I Will Not Forget That Power Rangers Reboot

Today’s essay is all about cynicism.

By that, I mean a state of mind that is heavy on suspicion, that anticipates negative outcomes even before they have signaled themselves. The cynic has learned not to expect much from life, even when it appears to be offering good fortune. 

Casablanca (1942)

    The magic of cynicism is that it is an easy position to take and defend. Life naturally offers a plentitude of opportunities to be disappointed. It could be said that cynicism is a response to being repeatedly let down in life, and further, that cynicism acts as a coping mechanism. 

Cyncism in healthy doses is not only valid, it's actually essential for having a proper understanding of reality. It helps to decenter oneself from artificial constructs perpetuated in common storytelling, such as ideas that just because one’s heart is true, one will succeed in all endeavors. Cynicism helps us to guard against the realities of life as well as the unrighteous designs of others, both from individuals and larger institutions. But that is not to say it is always a healthy reaction or a proper reflection of how systems work.

Taxi Driver (1976)

    There is a risk to always assuming the worst out of ourselves, our social environment, and the world at large. It is a fallacy to assume that all gestures of goodwill are disingenuous, that cycles of malice can never be interrupted or dismantled, or that no cause is worth investing in. Cynicism can illuminate certain realities, but it becomes a drain once it becomes the default. 

Which brings us to the 2017 feature film adaptation of Power Rangers, directed by Dean Israelite and released through Lionsgate.

I actually remember I was in class the week after the film came out when our professor started with some offhand comment about how we would need to be patient with her that day because she was still recovering from having watched the new "Power Rangers" movie with her grandkids over the weekend. Amidst the rolling laughter throughout the classroom, I made a comment to the girl sitting next to me about how I didn't think the movie was so bad. At this point, she turns to me and asks me, "It wasn't like ... stupid, was it?"

   I feel like it's important to establish that even though I was a few semesters into the major by this point, I still experienced a bit of imposter syndrome with this crowd. Perhaps this is partly because I was the rare critical studies emphasis, and so I missed out on a lot of the bonding experiences held by everyone working together on the capstone projects each semester. I wasn't yet comfortable in this scene, and so I felt the need to impress my fellow students. This is perhaps why when confronted with the question of whether I thought the new movie based on a children's merchandise line had any place in these fine halls of academia, I could only with, "... I thought it was fine."

This was, of course, ignoring how I had been counting down to that last weekend. It ignored how I not only thoroughly enjoyed the film, but also how I was already scouting out which showing I would attend that upcoming Friday. I would in fact seek out a third screening of the film about a month out when it became clear that this film was not going to be franchised, so if I wanted to see any kind of "Power Rangers" on the big screen, I needed to get my fill then while I had the chance.

But of course, what self-respecting film student was going to acknowledge that he wasted his time on "Power Rangers for adults?" 

Turns out a lot of people were skeptical of a "Power Rangers" reboot. And you see this in the blasé tone with which many critics seemed to dismiss the movie on a conceptual level–who on earth thought that “Power Rangers for adults” was a good idea? The movie stumbled to an embarrassing box office and critical reception, and then was promptly buried by both Lionsgate and the internet at large. The failure of Power Rangers confirmed a narrative that many wanted to believe: that the idea itself was just no good.

But when you look at how the 2017 reboot of Power Rangers played in execution, not just concept, it starts to feel less analogous to the redundant offerings of both superhero films or repackaged nostalgia material than what Rotten Tomatoes wanted to think. The movie was a hard sell, yes, but not because the result wasn’t good, but because a lot of what it wanted to pull off was hard to articulate for audiences, studios, and theaters alike.

And this is where I come in: today we’re going to do what I wasn't bold enough to do in 2017 and delineate who on earth “Power Rangers for adults” was even for, and why it not only “wasn’t that stupid,” but how it straddled a million different lines, and how its crash signaled not the end of Hollywood cash-grabbery but something far more lamentable.

“Power Rangers for Adults” pt. 1: The Pitch

    The children's superhero series, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, reached its 30th anniversary this year, and the "Power Rangers" franchise has seen a few dozen reincarnations during that time. The series has canvassed everything from dinosaurs to ninjas to more dinosaurs to racecars imbued with the spirits of living animals to even more dinosaurs, but through it all the franchise has predictably covered a very specific demographic, that being the "boys under 10" market.

    The "Power Rangers" property had also been previously adapted into film, once in 1995 and again in 1997. Both films carried the casts from the television shows and courted the same market. So, the idea of a "Power Rangers" movie already existed in the minds of the public as an extension of the children's show and all that entails. And so, when headlines started dropping about a “hardcore” film reboot for grown-up viewers, the idea was interesting only insofar as it provided the internet with material ready to be shipped to the likes of Honest Trailers and CinemaSins. 

