I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I just went because my parents were out and I had a bit of cabin fever, I wasn't expecting much. This film was pretty self-aware of how cheesy the whole concept is and even dropped a few inside jokes.
When Rita was being an edge lord and stealing teeth for the gold, I literally shouted, "Geez lady, just rob a jewelry store!". Later on, she actually did, dunno why she didn't start there.
I kind of feel like Billy stole the show, and not in a good way. His character was hilarious, but it was kind of like Mikey in the first couple seasons of the current TMNT show, they just overplayed it. I would have liked to have learned a bit more about the others. Oddly, for all of the focus on Billy, there was something that I thought they didn't really explain adequately about him:
why was he poking around in the mines in the first place? His dad was a miner and they used to explore them together, I get it, but he made it sound like his dad was looking for something in particular. Did he somehow know that something was buried beneath the mine, and Billy was carrying on his work?
I liked that they explained why the zords are dinosaurs. It made perfect sense for Zyuranger, but with MMPR, it kind of doesn't fit with the rest of the theming. In the first episode, it was like "Hi kids, I'm Zordon. I'm an alien and I have these giant robot versions of long-extinct creatures from your planet's past". The explanation itself is cool too, it would make sense to model them after the host planet's dominant species. I also like that the yellow and black zords weren't exactly a smilodon and a mastadon, since that wouldn't make sense with their explanation.
They called them coins, huh? I don't have a problem with them changing the look of the "coins", but they aren't exactly coins anymore, are they? They looked more like stained glass cookies (those Christmas cookies with the melted candy in the middle) than coins. I would have either called them something else, not refer to them by any specific term, or at least have someone say "why are you calling them coins?"
"Sorry, Bumblebee!" I just laughed when I saw the Camaro being crushed and was thinking something along those lines, and they went for it. The comparisons between this and the TF films were inevitable, so they just lampshaded it.... no, they lit it up in neon! Brilliant!
The Megazord battle... oh man, the Megazord battle. Not only was the part where they're all scrambling to figure out how it works hilarious and something that always bothered me (it's rarely explained in PR or Sentai how the heroes just know how to pilot this massive thing), but the whole sequence was cool. Not only do we see them learning to work together to make it work, but you got a real sense that this is more or less how it would work if you were to build and pilot a giant robot in real life. What I mean by that, is that it probably wouldn't be this effortless battle we've always seen before, with the machine moving like a human or at least like it was piloted by one person. When you've got that many people operating something, they have to coordinate, which is why you saw Jason giving orders, including telling individual people to be ready for the next move. There was also a certain amount of lag, as you'd expect. It was more like seeing a battleship or submarine in action in an old war movie than a traditional giant monster battle... I love it.
I think we all knew that there'd be some nod to the Green Ranger at the end. What I want to know is, was the explosion his doing, or was it really Billy's fault? Rita is still floating through space, right? She probably didn't give him the coin, I imagine that he just picked it up off the street, but then why is he abusing his powers?
Hoshinger wrote:I was looking forward to the cameos and smaller roles played by former ranger stars, but all I saw were the two fuckers who messed up the series. I won't say who they are but one of them caused money problems for other rangers and by coming back to ASSert dominance.
What's your beef with JDF, man? You can hardly blame him for his character being popular, Saban was just giving the kids what they wanted. I agree that Tommy completely took over the show, and it could be annoying, but that's more the producers' fault than his.