POWER RANGERS (2017)
Inevitably, your opinion of something will be out of sync with those around you. You’ll like something they don’t; while they’ll enjoy something that was not your bag at all. It’s unavoidable because we’re all different with different experiences and emotional reactions to things; if you and all your friends like and dislike all of the same things then you’re probably in a cult of some kind. Or perhaps a clone. Or worst of all…a clone cult!
Despite it invariably occurring, it’s still weird because both sides have some blindspotting that they can’t get over—that negative/positive balance where what is prominent greatly dwarfs the other. For example, is GAMER (2009) fairly dopey and a touch misogynistic with awkward posing of a pseudo-edginess? Yes. And while I recognize those faults, and wish some of them weren’t there, I still deeply love that movie because I think it’s fairly prescient while using its weaknesses to portray the world it builds all while having some dope action scenes and Gerard Butler pissing into a car to make it go. Others would focus more on the first part and the remaining charms I championed aren’t enough to sway their response to seeing the movie.
But I always prefer liking something that others don’t than the opposite. Not because I’m a contrarian prick, but because if I enjoy something then that naturally energizes me to talk about it and explain why it affected me. And being the negative vote always feels like raining on others’ parades. Or, worse yet, feeling like I can’t even participate in parades without ruining them. I don’t get why parades are fun and thus shouldn’t attend them with others. This analogy is no longer useful.
This is a long walk to get to the 2017 POWER RANGERS movie. Based on the long-running American adaptation of the Japanese super sentai series, the reboot movie takes most of the staples of the TV show but added various modern changes and some cosmetic ones as well. I was clearly too old for the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers series at the time, none of my friends watched it, I wasn’t even that into it—yet I remember watching all of the Green Ranger saga and then the return as the White Ranger. There’s some decent acting by the five leads and Elizabeth Banks is enjoyable as an overly hammy villain (who is not above delighting in Krispy Kreme product placement)—though those two groups are clearly in separate movies with widely different tones.
POWER RANGERS has an overly familiar storyline with basic themes and messages you can anticipate, but nothing egregious that makes you longingly look at the exit. And then the movie, directed by Dean Israelite from a script by John Gatins, seems to remember it hasn’t gotten to the lesson about working together or all the robot stuff yet and sprints through that to the finish line. It’s a really weird way to make the whole movie uneven where they spend like 30 minutes learning how to throw punches and get their battle armor, but master the “alien robot dinosaur (or dinosaur adjacent)” part in about six minutes—and the whole merged into one giant robot made of separate parts takes even less time than that, like a minute? Maybe two? All while fighting the lone kaiju that barely makes this count for KaiJuly 2021—Goldar. In the TV show, Goldar was your average main villain’s flunky who seemed tough while avoiding being the bumbling henchmen or comic relief. And he looked like this:
Some sort of bat/wolf thing with wings in a gold suit of armor. His boss, Rita Repulsa (played by Banks in the 2017 movie), would occasionally make him giant but mostly he just hung around, being angry, and eternally scowling as his mask didn’t have that much articulation. POWER RANGERS’ Goldar is portrayed thusly:
A weird goopy mess literally devoid of a face and personality. Some fans weren’t pleased and the director had to explain the decision. I wasn’t precious about the original, so my childhood remained intact. But I didn’t like the new version just because it had no real character and was just kind of…there at the end to be big and make the Power Rangers become one big robot because that’s what happened in the show. That decision—like the pacing, some of f/x, and more than a few character points—weakened the film over all and therefore I didn’t really care for POWER RANGERS.
But it turns out a lot of people did care for it. Not critically or financially as it did “kind of okay” (to use technical terms) in those departments. However, you’ll note that RT page shows the audience rating is notably higher than the critics’. People caught POWER RANGERS when it landed on streaming and other home video and seemed to have a real good time with it. FilmJoy had an episode of where the Deep Divers lauded its representation, investing in the characters and relationships as they were found realistic and engaging. I kept seeing posts by multiple people, with whom I often share similar opinions of movies, praising it for being so delightful and under-appreciated.
It was another moment where I realized I was a grave threat to the enjoyment of parades everywhere!
Was I over serious? Did I have some sort of bizarrely high expectation for the movie update of a show whose main locations were a park, the balcony of an evil lair, one room in a space fortress, and a combination gym/youth center/juice bar?
The gloopy Goldar wasn’t main obstacle standing between me and having fun with the super sentai film. But his appearance on screen marked right around the time my mind essentially crystallized a lot of its feelings about POWER RANGERS as a whole. This giant monster laying waste to the indeterminate-sized town of Angel Grove was my own dissatisfaction with the movie. Even though I never actively told anyone they were wrong or pointed out its lesser points or anything, seeing how they found so much to love about it made me, in turn, feel like a misshapen kaiju stomping through positivity. It’s an inevitability that there will be differing opinions, but it’s an odd experience when some goopy winged behemoth possibly heralds that I should accept I’m more than a bit of a buzzkill.
I stand by my opinion, though hope to one day find more things to like about it because that tends to be a better world in which to live. And I know that I’m not the dour hater, glowering at all the fun-having kids with their frolicking and carryings on. But it’s odd to have that moment of feeling like 'not getting it’ being the primary memory/emotion that comes about when I think of 2017’s POWER RANGERS.
That and the Krispy Kreme product placement. What a weird franchise to highlight. Was no one else interested? So many questions.