    All films of this make owe some of their woes to Michael Bay and how his “Transformers” movies ratified a certain narrative about established IP marketed toward children being regeared for viable 21st century cinematic property for adult viewers. In response to the unstoppable box office conquest of said films, audiences developed a sort of critical immunity not just to Michael Bay and his army of decepticons, but of any movie that casually resembled his films. News of a "Power Rangers" reboot gave a lot of viewers PTSD, and they put up their defense mechanisms—they would NOT be fooled by another hardcore reboot of a late 80s/early 90s children’s program with giant alien robots. It’s kind of like how the backlash against the Jurassic World movies is more the internet rebelling against the landscape in which said films are greenlit rather than against the merits of the films. 

But in the case of Michael Bay’s Transformers, it’s not simply that the films serve a specific part of the market–the movies have verifiable issues evident in the text of the films themselves: the banality of the plots, their bafflingly unlikable main character, their rampant misogyny, their (shall we say) commitment to overstimulation, the list goes on. Lumping Power Rangers in with the likes of Michael Bay’s Transformers films assumes that said film is guilty of equally severe offenses, which it is not–not by like ten longshots.

That’s not to say that Power Rangers (2017) is totally beyond reproach. The film is, after all, largely an experiment, and there are individual moments where the experiment doesn’t come out even. You can see the film taking shortcuts with certain plot elements. How exactly the kids survive the train wreck and are magically transported to their individual beds in their individual rooms is just kind of explained away as “Ranger magic.”

    It’s also weird to me that it’s canonized that Rita’s minions are called “putties,” as they are in the television show. Like, that’s not even a nickname that Billy or someone gives them. That’s just what Zordon and presumably the entire universe calls them. (“Brace yourselves, soldiers. The putties are coming …”) Moreover, if the Power Rangers have been the protectors of good and right across the entire universe, and the coins have been buried in the earth for billions of years, how has the galaxy not been like overrun by evil space monsters?

That said, it merits mention that all forms of fantasy/sci-fi storytelling involve some degree of silliness and beg our indulgence. Yes, even the Zack Snyder brand of hardcore superhero movie expects us to just believe that advanced alien races would ever be interested in a trash planet like earth, or that their spaceships would look anything like those you see in your nephew’s coloring books. Power Rangers is not unique in its approach, neither in concept nor execution. An idea that we’ll return to throughout this essay is that most of the failures of this film are not necessarily artistic failures, but market ones.

    There are a few tried and true methods that filmmakers can use to sell an IP to a skeptical audience. As one example, there’s usually an audience insert character who acts as a kind of mouthpiece for the viewer. We discussed in our essay on Detective Pikachu and Roger Rabbit that both films use their respective protagonists as stand-ins who vicariously act out the process of learning to reconnect with their childhood. This doesn’t even have to be the protagonist per se. Barbie uses the mother and daughter that Barbie encounters as audience inserts, representing both the barbie stan and the barbie skeptic, allowing both fragments of the audience to feel validated for their ticket.

Power Rangers doesn’t really have a character who fills this role. The closest we get to an insert character is probably Zordon. His arc is about learning to accept that there’s a new team of heroes who need to have their turn as rangers, in accepting that it’s time for a new generation to take up the torch. But I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily representative of the audience that is skeptical of the idea of a grown version of Power Rangers. As is, the most meta we get are a few comments about how weird it is to be talking to a wall, but this takes up very little of the film’s real estate. 

    To clarify, this metatextual commentary is a reliable trick to help train the skeptical audience on how to let its guard down, but it is by no means a storytelling necessity. In fact, it can often read as insecure, lazy, or even manipulative, which is why it should never be the default. Power Rangers opts not to use this device, which to me reads as a deliberate choice to try to carry the film on the strength of the cast and the story itself, and frankly I respect it so much more for that.

Power Rangers also emerged in the days when the Disney live-action remake train was really starting to gain steam (and even premiered alongside the remake of Beauty and the Beast, we’ll unpack that showdown here in a few sections). An adult adaptation of Power Rangers faced many of the same uphill battles that a live action reimagining of a “cartoon” did. There’s the appeal to nostalgia for both, for sure, but there’s still the question of getting adult audiences to overcome their bias against engaging with “children’s media," but the Disney remakes have generally been much more successful, and it's worth investigating why.

    Overall, the Disney remakes have defaulted to manufacture settings, making very few foundational changes from their source material. These remakes generally sell themselves on having additional songs or expanding on the backstories of certain characters, but these do little to fundamentally change the DNA of the material they are adapting. Audiences knew what they were paying for.

    The closest we get to these remakes actually experimenting is probably Maleficent, but even then reported “twist” on the Sleeping Beauty story only subverts expectations insomuch as it can impose world views that are designed to make 2014 audiences comfortable, including the idea that the animated source material was somehow outdated and need of a 21st century makeover (I have thoughts on this), and the end result still winds up being pretty toothless. (Worth remarking upon: The Disney remakes, and to an extent the animated canon, have also incorporated their share of the same meta-textual commentary that you see in movies like Barbie.)

    What makes Power Rangers unique is also what made it a harder sell: it is not a direct translation of the 1993 television show. The basic set-up is the same. The character names are the same. But the tone is different. The character histories are different. The feel is different, and deliberately so. Where the Disney remakes basically advertise themselves as extended cuts of their animated films, Power Rangers sold itself as a whole new animal.

