These aren’t the Power Rangers you’re looking for.
After a school prank lands Jason, the star football player, in detention, he meets Billy, a genius tinkerer, who changes his life. When Billy requests help of Jason with something at the gold mine, they run into Kimberly, Trini, and Zack, fellow students at the local high school, and come across something strange. They find colored coins that seem to give them superpowers.
In search of answers, they revisit the mine and stumble upon an ancient ship. Inside, they are surprised to find beings living inside. Alpha 5 is a robot servant, while Zordon is the consciousness of an alien that is integrated to the ship. After finding out about the return of the villainous Rita Repulsa, Zordon tasks the teens with training to become the next line of galactic defenders, The Power Rangers.
***Warning: Spoilers***
One of the flaws of this movie is that I feel that it was written as a part of a multi-movie series. I say this because the pacing feels unbalanced in order to set up the new lore and world. Assuming that we know nothing of these characters, we have to learn the backstories on so many individuals. We need to learn about five individual rangers, Alpha 5, Zordon, and Rita. Even at this point, they only concentrate on three of the five rangers, Red, Blue, and Pink.
With that being said, the story was rushed, and this is due to how much they needed to cram into two hours. At some points, the story progressed with little to no explanation of how or why something happened. How does an ancient being know how to navigate a modern city? How do they know how to pilot the Zords? How do we know that the plot device is at a Krispy Kreme?
Like a lot of reboots, this has a darker tone. This allows them to tell grittier backstories of what teens today deal with. These range from sexting, mental disabilities, and sexual orientation for example. Rita is a big change from the original and is now a scary witch hell-bent on destroying planets. It does return to classic Power Rangers in the last act, but returns to the serious tone to finish their fight.
This series has a lot of potential. I would like to have seen more of the fun that the series in known for, but because of the task of universe building, it bogs down the pacing for me. Let’s see how successful the series ends up being.