LmAo I saw this thread last night, you can't hide the evidence.

For what its worth, RT is now going with SABANS Power Rangers.

Because that's what it's called.

I'm assuming TDS updated the thread title. I figured I'd clear out the crap since we had people throwing fits about it.

Well Rotten Tomatoes just looks stupid calling it that . They're like the only people calling it that now.

uh... so yeah, this movie is pretty solid surprisingly! Most of the cast is likable (RJ Cyler is great) and I thought the chemistry between all of them was believable. What I liked the least was actually the big action sequences that were in the final act. They weren't god awful but they were mostly eh to me.

The product placement was hilarious.

I did no such thing!

Well I know David didn't, because idk.

Lecter didn't because he's MIA.

IT WAS YOU.

I swear on the potential quality of SAW: LEGACY that it wasn't me!

I was a full member of the Power Rangers team right through the first three-quarters of this movie! I appreciated that the origin story was told with due solemnity and attention to the minutia of powerangerdom, yet injected with a healthy portion of dirty innuendo and self-deprecating humor. However, the robokaiju finale left me cold - the rock music score just didn't lift me up into the intended action frenzy. I did like the very ending's all too brief return to high school (though the joke in the mid-credits extra scene fails to land). *B*

Its a decent movie but is very manipulative of the script. The actors do fine and its generally very good its generally them just talking or having fun (thankfully this consists of 3/4 of the movie) but overall its not very satisfactory with the ending/action and the big robot resembles too much like Optimus Prime. There is also not much to do with team even though there is a constant theme of friendship/team throughout the film.

5/10.

I really wanted to like this movie, but sadly I thought it was pretty terrible. The actors aren't the problem, because the kids who play the rangers do have good chemistry, especially Jason, Kimberley and Billy. I liked Bryan Cranston's Zordon aswell. This script was awful though and I hated the fact that the majority of this movie is nothing more than boring, soapy teen drama. It doesn't help that the direction is so flat and uninteresting and even when you do get to see the Power Rangers/Zords in action it's a rushed, blurry CGI mess. Also, poor Elizabeth Banks. She gave a cringe inducing, career worst performance IMO. I honestly hope this movie doesn't stop her from getting great roles in the future.

Power Rangers

This is utter shit. It takes 90 minutes for the Power Rangers to show themselves. In the meantime we have Elizabeth Banks as Rita Repulsa strutting around like Travolta from Battlefield Earth. Then you have the Power Rangers; budget Zac Efron (red), permanent smirk lesbian (yellow), wanker Asian (black), wimpish geek (blue), and hot bad ass (pink), and they are all very PC (one's an Asian, one's a Caucasian, one is black, and one is lesbo-Mexican) so they cover all the bases! What luck! And what's better is none of them can act! Bryan Cranston, you should be ashamed to have performed in this shit fest.

The film just devours time without anything happening. Teenage melodrama. Some boring crap about being friends. A few sob stories. It's all crud. This script is just awful. The final twenty minutes is a yawn-fest as they defeat Rita Repulsa within minutes. The humour is infantile crap, and the references to better films (Iron Man, Transformers) rightly undermine this film. To top it off there's this strand of the score that appears to copy that of Stranger Things.

Finally, it did nothing to evoke nostalgia for the television series that I enjoyed so much for a short spell in the 90s. It isn't anything remotely like it. It's not even campy fun. It's just shite.

F

OMG.

This is so bad.

I'm so glad that it didn't do well because suffering through a whole cinematic universe with these characters over the next few years would be pure torture. The only main cast member who delivers anything resembling a performance is RJ Cyler, who gives the role his all but the character is hugely annoying. All the others are universally awful. Elizabeth Banks is vamping it up to the max but the movie has such a self-serious tone that her performance feels like it belongs in a different movie. It's dull as hell with the teenage melodrama for the first hour and a half (and yes, they don't actually morph until this point in the movie) and then the final fight feels like some kind of low-rent Transformers ripoff. It all feels so artificial. The use of the original series' theme song is groan-inducing. The script is absolutely terrible and the direction is all over the place. I have no idea what they were going for with this but they did not succeed. D

So what stopped you from giving it an F?

I very rarely give straight Fs.

This is pretty good re-watch if you don't have lofty expectations and are looking for cheap visual thrills.

We have porn for that.

Not those kind of thrills ofcourse

Excepting a fair amount of groan-worthy humor, I did not mind this film for its first 80 or so minutes. It plays as a fairly spry and wholesome teen-empowerment fantasy (a lightweight Chronicle, in a sense), and the young lead actors acquit themselves nicely and have decent chemistry as a team. Not to say this portion is a film of any notable quality, but a digestible enough B movie? Sure. I completely zoned out, though, once it transitions to a Power Rangers movie proper. I thought the incomprehensible, Transformers-lite final fight pitting them against the (poorly)-computer-generated gold monster would never end, and abruptly any fan service—"Go Go Power Rangers," the Green Ranger-teasing mid-credits sequence—seemed puerile and irritating to me. The film's third act turns to pure torture.