Who exactly was "Power Rangers for Adults" even for? Well, that's hard to articulate, and that's kind of the problem. I will say that as someone who grew up loving the television show in all its many, many iterations, and someone who was also reticent of the Disney remake storm cloud creeping over the horizon, I was very intrigued by what this adaptation set out to do.

   More than just tossing out the "Power Rangers" name into the water and hoping millennials would bite, this reboot actually looked at "Power Rangers" as a property and saw more than robots and explosions. Months before promotion started, Becky G, who plays Trini, described the film by saying, "Literally you’re going to see these kids grow up in front of your eyes." These are the kinds of things that get my attention as a viewer.

    Who was this movie for? Well, I guess it was for people who liked "Power Rangers" not just for the colorful outfits, but for the way it made kids believe that whatever their background, they could be forces for good. And the ambition of this film seemed to be testing whether it could convince these same kids of that same idea from the other side of growing up.

“Power Rangers for Adults” pt. 2: The Execution

    Power Rangers also came out less than two years after the infamous Fantastic 4 flop. At first glance, Power Rangers (2017) and Fantastic 4 (2015) bear a passing resemblance to one another, which I saw multiple people take note of following the trailers for Power Rangers. Both try to detach the superhero origin story from its typical glossiness in favor of something more realistic. You see this in the more grounded acting style and aesthetic. Of course, Fantastic 4 was eviscerated both critically and financially, and so when Power Rangers came up to bat some two years later, the internet was already primed for seconds.

But a few important differences stand out to me that keep Power Rangers several levels above Fantastic 4. The one I want to go into detail in here deals with pacing as well as set-up and pay-off. This is how PR gets away with telling a very human-based superhero story, which is what I think F4 wanted to do.

Both films have a first half that is almost entirely character driven with a midpoint that introduces the superhero elements to the characters (in Power Rangers, this is when the teens meet Zordon and he tells them about the Power Rangers; in Fantastic 4, this is when they travel to Planet Zero and get their powers). But even though F4 runs about fifteen minutes shorter than PR, it feels a lot longer.

    Power Rangers does a better job negotiating its screen time by virtue of foreshadowing. The film sets up the story’s larger conflict by opening with a prologue that shows Zordon’s ranger team having been decimated by Rita as Zordon buries the power coins while preparing a last-ditch effort to stop Rita from reaching the Zeo crystal. This sets up a lot of essential elements of the story. We learn about Zordon and Rita’s rivalry and their history as Power Rangers. We learn that the Zeo crystal is the thing Rita is after and bad things will happen if she gets it. And we also learn about the power coins, not only that they hold the ranger powers, but that whoever finds them will be “worthy” to wield them.

Again, we’re about forty-five minutes into the film before Zordon explains the ranger situation to the kids, but it doesn’t feel jarring because the audience has already received that information. The film also keeps reminding the audience of its ultimate destination by cutting back to Rita as she slowly regains her powers, building anticipation for these two parties to eventually cross paths. We’ve already seen the outline of the epic conflict at the heart of the story, and so there’s a sense of fulfillment as the superhero bits naturally resurface as the narrative progresses. Where Fantastic 4 just feels like it’s making itself up as it goes along, Power Rangers plants the seeds of its superhero story in the soil of a high school character drama, and the audience watches as these story elements sprout. 

The other difference I’ll touch on quickly is that of tone, probably the biggest hurdle they faced in adaptation. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the series on which this adaptation is most directly based, is the kind of television show where our heroes encounter such obstacles as a rubber monster named “Pudgy Pig” who gobbles up their laser swords, and their solution to defeat said pig is to feed it sandwiches spiked with horseradish so it will cough them back up. A reboot of this kind of show is immediately faced with the question of whether the premise itself is completely incompatible with the more mature demographic it is chasing. But this is another area where the movie gets punished more for its pitch than its ability to execute it.

At its root, there’s nothing inherently dissonant about a story in which five teenagers from different backgrounds overcome their feelings of disempowerment when they come across some larger than life conflict, and with it the opportunity to enact real change in their world, while also becoming friends in the process. Likewise, brightly colored superhero suits, giant robots, and even bad guy names like “Rita Repulsa” are not uncommon features within the superhero genre.

And the reboot is overall discerning about what elements from the tv show it carries, what it transforms, and what it leaves behind (putties excepting). In the show, the rangers initiate the transformation sequence by staring straight at the camera and shouting, “It’s morphin’ time!” and that is how they suit up every time. It’s far too central a piece of the mythology for the show to just drop, but the adaptation understands that this would be incredibly out of place in this film. And so, the line gets reframed as a one-time mic drop for the first time the characters don their ranger armor. 

