time with friends, and at the very least we could laugh or complain about this stupid movie afterwards.
Fiiiiiiine, I said with all the maturity of a ten year old forced to go grocery shopping with his mum.
I was convinced that Power Rangers (2017) was going to be an unnecessarily bleak, grim dark, grey, violent, movie about the weight of war, or the burden of power, or something equally tiring. I was convinced that it was going to be a badly written, predictable slog. I was convinced it was yet another shoddy cash-grab. I was convinced I was in for a bad time.
Oh lordy, lordy. I was wrong. I was so, so very, incredibly wrong.
Turns out Power Rangers (2017) is a REALLY GOOD MOVIE Y’ALL.
You want heart? It’s got heart. You want a cast of realistically diverse characters? It’s got realistically diverse characters. You want decent queer and neurodivergent representation? It’s got queer and neurodivergent rep. You want to see the power of friendship being a key plot point? It’s got the power of motherfucking friendship!
I need you to imagine, short, grumpy Tom walking into the cinema just wanting it to be over, and then walking out of the cinema with a spring in his step and a confused, dazed, yet happy grin plastered all over his face. It was such a strange experience for me. Usually when I see a movie, I’m pretty tuned in to what kind of experience I’m about to receive. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised and disappointed before, but I can’t remember the last time that my expectations were completely turned on their head. Now I want to make sure that I’m not hyping this up too much. Power Rangers is not the new Citizen Kane. It is, however, a solid four-out-of-five action adventure movie, and you should expect as much from it.
So what drew me into it? What endeared me? What won me over?
The movie begins with the extinction of the dinosaurs. We see alien Bryan Cranston in a latex alien suit. Okay, this is odd. Then the movie transitions to present day, with a couple of mischievous teens ‘pranking’ a school by leading a live bull into the locker room. American schools are weird, yo. We meet Jason, one of the main characters. Then the movie almost lost me with a really cheap and obvious ‘I accidentally tried to milk a bull lol you were actually stroking its dick haha’ joke. Ugh.
A car chase begins. Police are trying to nab the pesky highschoolers. Jason is now on the run! Apparently bovine kidnapping is a capital offence in the States.
Now, imagine a movie car chase. What does it normally look like in movies? Usually with various long shots tracking the cars involved. A shot with the camera sitting on the bonnet looking in at the characters. Maybe an extreme close up of the character from inside the car for dramatic emphasis.
Hah! Power Rangers cares not for your rules of action movie car chases!
Instead, we are treated to a wonderful piece of camera work, as a single camera, in one single, fluid take, spins around in the very centre of Jason’s car for the entire chase, right up until the pretty intense, upside-down car crash at the very end.
It’s a really cool piece of camera work, and there are a few more like that in the movie. It’s like, “Power Rangers movie, you didn’t have to treat us like this.”
Even things like colour coding the teens into their superhero colours, which is something the show always did, but it’s done a lot more subtly here. In the old TV show, Jason would wear a solid red shirt, or Trini would wear bright yellow overalls. In the movie, Billy wears a blue and grey flannel, or the colour of the plates or wallpaper in the kids’ houses will correspond to their colour. It’s really apparent that the people who made this movie really cared and put a lot of great details like this into the film.
But these are mostly cool extra details that I noticed on subsequent viewings. Uh, yes, of course I’ve seen this movie multiple times and own it on Blue Ray.
What really hooked me into this movie is The Slap.
THE SLAP
For the egregious crime of bringing a bull into school, Jason gets detention for the rest of the year and also has to wear a police ankle bracelet tracking thingamajig (Oh my god. Note to self: Don’t fuck with animals in America, they will sue your ass). In detention, Jason comes across Billy, a black kid who is displaying some neurodivergent behaviour: making sure his pencils are all the right length and organised properly by colour. Billy is being bullied by the local school caricature, who is pushing Billy around and eventually snaps one of his pencils.
Jason steps in, tells the bully to back off. The bully tries to punch Jason, who dodges impressively out of the way.
Then Jason raises his hand and full on open palm slaps the bully across the face. It was so sudden and so loud that an entire theatre full of people went completely silent for a full three seconds, before erupting into applause and screams of “Ohhhhh!”.
When someone slaps you like that, the only thing you get to do is sit your ass down and be quiet. You don’t come back from that.
It was fucking glorious.
It was that moment that I realised this movie was a lot better than I expected.
And that’s basically the first five minutes. It didn’t take long to win me over from complete disinterest. I’m not going to go through the entire plot, I want you to watch this thing for yourself, grab a couple of beers, treat yourself to a bag of chips and have fun with it.
But I need to talk about this movie’s greatest strength. A lot of people seemed to dislike this movie, and I’m not certain, but if I had to guess it’s because they wanted a movie with a lot of action and kung fu and transforming dinosaur robots. All that cool stuff is there, but it really only appears in the final ten minutes of the film.
Because it turns out that Power Rangers (2017) isn’t really an action movie.
It’s a teen drama.
Wait, where are you going? No, come back! I swear it’s a good thing!
I’m going to talk about what I think are the best three scenes in the entire movie (three or four scenes, depending on how you look at it) that really show off how awesome and relatable and fun these characters are.
The Campfire Scene
At about the halfway point of the movie, the five teen heroes decide to camp out for the night, and get to talking, “Why can’t we morph? What are we not getting?” It’s supposed to be about teamwork, right? Zack has the great idea that they still don’t know each other well enough, that they need to share some secrets.
