Power Rangers 4K 2017

High school outcasts stumble upon an old alien ship, where they acquire superpowers and are dubbed the Power Rangers. Learning that an old enemy of the previous generation has returned to exact vegenance, the group must harness their powers and use them to work together and save the world.

4k movies reviews
The Mighty Rangers' was on our TV screens at the end of the '90s, occupying morning time somewhere on par with the cartoon series. Many people watched them, and there was hardly anyone in that generation who didn't get to see this one-sentence TV show. The Rangers wasn't clever, the show's budget was spent, I think, only on actors' fees and a new monster costume in each episode, because the rest of the set wasn't changed at all, and the megazords crushed the same model city over and over again. In fact, being a little older than the main audience of the series, I thought it was extremely stupid - the idea of warriors in colorful jumpsuits fighting the same kind of evil didn't seem like something worthy of attention. However, that didn't stop me from enjoying it for quite a long time. The main reason lay, I think, in the fairly good characters and their relationships. Again, it wasn't a drama and the actors weren't good - they were just pretty charming darlings who interacted with each other a little too amicably, occasionally dressing up in these costumes to fight cartoonish evil.

Was Israelite a good movie? Well, to be honest, it wasn't. To begin with, the plot of the picture will probably be the silliest thing you've seen in a while (unless, of course, you've attended screenings of domestic 'Attraction' or 'The Defenders'), because it's about a group of extremely respectable teenagers who, for deliberately creepy reasons, are shoved into a reformatory school in a small port town. While helping an autistic friend to make explosions in a guarded gold mine (why? because he feels like it! His father used to do it!) the heroes meet two more teenagers who pass by completely by accident and together with them they accidentally find magic lockets, after which, running in different directions from the mine security, they accidentally get into one car which by stupid chance gets hit by a train. Totally by chance our heroes survive, gain power, totally accidentally find a spaceship that has been lying underground for several billion years, where the disproportionate robot Alpha-5 and the talking 3D wall Zordon wait for them, announcing to their new friends that they are here for a reason. So now it's up to them to save the world from the completely accidentally resurrected in the same days villain Rita Repulsa, and despite the fact that both Rita and Zordon have been in 'hibernation' since prehistory, the young rangers have as much as eleven days to prepare, during which Rita will wrest enough gold teeth from the port tramps to build a giant monster Golder, which will destroy the world (good people will tell you that there is a gold mine in the side).

But there's another side to the coin. The new 'Mighty Rangers' is pretty much the best adaptation one could expect. My biggest fear, for example, was not that it would be silly or childish, but rather that it would be like Joseph Kahn's 2015 short film 'Power/Rangers,' in which the author portrayed the history of the Rangers in a very peculiar way. He made them... serious. He tried to point, through the lens of the canonical Rangers, to the scarier consequences of war with the monsters, the cruelty, betrayal and loss in a dark and almost post-apocalyptic world. In part, it is interesting, but this interpretation violated the whole point - it did not correlate in any way with what the 'Mighty Rangers' were, as if forgetting that it is an endless battle of little men in colorful suits with cartoonish evil. Israelite, on the other hand, was able to cast five 'friends' in the role of the actors for this adaptation, creating much the same impression as it did in the series - they are not required to be specific actors, or clever dialogues - just a little silliness, a little pathos, and most importantly - to be cute. Having made more stylish costumes of characters, having combined the images of Rita and Divatox, heavily replacing the interiors of the headquarters, still not shy away from the frank non-seriousness of his brainchild. Yes, some of the extras are murdered quite concretely here, but it passes without relishing the violence, and the battle scene with Golder in the city, not at all the hell that Snyder's Superman and Zod did, but still looks somewhere in between the violence and those faceless layouts from the show.

For all its charm, though, the film has major flaws. The intro is frankly dragged out, there are too few fight scenes, and the characters' relationships could have been better revealed. For the fanservice the authors should have thought that Megazord should be gathered in front of the audience, not in the dungeons somewhere behind the scenes, and the song 'I've got the power' does not suit the climax of the final battle. There's only one song that fits in there, you all know it, because it's one of those things that you just can't get out of your head. No, of course it's here too, but we're at a ranger movie, so it has to be played more often.

As a result we have a stupid plot, over-the-top problems with characters who only become friends for reasons of common superpowers, absolutely strange forces of good, it is unclear by what criteria they even work, an absolutely formulaic, sometimes underplaying, sometimes overplaying villainess, and stupid robot dinosaurs. Well, that is, everything you'd expect from the most proper adaptation of 'The Mighty Rangers'. There are a lot of movies that want to be better than the source material, more serious than it, sometimes just to sell themselves for a lot more, and among them 'The Mighty Rangers' is most reminiscent of 'Rocky and Bullwinkle'. The thing is, everyone called this adaptation extremely silly, irrelevant, with a silly plot and humor. But nevertheless, it was exactly the kind of adaptation that conveyed the whole point of 'Rocky and Bullwinkle', which didn't need to be clever and relevant. Rangers' is made in a similar way - the film is unlikely to collect a big box office, it is unlikely to be loved by critics and audiences, moreover, it will not even be loved by all those who liked the classic Rangers on TV, because there is so much that could have been done better. Its true charm, though, is that being made for $100 million, it doesn't even try to look more winning than its original or be a cool blockbuster. It's just such a glorious element of nostalgia for a time when you could lie on the couch and watch some light and kindly silliness for hours, with gusto.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (49.6 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
English: Dolby Atmos
English: Dolby TrueHD 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English SDH, Spanish.