    The reboot of Power Rangers is mature compared to rubber monsters getting “pew-pewed” by laser guns, but there also remains an element of fun that isn’t there in something like Fantastic 4. The teens’ mission to attain superherodom is metered with comedic bits that derive naturally from the thought process of what would happen if five borderline delinquents were charged with saving the world, like Trini blithely explaining to her family that she missed school because she was busy training to be a superhero and her mother immediately bringing out a drug test, or Zack taking his zord out for a joyride. Director Dean Israelite described his experience reading the script, saying.

“I read the script and was really surprised by it and thought there was a really cool, contemporary, mature but still playful, buoyant and fun take on the material, and was updated in a really interesting way. It had this wonderful character that's essential to going on a fantastic adventure. I was instantly drawn to it.”

    One of the reasons why I still find the “children’s show” eminently watchable even as an adult is that neither the actors nor the writers use the campiness of the subject material as an excuse to not bring their all. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers could be said to have “bad writing” in that it’s the kind of show where every other line of dialogue is “you are so going down!”, but I still count it as good storytelling because the conflict and stakes are not only consistently clear, they’re also often character-based (e.g. can Trini overcome her fear of heights in order to save Billy?) And you see that throughline in this adaptation.

Though this film eschews the campiness that defines the original property, this same sincerity is ultimately where the film lands. It doesn’t use some vague passing facsimile of “maturity” as an excuse for nihilism. Cynicism is where many of the characters start, yes, but the film explores the psychology underpinning this behavior. It doesn’t leave deflection and anger as their only weapons.

    Another toyetic element from the tv show that carries into the film is, of course, the climactic megazord fight. In the show, this is the part of the episode where the rangers combine their giant assault vehicles into one super robot who takes out the monster of the week. This ritual is synecdoche for the rangers’ ability to come together as a team to defeat the bad guys.

    That narrative line of the rangers learning to come together despite their differences is the bedrock of the film, and so if anything it is even more powerful in here. The story culminates with these five kids who felt they had no place in the world ready to literally fall into the fire together, only to be reborn in the flames and emerge as this singular towering fortress capable of pushing back against a world that is trying to tear them down. This is very much in line with the show’s optimism, and that is one of the reasons why this works as an adaptation despite being remade for a whole new demographic.

And yet because the film ultimately arrives at a place that is sincere, it demands more vulnerability from the viewer, which only contributes to more critics and viewers wanting to push it away. The film’s central tension is one that demands a lot of emotional vulnerability, the kind that really runs against the grain of the mindset with which the internet wants to discuss a film like Power Rangers. And this is what I mean when I say that most of the issues with this movie are market failures rather than artistic ones.

Some commentators have tried writing off this newer, maturer dressing as an ill-fated marketing ploy--spawned from the same brain that proposed "Let's adapt Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, but like, with human bodies and we'll just spray-paint the cat fur and hope it comes out looking good." But the connections here aren't tenuous at all. You can tell the writer put a lot of thought into finding the links between these real-life teenage frustration and how its audience would overcome that in a larger-than-life mission, a situation where the fate of the world depended on these kids coming together. 

Teenage Superheroes

    Teen superheroes are nothing unique. Arguably the most well-known teen superhero is Spiderman, and we all know how hard it is to make a Spiderman movie. But Power Rangers aims for a slightly different genre than Spiderman: Homecoming. (The two movies came out months apart incidentally.) The "Spiderman movies" aim to be superhero movies first and teen movies second. Power Rangers works from the inside-out, building a teen movie first and incorporating superhero elements where they fit in. 

It's a solid conceit, but from a market standpoint, it ends up working against the movie's favor as it does muddle who exactly the film is for: If we’re targeting the original 1993 audience, well, they’re all pushing thirty by the time this movie’s out. They’re past caring about high school. Meanwhile, what teenager is going to want to watch a movie about the toys their parents played with? Whether or not it worked commercially, the results are actually pretty compelling.

The Way, Way Back (2013)

One common theme within teen-oriented media deals with the angst of that in-between space where you no longer enjoy the protections you had as a child but are still not yet afforded the autonomy of a fully-fledged member of society. That's a really frustrating place to be. With that sense of powerlessness often comes a sense of nihilism. For many in this crowd, the natural response is indifference, or at least the performance of it. When the world is cold and unfeeling to you, sometimes it’s just easier to pay that coldness and unfeelingness forward.

You see this attitude form the bedrock of many of the characters in this film, and the draw of this situation is the way that it rescues these kids from that state of suspended animation as they work for something greater than themselves and as they realize they are not alone in this fight.

    At the start, Kimberly is grappling with feelings of self-loathing as she reflects on how thoughtlessly she participated in the gossiping and cyberbullying of a former friend. Rather than work through that herself, she projects that disdain onto her environment, which is why she rolls her eyes at “how such a small crap town could cause me such misery.”

    But her experience with her friends helps her reveal a more honest approach to her feelings of guilt that help her move past being the girl who would do something like that. Like all the characters in this film, Kimberly is not an aimless good for nothing. She has the capacity for genuine goodness if she gives herself the chance.

