DanTheMan2150AD
Joined Jan 2016
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DanTheMan2150AD's rating
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DanTheMan2150AD's rating
A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure, there's a reason Turbo is often considered the lowest point of the original Power Rangers run, and this film is no doubt the catalyst for that lasting impact, taking the series into a dead end that it had to claw out of for a long time. Thank god for In Space. Completely sidelining the Zeo powers for seemingly no real reason other than Saban wanting to chase after the next Sentai he could plunder for footage, and writing out poor Rocky only to replace him with the character vacuum that is Justin, this Power Rangers film is less a transitional one and more of an extended prologue for the then-upcoming TV show. One that will have you wondering how on earth a franchise founded upon sound and fury could be so monotonous, containing all the action to the climax was certainly a choice. Granted, there's like one or two things about this train wreck I can actually point to that are any good, although it's mainly just the special effects, specifically the Megazord sequence at the end, and the fact that they got Ron Wasserman on the soundtrack, while the only real laugh the film elicited from me was Rita and Lord Zedd's cameo. Other than those, this is a real travesty; not even the cast can save the script this time around, despite Hilary Shephard Turner clearly having a lot of fun with her role as Divatox and her massive cleavage. Everyone is just bordering on insufferable. Nowhere near as good or endearing as their last cinematic outing, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie is a no-no Power Rangers, terribly paced, little to no fun, and borderline agonising to a point. Pretty sure this is why we didn't get any more Power Rangers films for nearly 20 years, cheers Saban.
Obnoxiously loud, horrendously cheesy and aggressively '90s, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie drips with plenty of goo and slime, carrying with it an attitude of go-go relentlessness and silly escapism. It's completely bonkers, lively, colourful, cheerfully violent and utterly stupid. One that can't decide whether it wants to be a winningly ramshackle production, like the TV series, or a more polished one; the result is a wildly enjoyable and awkward mishmash of slick special effects, an exhaustive amount of action, unwieldy pun-filled dialogue, a hard-rock soundtrack, and incongruous pilferings. If there was ever a script, it seems to have been left behind while everyone went on location, though, for once, it seems that Saban threw the production something equivalent to that of a proper budget, given this is one of the few Power Rangers productions that didn't rely on stock footage for its action. Bryan Spicer's direction is genuinely quite good, maintaining a likeable comic-book aesthetic and sense of wonder, while Graeme Revell delivers a wonderfully whimsical musical score. It's really the cast who deserve the most praise for delivering all this hilariously cheesy dialogue with a straight face; how Paul Freeman didn't break down in hysterics is to be commended. Bolting along at a breakneck pace, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie might do little more than resemble multiple episodes of the show strung together, but any film that ends on Van Halen's Dreams is alright in my book.
I've always been a great admirer of the original TRON, representing a huge leap forward in the development of computer animation, but I've always struggled to fully come to grips with it as a film. The visuals were groundbreaking for the time, and the famous light-cycle sequence is undeniably cool, but the years haven't been kind to it. Although it is intermittently fascinating to look at, with all its jazzy computer-generated imagery and use of bright neon colours, it has aged horrendously to the point where it almost loops back around on itself. It's a pretty poor excuse for a film, where the pixels are more interesting than the characters, and the script is a 404 error. It's clear that writer/director Steven Lisberger has a near-fetishistic love for computers, and it bleeds through the screen as it throws jumbled gobs of jargon at the viewer in the hopes that they'll just accept the overload of information. It's very much a film that has been saddled with a story which should have been wonderful, fantastical, and completely gripping, but which never quite manages to climb out of ho-hum. That being said, his direction is particularly robust, making great use of the wildly imaginative and highly stylised setting, but it just doesn't quite gel together satisfyingly enough with its distant tone. It comes across as more of a miscellaneous form of abstract spectacle, and, when combined with Wendy Carlos' deeply abrasive synth-mongous score, it can come across as a deeply grating experience. However, all that being said, I still have to applaud the cast, who are by far and away the best bit about this film, although it's really David Warner who steals the show in all three of his roles; he very much should have returned for Legacy, but I digress. Still, for all of TRON's faults, I can't bring myself to hate how determined it is; it's one I find deeply fascinating by what was achieved with such limited means, embracing a spirit of adventure with momentum and wonder. I can't wait for Ares.