Saban's Power Rangers - Wait a minute, why is this film good?
Go, Go, Power Rangers! That's the motto of the colourfully diverse but uniformly coordinated superhero squad in spandex suits and motorbike helmets. For over 20 years, they have been fighting giant monsters in giant robots and saving the world. New in the series: a reboot on the big screen that nobody asked for, but which surprises across the board.
The small town of Angel Grove, somewhere in the USA, is boring as hell. The teenagers at the local school are chronically bored, dreaming of bigger things and the adults in the small coastal town, which also has a gold mine, are having a hard time with their offspring. When Jason Scott (Dacre Montgomery) tries to play a prank on the school and smuggles a cow called Roastbeef into the football team's dressing room, he is arrested and his career as a quarterback is over. Instead, he has to serve detention. There he meets Kimberly (Naomi Scott), Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler), Zack (Ludi Lin) and Trini (Becky G). Even though the five of them don't really get along at school, the teenagers have much more in common.
Ah, what am I writing here that you could get from the film distributor or the studio? Nonsense. I'm a Power Rangers fan. I always have been. As a little boy in 1994, the first incarnations of Jason and co. were my heroes. Because they had everything that was cool in the 1990s. And more. Not only did they wear cool clothes, but they could also do karate, or what I thought was karate back then. Well, and then there's the fact that they fight a prehistoric witch and gigantic monsters by hopping into an equally gigantic robot and then it's off they go. Lasers, swords and dinosaurs! What's not cool about that.
But the series has aged brutally badly and, looking back, I question my childish state of mind. And then I watch the scenes with the giant robots borrowed from the Japanese series "恐竜戦隊ジュウレンジャ" ("Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger", translated as "Zyuranger Dinosaur Squadron"). These so-called Zords are still super cool.
Okay, I watched all the other seasons and only stopped watching after Power Rangers RPM in 2009 because I realised how rubbish the first season was back then. Well, objectively speaking, RPM, based on "炎神戦隊ゴーオンジャー" ("Enjin Sentai Gōonjā" or "Engine Sentai Go-Onger") doesn't look that great either. But the story was good. Really.
Now "Saban's Power Rangers". Nostalgia is over. Everything new and better. It looks like this
Something between John Hughes and the apocalypse
When the credits flickered across the screen at the end, I sat in the cinema and questioned reality. The film wasn't supposed to be good. The costumes take some getting used to and somehow nobody asked for a reboot. Nevertheless: I'm sitting there and I'm thrilled.
Because Power Rangers isn't just good, it's really good.
The jokes are funny, the effects are great and the story isn't particularly innovative, but it doesn't have to be. Surprisingly, the new Power Rangers doesn't live from effects or jokes, but from the characters. Where an episode of Power Rangers used to last just over 20 minutes, the authors of this film have almost exactly two hours to breathe life into Trini and co. This succeeds and so the CGI battle at the end becomes an event in which the audience doesn't just hope that the Megazord - the name of the gigantic fighting machine made up of several small fighting machines - will destroy the giant golden monster so that it can't get its hands on the life-sustaining or life-destroying Zeo crystal.
Because we root for the Rangers when they are cornered by Goldar, when Kimberly's Pteranodon Zord is crushed on the ground and when the Megazord rises, it warms our hearts. Because the Power Rangers are our heroes, precisely because the characters are likeable when they're not fighting. Trini discovers her sexuality, Billy is slightly autistic and Jason is a superstar who always wears a mask. This comes to the fore in all the scenes in which the Rangers are not training or competing against Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks). The Rangers are people who are just discovering life. They laugh, get up to mischief, swear and sometimes just don't know what to do. The authors have taken a leaf out of the book of John Hughes, author and director of films such as "The Breakfast Club" and 1980s teen film legend. Because his films live from the characters and their often seemingly trivial problems, if the fate of the world were also relevant.
Not all that glitters is gold
As good as the characters are, other aspects of the film suffer somewhat from the franchise's newfound depth of character. There are two aspects in particular that really bothered me
- When the Rangers morph for the first time, i.e. put on their uniforms, why doesn't the Power Rangers melody play?
- The Megazord looks a bit pale. Whatever happened to the breastplate with the dino teeth?
In contrast, the revamp of the evil space witch Rita Repulsa is a complete success. Elizabeth Banks plays the villainess with so much fun that she simply steals every scene she's in. She has such a presence and such a mad sense of humour and wicked charm that she not only makes a convincing villain, but also makes the threat seem real.
So: Go, go, Power Rangers! Go see the film. I know there's really no reason why the film should be good, but Saban's Power Rangers is good. Very good, in fact. <p
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.