    It’s also worth noting that the character who does the most to bring this group together, Billy, is not only the teen that is most punished by the high school social structure (we learn very early on that he has long been a frequent target of bullying), he is also the one character who doesn’t respond to his angst with that armor of nihilism. Billy is defined by his openheartedness and honesty, which positions him as the counteragent to the divisions keeping the rangers apart not only as a unit of superheroes, but as victims of teenage cynicism.

    Billy’s inner purity is what lets him see right from the start that this random assortment of kids who have nothing in common could in fact become something more. Jason saving Billy from the bully at the start of the film is indirectly the inciting incident for this entire group coming together. The pull is that two kids like Billy and Jason would never naturally come together in the high school landscape. Breaking the equation honestly would spur the kind of colossal conflict depicted in the film.

They're even wearing color-coordinated outfits for crying out loud

Many of the cast and crew have also drawn explicit parallels to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club as inspiration for this film. The connections are very easy to parse out. Half of the rangers meet up in detention, we have multiple moments where we are directly homaging the confessional scene, most of the rangers have a direct equivalent character from said film, the list goes on.

The Breakfast Club is also noteworthy for its minimalist approach to storytelling. The entire film takes place in the course of one Saturday all on one high school campus, and mostly in the school library. There are very few external factors influencing the development of the narrative–almost all of the plot comes from the teens and their interactions while they’re stuck together in detention–it is the picture of “character-centered” storytelling. This is where the film’s central theme emerges: these kids from wildly different branches of the high school social system have a lot more in common than the social hierarchy might have wanted them to believe, and by breaking those barriers, they take back some of their own power.

Power Rangers takes the running tension of The Breakfast Club–can these outcasts from different corners of the high school ecosystem come together?–and transports it onto this epic conflict between good and evil. It works here just like it works in The Breakfast Club because it borrows our real-life context for high school cliques: how quick kids are to cast each other into limiting categories as well as how arbitrary these divides are.

    Zack, for example, is typed early on as being reckless to the point of obnoxiousness, jumping onto moving vehicles just because he can. That aspect of his character originally reads as a really annoying character trait, but the film explores the psychology behind this kind of behavior. In real life, kids like Zack tend to act out rashly as a means of asserting their autonomy and influence in a world that feels out of their control. Their ability to stoke irritation from their social circle is in many ways positive reinforcement, a sign that they are capable of leaving some influence on a world that feels out of control for them.

    In Zack’s case, he is grappling with his mother’s deteriorating health and the possibility that she could die any day, and it’s easier for him to act out than to sit with the possibility of losing his mom. There's a lot going on with his character that your average bystander would not care to discover, but this film makes Zack and others like him not just relatable but heroic.

    And the twist is ... it actually works. Isolate the film's many character-building scenes from the larger plot of fighting aliens, and you have a solid teen movie, a facet that is only aided by the fact that this cast of kids has palpable chemistry.

    Honestly, the fact that the emotional elements are much more thought out than the superhero elements kinda works in the film’s favor, even as it made it seem out of place among its contemporaries. As the MCU has struggled to find, or maybe even just market, its place in a post-Infinity Saga landscape, the strengths of this film, many of which were once written off as vices, come into sharp focus.

Multi-verse of Stupid ...

Character, Conflict, and Superheroes

Another reason why Power Rangers was so easy for so many to write off was because it looked like not just another desperate nostalgia reboot, but another brainless superhero flick. (I’ve already covered my thoughts on the advent of “Superhero Fatigue.”) But I find it really interesting when people try to weaponize this point against the Power Rangers reboot because the film so deliberately skirts almost everything about the superhero deluge that is actually irritating. 

Ahead of “Guardians 3,” James Gunn kinda framed the conversation in the best terms. When posed with the question of whether superhero movies as a whole were losing favor with audiences, he responded,

"It doesn't have anything to do with superheroes. It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character. We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they're these incredible characters that we have in our hearts. And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense onscreen, it gets really boring."

"If you don't have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that's very, very real."

    That is not the sin of Power Rangers 2017. Character functions in this film on a subterranean level. Jason, for example, has a problem with his dad. Wrecking his future is obviously going to make any parent unhappy, but the film goes out of its way to show Jason’s dad as a working-class fisherman, and so his frustration at his son for ruining his chances for college and all that this entails has a very specific kind of charge to it. 

    It’s not uncommon–though also not a given–for blue collar workers to feel especially invested in securing a future for their kids, one where their options extend far beyond the handful of working-class jobs that they are saddled with. And Jason throwing that away over a school prank would create a specific kind of tension with his dad.

We touch base with this plotline again at the end of the film. When the city is under attack, Jason sees his dad is in peril and runs to his rescue, his dad not realizing that the masked hero who pulled him from the fire was his screw-up son. Jason and his dad don’t get a proper moment of reconciliation in this film. All Jason gets is the assurance that he is in fact growing to be the man his dad wants him to be, even if his dad never gets to recognize this. The film's larger-than-life conflict becomes the vehicle by which this kid grows internally.

