Monday 3 April 2017

We watched all 13 seasons of Grey's Anatomy and then I realised we'd only watched 20 minutes of one episode

Remember when Godzilla didn't show up until an hour into his own movie and even the people who liked that gimmick said they'd rather not see it again?  Well here we are: 90 minutes into Power Rangers before the Power Rangers show up.
Hand on heart, the mid-90s Power Rangers movie was much, much better, and I'm not just saying that because it was about a half hour shorter, I'm saying that because it knew the level of bullshit it was operating on and stuck to it.  Power Rangers 2017 looks as good as one would expect a 200 million dollar superhero film to look, but at heart it's just an expensive episode of a CW show, complete with so many recycled tropes that neither you nor it will know when it's supposed to be serious - I mean, they won't just start playing the Power Rangers theme out of nowhere despite 90 minutes of relentless angsty teen whining, will they?  HAHA THAT WOULD BE STUPID.
Also, I admit I haven't paid much attention to Power Rangers since the franchise regressed - under incoming production company Saban - to a show for ADHD-afflicted infants after series high point RPM, but the kung fu was much better in the tv show than it is here in a theatrical movie.  The CGI isn't much cop, either, as it's just as occasionally-good/occasionally-ropey as it is on the tv shows, it's just that the models are more cluttered in terms of design and match the surrounding video quality slightly better, but the end result is pretty much PS3-quality cutscenes, with the climactic fight reminding me in places of battles from latter Ultraman series.  What it reminded me of most was Justirisers, the second outing in Toho's Genseishin  (Ultra Star God) series of tween superhero shows aimed at taking a chunk out of Super Sentai's monopoly on the Saturday morning Tokusatsu market, featuring as it does a more troubled and less perfect line-up of young heroes and some spectacularly messy mecha designs.
There's a joke about the Yellow Ranger being mistaken for a he, which sort of falls flat seeing as the female Rangers have comically pronounced boobs on their armor that look like something Bettie Page would have been knocking about in, but the best bit is probably when the dad of one of the characters pins a newspaper story about the final fight to his fridge and it's clearly an internal page with one small photo and about three paragraphs headed by "Masked Heroes Save Angel Grove", which just begs the question "what kind of hellish shithole is Angel Grove that what can only be described as A Sinkhole Straight To Hell opening in the high street and buildings being flattened in a fistfight between a giant alien robot made of dinosaurs and a demon made of molten gold does not make the front page?"  My personal take is that the front page is taken up by speculation as to the roles of local Muslims and Latinos during this giant monster/Fiery Sinkhole Into Hell crisis because that's Trump's America now, but the film does not elaborate either way - which is just typical of gutless Hollywood liberals, if you ask me.

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