Taglines: It’s morphin time!
New Power Rangers movie begins on Earth all the way back in the Cretaceous period with Zordon and his group of Power Rangers fighting Rita Repulsa. In order to defeat her, Zordon somehow detonates a black hole, and that seems to be the end of the prologue.
Then 65 million years later, we begin to meet our team of new heroes. There’s 16-year old Jason working in the garage of a car dealership in Angel Grove, California, and he just so happens to be getting text messages from his friend Billy, described as being brilliant in his own way. At the car dealership, Kimberly eventually shows up, described as a perfectionist on every level, academically and physically. Her father owns the dealership, and isn’t to happy when he finds Kimberly and Jason making out in the garage.
Meanwhile, Zack is working at a Dave and Busters. He’s seen scoring an impressive number of points on an arcade basketball game. But when an assistant basketball coach offers him a position on the school basketball team, Zack isn’t interested because there isn’t an “I” in team. Clearly he misunderstood that old saying, and he’s got some pretty obvious lessons to learn.
And finally there’s Trini, described as a bit of a loner, and we find her in the desert doing yoga. Becoming part of a team will clearly be something she has to get comfortable with too.
The story is set in motion because Billy has been texting Jason about the fossil of a tyrannosaurus rex he found by way of Google Earth, and the two friends head out to a decommissioned military base to check it out. As they try to unearth part of the skeleton, the find a strange coin. In fact they find five of them.
They’re power coins from the original Power Rangers. But after arguing about taking the coins with them, Billy throws them back on the ground. Here’s where things start to get a little silly (as if they weren’t already). An unprecedented meteor shower collides with the moon, causing insane tidal activity on earth. And when a young mother needs to be rescued from the massive waves that have begun forming in the ocean, that’s when Jason, Billy, Zack, Kimberly and Trini end up meeting and working together to save this woman.
Meanwile, a teleportation room suddenly sees the return of Zordon as a being of light, an ethereal version of himself in a glass tube (his whole body, not just his face like in the original series). Zordon is reunited with Alpha 5, where we learn that the black hole tore the fabric of time around the solar system, bringing them into the present.
But Zordon and Alpha 5 aren’t the only survivors, as Rita Repulsa has landed in Russia with a plan to steal gold from around Earth in order to rebuild her trusty thug Goldar. For some reason there’s a ticking clock of 71 hours left to stop Rita. Director Dean Israelite recently described the script as mature but playful, but this just sounds goofy as hell.
Power Rangers (2017)
Directed by: Dean Israelite
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Dacre Montgomery, Elizabeth Banks, Bill Hader, Fiona Vroom, Naomi Scott, Sarah Grey, Becky G., David Denman, Emily Maddison, Caroline Cave, Lisa Berry
Screenplay by: John Gatins
Production Design by: Andrew Menzies
Cinematography by: Matthew J. Lloyd
Film Editing by: Martin Bernfeld, Dody Dorn
Costume Design by: Kelli Jones
Set Decoration by: Hamish Purdy
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, language, and for some crude humor.
Studio; Lionsgate Films
Release Date: March 24, 2017