Aliens (1986)

    A lot of any story’s success comes down to how it balances its levels of conflict. Stories generally have two main conflicts running through them. There is an external or physical conflict, which is usually the two competing forces that are trying to seize control over the world. Then there is the internal or emotional conflict, where the stakes are emotion or principle-based. A good film not only has both, but it also knows how to make the two work together.

And even the most explosive of superhero movies can still have this. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is first and foremost about Captain America taking down the Hydra agents that have infiltrated SHIELD, but it’s also about Steve learning to live in a version of America that feels like it has more readily embraced moral ambiguity and compromise. This being a theatrical smash-em-up kind of movie, both the internal and external conflicts are advanced by these elaborate, explosive set-pieces meant to dazzle the audience. Ideally, there is some character development couched in all this action, but high-energy fight sequences are the primary method through which the story is delivered.

 What makes Power Rangers so unique in this landscape is just how much of the story is carried by its internal conflict alone without the distraction of explosions. Aside from the sequence where the kids are running from the police in the rock quarry, there aren't really any action sequences up until the rangers decide to face Rita. The plot progresses not through action scenes but character ones.

    Again, the film spends the whole runtime counting down to the Rangers’ eventual battle with Rita, even before they learn who Rita is, but they don’t actually don their ranger outfits until the final thirty minutes of the film. Almost everything leading up to this is pure character development. It’s not just that Power Rangers “doesn’t lose sight of character,” it puts it front and center.

    Really, the composition of this film feels less comparable to films in its own genre and more to the films critics report they wish they saw from contemporary Hollywood, something like French New-Wave masterwork, The 400 Blows. Like the kids in this film, the protagonist there becomes the face for what happens when a person caught between childhood and adulthood has no tether, and the events of the narrative respond directly to that question. Power Rangers has the added ingredients of aliens and robots, but these only show up intermittently, and when they do, they don't take away from that driving incentive. The fireworks all spring organically from the film's natural heartbeat.

    Other superhero movies like Thor (2011) sometimes have the hero without their superpowers for the middle of the story so he can somehow earn them back, but these films tend to start strong with some heavy superhero punches at the start to tide the audience over. What’s more common in origin stories like Batman Begins (2005) is having the hero or heroes start off as normal dudes and letting them suit up midway through, resulting in a more action-heavy second half. In Power Rangers, the halfway point is the teens being told that they are superheroes, a plotpoint that the film doesn’t cash in on until the third act.

    What this leads up to is a tremendous sense of build-up for that moment when our heroes finally sport their superhero outfits. And within the context of the narrative, it is a satisfying pay-off. That first morph feels earned. This is really what sets this superhero film apart from so many others like it. Even in the best superhero media, the emotional conflict is functionally a means to an end. Power Rangers is basically the antithesis to the modern superhero flick, most of all to the worst kind of superhero flick.

But again, this just brings up the question of how one markets the darn film. How does one sell a superhero movie that deliberately skirts superhero elements? I think the filmmaking team was hoping that audiences would be curious enough to give it a try anyways, and that's just not what happened.

    When a movie like Power Rangers bombs like this ($142 M worldwide on a $100 M budget), there’s always the need for analysts to discuss why. That conversation didn't last very long for Power Rangers given how it seems to fit into a very specific kind of film, one that is produced just as mindlessly as it is forgotten. The verdict everyone landed on was, “Well, that’s just what happens when you sell your soul to the Hollywood machine. When will Hollywood learn that it takes more than a brand name to win over audiences?” But when you open up the hood and take a look at the engine, that narrative falls apart.

While I don’t think it’s useful or truthful to imagine that this movie was beyond reproach, I do think that the problems lie less in the quality of the product and more with the method of delivery.

Where Did the Movie Actually Fail?

    The early marketing for this movie actually started off really strong. Lionsgate heavily promoted the casting as it was announced in the summer of 2015. The roster was remarkable in that none of the leads were established names. The most famous actor among the rangers was probably RJ Cyler (Billy), who frequented the indie-film scene (I think Naomi Scott may have also been in a Disney Channel Movie). And that was kind of the draw, "Get ready to see these kids become superstars once the movie drops." Over a year before the film was even due in theaters, you had the full cast doing long sit-down interviews at comic-con. At some point, Lionsgate did seem to think they had a hit on their hands.

    Then about a year out, Lionsgate dropped this tasteful teaser poster. Fittingly, the image showcased the characters out of their suits, with a cluster of stars in the shape of a lightning bolt as the only suggestion of a superhero conflict. Very minimalist. Very character-centric. Promotion began in earnest when we got the teaser in October 2016, a little less than six months before the film landed.

    But the first proper trailer—the first time we got proper looks at Zordon, Rita, and the ranger suits—came about two months before in mid-January, a little too late to play in front of any major headline films. The space between Christmas and mid-March is notoriously one of the driest spells of the year for moviegoing, and films that come out early spring typically depend on generating a lot of their buzz online.