C

I never would have expected you to see this, and never this late, and never would I have expected you to give it anything above a D.

This was quite solid, if not spectacular. Very good visual effects and performances. The script is decent, but there isn't enough time to flesh out the characters before they have to jump to the Power Rangery type stuff.

B

KNOW. YOUR. AUDIENCE.

That, in a nutshell, is the glaring problem with Power Rangers. The original TV show, in hindsight, is probably a complete piece of shit. But boy did I love it as a 4-9 year old. The toys, the show, even the crappy movies, which even then I knew were crappy but still couldn't get enough of. You know who NEVER watched the show? Teenagers. The show was about teenagers, but it was never for teenagers. Same with something like Saved By the Bell. Both were shows that you watched as little kids before and after school. Why? Because they were fantasies. Fantasies (especially in SBTB's case) of what "it was going to be like in high school". FUN! But as soon as you hit the age of 10 or maybe slightly older, what happens? Poof! You outgrow things. Why? Because at a certain point you become smarter and self-aware, and you want to become an adult.

Power Rangers is for naive little kids, and in the case of the movie, kids and the parents of naive little kids who once loved the show. That's why it boggles my mind that they made a PG-13 Power Rangers film aimed at teenagers. As I said before, the show was never aimed at teenagers, so why the hell are they going to like it now. They don't even know what it is. So what should be a film aimed squarely at kids with a tone of something along the lines of the first Fantastic Four movie, is instead a weird hybrid of jerking off cows, swearing, sexting, and kind of likable shitheads. It takes a good 80 minutes for these kids to become something inspiring, and even then it feels ham-fisted.

Yet...I still kind of enjoyed it. The teens are mostly watchable, and Banks is having a blast. And, as an old fan of the show, the action at the end was kind of fun. It's a little too Man of Steel-ish as countless people must've died (even if it oddly becomes a celebration at the end), but fuck it. I also enjoyed Tyler Bates's Tron Legacy-ish (not saying it's anywhere near as good) score, though only having the original theme is a crime. And even when it plays its updated horribly so I couldn't even really enjoy that. Oh, and Bryan Cranston as a face in the wall is still Bryan Cranston and Bill Hader isn't given enough to do.

I'm a mixed bag to say the least. It's a movie for teenagers based on a TV show made for kids and neither demographic is (or did) going to give a shit. I'd say it's really only for fans of the show and even then...

If they make a sequel, make it for kids and go from there.

A very kind C+

Why does Roy from The Office hang a picture of the Power Rangers on the refrigerator like he did with his son before? He doesn't know it's his son (OR DOES HE?...he doesn't), so why does he do it except for the audience's sake (just not our intelligence)?

So like every kid who grew up in the 90s, I watched and loved the Power Rangers show. However it was never something I was nostalgic for. More embarassed by how much I liked it than anything else, like Kid Rock. I would have been fine never seeing this movie, but it was only a buck to rent on the playstation store and why not at that price.

I'm very glad I did though! I enjoyed this quite a bit. All five of the Rangers ease into their parts and I loved all the team building. I popped everytime they overcame whatever obstacle was in their way. And while their motivations are somewhat shaky ("my family is too normal" ) , they're high schoolers and teenagers often have silly motivations. What mattered is that they were all bonded by a fear of being alone. And everything that happens here is a fantasy resulting from that.

The one thing that brings the movie down is Rita. I love Banks, but the movie stops anytime they show her murder spree. I think it would have been better to save her until the very end, casting doubt on whether she even existed. Not only does that eliminate most of the bad scened, but an adds a extra double layer of tension when the team finds out Cranston is using them to return to life.

I didn't mind the lack of action though, and am glad they blew the entire budget on one glorious scene. I'll take one great scene in the middle of the day over 10 "action for the sake of it" scenes that we so often in the post-China blockbuster world. At first I was thinking this was a less interesting version of Chronicle, but it basically mirrors the Avengers in pace. And that is one of the best blueprints you can work with!

I initially gave it a B but might bump it to a B+ after writing all that.

Quote:

"If you are looking for a superhero movie where you have a team that is fully developed, three dimensional, and earns your attention to the screen, this movie does a far better job than JUSTICE LEAGUE or SUICIDE SQUAD. In fact, POWER RANGERS feels like it should be a template for DC to model themselves after: a film that develops characters rather than trying to emulate the proven formula of Marvel. Take that suggestion, Warner Bros. If you haven't seen it, go go check out POWER RANGERS!"

- via The Unpopular Opinion