A lesser movie would have had them start making jokes at each others’ expense, before one admits that they’re “Afraid of failure” or some other cliche. But, nah, my boy Zack gets right into it. He lives with his mum. She’s sick. They’re poor. He’s afraid she’ll just be gone one day.
Billy speaks up, talking about how music and building things helps him deal with his dad’s death.
Jason, admittedly, doesn’t have a lot to say. He was the school’s star quarterback and he stuffed everything up, and now the whole town hates him.
Trini does not get along with her parents. It’s heavily insinuated that it’s because she’s gay and they don’t know how to deal with that.
All the while the camera is looking at these characters from specifically the inside of the circle they are sitting in, making us feel like we are part of the group, making us feel that intimacy and closeness and vulnerability.
Finally the group turns to Kimberly, and asks for her secret. And Kimberly (and this is what makes this scene super special to me) says that she’s not ready to talk to them about it yet AND THEN THEY RESPECT HER DECISION TO NOT PARTICIPATE AND LET HER KNOW THAT THEY ARE READY TO LISTEN WHEN SHE’S READY TO TALK. How friggen awesome is that? No peer pressure, no ribbing, no booing, no teasing. Just respect and acceptance. Our heroes are truly good people (just ignore that one time Zack stole a Zord and almost flattened a bus full of nuns, it’s fine, it’s fine).
This whole scene really highlights that they didn’t just get thrown together because of weird circumstances and are now suddenly BFFs 4EVA. You really do see them grow as friends across the whole movie, and how they navigate that friendship, and how some navigate it easier or harder than the others. It’s truly wonderful writing.
G O L D
So Elizabeth Banks plays Rita Repulsa, and my god, she looks like she is just having the time of her life playing this role. She is eating scenery like it was made from delicious American donuts. Actually what she is eating is gold, quite literally stuffing it down her throat. She needs gold to build her super-mega-warrior, Goldar. Who is apparently made of gold.
But over the movie Banks goes from this half desiccated corpse lady, pouncing on homeless people to literally rip the gold teeth from their faces, to an uber confident, maniacal alien empress, and she does it so well! Every time she is on screen is a fucking delight.
Sadly, she does not ever scream “After ten thousand years, I’m free! Time to conquer Earth!” but she does give a very impassioned “Make my monster grow!” and makes it work, somehow? Banks got that Repulsa energy down.
Her costume is also very cool. It’s never explicitly stated, but she is wearing the shattered remains of her old power armour (she used to be the green Power Ranger, a little nod to fans of the show and the sort-of origins of the Green Ranger) as her skin is slowly more interwoven with all the gold she’s collecting. The more powerful she gets, the more ‘complete’ her armour becomes. Like I said: details! (I know this isn’t a scene at all, but a character, but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want)
We’re not so different, you and I…
You’ve heard those words before. When the bad guy finds the weak link in a group of heroes, tries to convince them that their evil scheme is somehow good actually, and that they should totally turn on their companions. Maybe it’s the only way to save them. Maybe it’s because the bad guy’s very obviously evil plan is the “better way” (it never is).
It’s a trope and cliche, and one that Rita Repulsa totally tries to pull on Trini.
It is a legitimately creepy scene. In fact a lot of the scenes and shots that surround Rita are definitely pulling from horror movie techniques. Rita pulls the “You don’t really fit in. Just betray them and I’ll let your family live,” bit, while absolutely messing up Trini’s room, and Trini. Banks’s physical acting in this bit is fantastic; she is just throwing this poor girl around the room, slamming her into walls, the ceiling. It’s intense stuff.
Rita really twists the emotional thumb screws into Trini, and Trini agrees. She’ll betray her new friends. She’ll send them into an ambush.
When I saw this play out for the first time in the cinema, saw Rita bullying Trini into betrayal, I sighed a little bit. I thought, are they really going to pull this cliche? I couldn’t help but predict the next few steps of the movie. Trini will lead her friends into Rita’s trap, have a change of heart and warn them at the last minute, they’ll temporary foil Rita’s murder-plan, but they’ll question if they can trust Trini, and she’ll win back their trust by the end of the movie. Seen it before. Bored by it before. I slumped a little in my movie chair.
Except PSYCH! Trini calls up the others and says, “Hey, the evil witch showed up in my room and told me to betray you guys. This is where she’s gonna be, let’s go fuck her up.”
And then they decide to beat up a 65 million year old space witch with pipes and chains, which is certainly one of the cooler sentences I’ve written.
There are a bunch of times where this movie looks like it’s going to go down the predictable, safe, familiar path, but then jerks the wheel at right the last second and sends you somewhere you didn’t expect.
I really could keep banging on about things I love about this movie, but this post is becoming one long boi so I’ll try to wrap it up. As one last point though, this movie copped a lot of flack for only having the Power Rangers show up for the last ten minutes of the movie to do Power Ranger-y things. But I think what people mean by that is the heroes don’t get their armour until the end of the film; that classic imagery and Power Ranger signature.
But here’s the thing. The armour isn’t armour. It’s their full potential. It’s what they can be. It’s their true selves, no longer bound by the baggage and doubt they dragged with them. And it doesn’t show up until the end of the movie because they had to earn it first. Earn it through friendship. Earn it through self-discovery. Earn it through hardship and pain and loss. And that just makes it so much better.
So please, if you skipped over this movie because of the review, I implore you, beg you, to give this movie a shot. I honestly believe that it will one day be known as an underrated classic.
Billy4Life
So long, nerds.
Scribbled Cakes 