    We saw some of this. Leading up to opening weekend, Lionsgate launched an online personality quiz that revealed your ranger color (I got blue: genuine, virtuous, and loyal, in case you were wondering), but by this time personality quizzes that you shared on Facebook were on their way out. This was also a problem with the posters which kinda knew that the story was much more about the kids outside their suits but still felt obligated to put the bright colors front and center. All we know is that at some point the marketing sort of lost its zeal. Neither Lionsgate nor theaters seemed to know who the movie was even for. (I distinctly remember my screening playing with a trailer for both Wonder Woman and Despicable Me 3.)

  There are underground rumors of a tragic preview screening around the winter of 2016, shortly before the film’s marketing blitz should have begun. Unless the test audiences were really turned off by the film’s Krispy Kreme product placement specifically, I have a hard time getting into the heads of what exactly participants of said screening took issue with. Our only point of reference is the online discourse that arose after the movie's promotional train kicked off, and so best I can guess is that it was general antipathy towards the idea of a grown-up version of "Power Rangers" that turned them off. Admittedly this would be a little warped given how the audiences do grant exemptions for these kinds of things.

    Power Rangers also came out one whole week after another famous ‘90s property was adapted for the big screen–that being the live-action retelling of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. That reboot found tremendous financial success and relative critical success, at least upon initial release. Both made bids to capitalize on the nostalgia of the millennial market, but “Beauty” was an easier sell than Power Rangers.

It’s hard to recall in this day and age, but “Beauty” came out during a time when critics and audiences hadn’t yet turned on the Disney remake parade. The internet was never 100% on board with this idea, but social media was abuzz with excitement when Emma Watson’s casting as Belle was announced, which the remake leaned into for its promotion. “Beauty” also put a kind of ethical imperative on itself, citing the importance of strongfemalecharacters, even throwing the entire Disney canon under the bus in the process. (Kinda a recurring pattern for these remakes.)

    Power Rangers actually had an opportunity to lean into a similar imperative, perhaps with a little more grace. The film’s cast was diverse not only along lines of race—literally every one of the rangers is a different ethnicity—but it also featured neurodivergent and queer superheroes in the forms of Billy and Trini. We never saw Lionsgate take this approach because by the time marketing for this movie began, they had already kind of figured out that no one was really interested in it. A movie like Beauty and the Beast (2017) can become a viewing priority over a movie like Power Rangers (2017) not because its creative ambition is any purer and certainly not because its end result is any stronger, but because they knew exactly what lane to put this movie in.

 Whatever the initial hesitancy, I don’t think that Power Ranger’s fate was written in stone. The early buzz around Guardians of the Galaxy, what with its talking racoons and trees, was mostly everyone asking “Is Marvel … okay?” But they stuck to their guns, and the end result is arguably the most acclaimed and celebrated film in the MCU. In that same way, there was love to be had for Power Rangers.

    I had the opportunity of seeing the teaser play out in front of a packed live-audience when it screened in front of a showing of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, about four months ahead of the film’s release. Keep in mind, this crowd would have consisted mostly of nostalgia hungry college students who had probably grown up with some presence of "Power Rangers." They were, in other words, the crowd for whom this reboot was made. I’m assuming this crowd had not seen the teaser, even though it had been released a little over a month before, because the moment the title came on the screen, there was a collective gasp throughout a very packed theater.

See, the teaser puts the characters front and center, deliberately keeping the superhero stuff tucked away until the next trailer. We see the teens struggling to keep their heads up in the battlefield of high school, looking very out of place and forlorn, and then it introduces the idea of them all finding some magic thing in the mountains together. From there you get snapshots of them running or striking power poses, and there’s a hanging suggestion of some vague but epic conflict that these high school nobodies are rising to face, with intertitles tossed in enticing audiences with the prospect to “discover the power … to change your world.”

The audience watching this in the theater was clearly not expecting something like “Power Rangers” to be the big reveal at the end of the trailer. That did not stop this same audience from cheering and clapping once the teaser culminated with the rangers starting to morph into their iconic battle suits. This was the only trailer at this screening to receive such a response.

And that's sort of the crux of the Power Rangers phenomenon. If you lead with "it's a grown-up version of a kids show," it creates a sort of record-scratch dissonance that is naturally going to turn viewers off. But when you allow the material to speak for itself, the result is ... exactly what audiences want. Watching the reaction of that auditorium play out in front of me gave me hope for the film's ultimate fate, that people would give this outing a chance. But whatever was lost in the months that followed, it had irreparable consequences.

    Whatever the fate of this movie, Hasbro clearly sees the lucrative potential in the property and remains committed to bringing it to life in some form. Netflix has been sitting on the rights for the show for a while, handing the creative license to Jonathan Entwistle, showrunner of “I Am Not Okay With This.” This project has not seen movement in some time, it remains to be seen what shape Power Rangers will take. [FUTURE EDIT: Wow, all roads really do lead to Disney ...]

The 2017 reboot was meant to kick off a whole saga of Power Rangers stories on the big screen following the same cast, the details for which we may never find out. There could have been a future where I would be presently waiting for the “Endgame” style Power Rangers showdown, but instead I am left waiting for the live-action Moana, premiering a whole nine years after its animated ancestor.

