So... got dragged to this one, and it was an interesting little... experience. Believe it or not, it was okay. Not great. Nothing special, but not as skin-peelingly bad as I was expecting. Of course, the source material is nothing to write home about. It's a cheaply made TV show starring "actors" who were hired out of the gym, not the theater, and used Japanese stock footage for anything technical it needed.
It does and doesn't follow the story of the first season, from 1993. It follows it in the sense that they have the same outline, but all the working bits are changed. The rangers themselves are now not the sickingly goody-goody paragons of swellness you might remember from the original series. Instead, they're basically The Breakfast Club now. Four of the five heroes have actual legitimate issues for being troubled teens. The fifth, Jason, is the epitome of a privileged white kid in a first world nation who THINKS he has problems, but really doesn't. Well, he does, technically, but all his problems are ones he himself made for himself. The others are victims of circumstance or of a single thoughtless action that had very severe consequences.
My main issue with the film, apart from Jason reminding me a bit too much of jerks I went to school with, was that they don't actually suit up and kick ass until the last half-hour. Yes. Really. This film learned nothing from Fox's F4nastic. That said, that last half-hour was pretty awesome, all things considered.
Rita Repulsa was actually pretty terrifying as the main antagonist. Brian Cranston was, of course, excellent, even with the filmmakers deciding that Zordon needed to be kind of a jerk working against him. Alpha-5 is considerably less annoying than he was in the original series, but sadly: no Bulk and Skull.
In all, it was an average teen drama/sci-fi/adventure/superhero movie. Nothing great, but certainly not the painful trial I was expecting. I'm actually kinda rooting for the film to get a sequel if they learn anything from making this one.
So how about you?
