Review of Power Rangers (2017) by Vykron — 31 Mar 2017

For once in a twenty-year-long (and expensive) barrage of costumed-hero trilogies, alliances and big versus-showdowns, we finally have a breather in something that is really quite serious, quite grown-up, and nowhere near childish.

Power Rangers points the camera at people, and admittedly, holds it there for a somewhat protracted period of time, but much good comes from it. Before this film, you will never imagine being privileged with the opportunity to actually feel for a Power Ranger character on a deep, existential level. These people begin to matter to you very quickly, and at no time during the movie are you made to feel that their stories are a receding tide written to be gotten over with – obligatory backstories conveniently swept away so that action can commence. Power Rangers has come into a league of its own, and the broad majority of entrants in the superhero genre will struggle to even remotely compare.

Comparisons will be made by some with the Warner Bros. picture that emerged several years ago – Pacific Rim – but there are important differences between the two movies. Pacific Rim is a robot movie oriented on giant monsters, with personal stories enmeshed in the script to serve as girding for a loud action movie. What Power Rangers has pulled off – and this is very surprising to say of a Power Rangers movie – is a coming-of-age introspective, almost arthouse-y piece of youth literature cataloging the stories of young people who face dark prospects in their own lives, but happen to come across robots and giant monsters. The literary direction of the Power Rangers movie is extraordinary, given how the formulaic comfort of hi-tech action over character development seems to be the go-to for much of the superhero fare churned out in recent years.

Power Rangers fills an important gap – the wish for characters that, outside their powers, resonate in empathic symphony with our own challenges, aspirations and fears, and when in their powers, retain a discernible humanity. The individual is not subsumed by the superhero power; the Ranger identity does not take over and does not render the person the mere flesh that lives underneath the garb. Even better, the Ranger power is not even an extension of the individual – as though the young adult him/herself wasn't enough and had to be given upgrades. It feels strange that we now look to a Power Rangers movie to remind ourselves that we do not have to become someone/something else in order to come into our own. To become powerful, we do not need to shed ourselves. Rather, we need to know ourselves, be ourselves and use that to our advantage. And when you rise powerful and confident, your self isn't eradicated. You are not lost. Those Ranger powers come from within these young people, and the gemstones they found were no more than conduits.

Power Rangers refrains from aggrandizing the role the machines have, or the fact that there is an otherworldly spacecraft, or the place the suits have in making the young men and women ready for combat. Like we said, the camera's eye stays on these troubled, unique individuals, and they are allowed to define the story and carry it all the way to the finish line. Indeed, the technological implements that occur in the film are treated so matter-of-factly, that they melt into the background of the narrative and become united into the fabric of the story itself: you are being given a chance to break out of debilitating despair – are you going to make good of it?

Power Rangers is a movie that lets you keep all of the film and have nothing to be ashamed of. Pick a T-shirt or an artefact attributable to any other superhero/giant robot movie, and you may find yourself wincing at the elements of hilarity that stick around and haunt that T-shirt, weapon or figurine. Power Rangers in its 2017 movie composure is a success for having ripped its way out of this paradigm to transcend it; and now, anything related to this movie comes with a tinge of forlornness borne of real struggles we can identify with. That such maturity arrives in our time on the saddle of a Power Rangers movie is astonishing in itself without thought for what other franchises should have done. And when you do think about the deluge of action vomit that has ruined the dignity of film in the last decade or two, you will find these Power Rangers to be a hearty godsend.