Thank you, Beauty and the Beast …

 

Who Cares?

I’ve been sitting on my feelings for this movie for a long time, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe why I felt this movie was important until a semi-recent development in both the superhero world and the film world at large.

    The Warner Bros movie, Batgirl, was originally intended to be released exclusively to Max (then HBO Max) sometime this year. The movie was meant to be a part of the new DCEU franchise and would have featured the first Afro-Latina actress to lead a superhero film through Leslie Grace. So when it was announced last fall that Batgirl would not be released in any format, it sent shockwaves through the industry.

    There was a lot of outcry, most of all from the talent behind the film. And said outcry feels pretty sincere. It’s understandable that they’d be upset over the fact that all of their hard work has been nullified overnight for a tax write-off. One of the directors, Adil El Arbi, recently expressed his dismay that, “We didn’t get the chance to show ‘Batgirl’ to the world and let the audience judge for themselves. Because the audience really is our ultimate boss and should be the deciders of if something is good or bad, or if something should be seen or not.”

I don’t really know how good or bad Batgirl really was. Thanks to Warner Bros., maybe none of us will ever know. Maybe it really was another Fantastic Four, but just as likely, it was another 2017’s Power Rangers: an unconventional approach to the superhero movie that certain audiences didn’t know what to do with, but something that might have yielded surprising rewards. In the wake of something like Power Rangers being left out to dry, it’s not hard to imagine Zaslov and the others at Warner Bros. straining to believe that audiences would respond to something whose appeal and victories were not easily articulated. 

The One and Only Ivan (2020), formerly a resident of Disney+

    Batgirl was the most expensive movie ever to be pulled from release, but it only opened the floodgates for studios and especially streaming sites to just dump large swaths of content in order to preserve that bottom line. Even in the process of writing this, several streaming services made heavy cuts to their catalog, including films and shows that have only ever existed on their platform and cannot be viewed anywhere else. We're seeing a lot of films being punished for not pulling in record numbers when many of these same films were not properly promoted by their parent companies.

    And seeing some of the patterns between kinds of movies that get cut, as well as the online reactions, I can’t help but wonder, if Power Rangers had been produced today in this ecosystem, would it have ever been released? And what would the repercussions of that have been? Would Dacre Montgomery have gone on to steal the show across two seasons of Stranger Things? Would Naomi Scott have had the opportunity to bring Jasmine to life in Aladdin (one of like three good Disney remakes) with such command and grace?

Ready Player One (2018)

    And something else I feel like we need to put out there is that Power Rangers flopping at the box office, especially against the backdrop of Beauty and the Beast doing laps, did absolutely nothing to inhibit the forward march of Hollywood reboots that audiences report to be tiring of. Those never went away. They just became safer. They fell back on proven box office draws: gratuitous cameos, shameless meta-commentary, surface-level activism, etc. Audiences have signaled many times over that they will take something reliably bad over the possibility of novelty.

And so cynicism pervades every aspect of this story. The cynicism that the teen heroes must overcome to self-actualize. The cynicism with which audiences and critics chose to shut down what they were hoping was another easily dismissed cash grab. The cynicism by which films like Power Rangers and Batgirl are dropped by studios who refuse to believe in their own product. I very much fault Lionsgate for not sustaining their marketing efforts for Power Rangers, but I also think there are lessons for the little people and how we receive media.

     The internet tends to cope with the state of Hollywood by defaulting to cynicism. The person who calls out something for being a shameless cash grab is generally seen as ahead of the curve, even as that mindset becomes more and more co-opted by the YouTube algorithm. Cynicism is a natural reaction against a lot of the nonsense that gets peddled out by Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean it’s a more honest way of looking at things. I think we’d be better off if we were to deprogram that just a little bit and maybe introduce more curiosity into the mix. You might discover there’s a lot of good media that doesn’t pass the Cinemasins treatment.

  Yes, I’m disappointed we only got to see this cast of Rangers fighting in their suits for two whole minutes. I’m haunted that we never got to see future Power Rangers films incorporate elements from the television show like Lord Zed or the Thunder Zords or Tommy, but it really is the character centric pieces that I mourn: the electric dynamic between the teens or Jason trying to prove to his dad that he's not a screw-up. Even Zordon’s role in this film is more of an origin story, of learning to accept that this new generation must lead the way. I had really wanted to see future installments where he gets to play the role of counselor, as he does in the television series.

    Those particular doors are closed for us, but this is a conversation we are all still a part of. We should always aspire to be proactive in our consumption of media and be open to unconventional storytelling, and we should certainly never resign our participation in this ecosystem to that of a datapoint waiting to be mined by executives.

    "Creativity" and "risk" are terms often tossed into the discourse as lost features of the film conversation, but for filmmakers to make such leaps, audiences have to be willing to roll the dice as well. Yes, that will mean occasionally landing on snake eyes, but that also means occasionally being surprised and finding something you didn't know you wanted.

    Yes, even something like "Power Rangers for adults."

            --The Professor