I said in on Twitter and I'll say it here: to be perfectly frank, it's bad.
First off, and I know this may be a bizarre complaint - but why Walk the Line? Excluding the fact that it's a cover (and not a bad one, in all honesty), why this for Power Rangers? Is its slow, somber tone supposed to illustrate to us that the five teenagers with attitude who get recruited by Zordon...oh, wait, they don't get recruited by Zordon in this version?
...what do you mean "they find their morphers in a quarry"?!
Yes, in a bizarre twist it seems that the rangers (at least Jason, Kimberly, and Billy if the trailer is to be believed) discover their morphers in a quarry...and they aren't even morphers. Gone is the uniqueness of the original belt buckler morphers carried by the team in the original series. Now, they have...I guess a flattened rock that glows their respective Ranger color? They look like something that someone who has no idea what they're doing would put on Etsy. Lame!
From the look of it, as well, the team's uniting actually comes not in the Angel Grove Juice Bar, but in Saturday detention. I wouldn't mind it so much, except it completely and utterly rips off The Breakfast Club in a way that shows no originality whatsoever. While that movie was a deconstruction of the various tropes of the teenager and how breaking free of what your peers or what society thought of you was the most important step in self-realization...Power Rangers took those stereotypes and played them straight in the original show. If the definition of "dark, realistic reboot" is "make everyone kind of an asshole regardless of their stereotype" then I guess you could swing all of them being in detention, but I personally don't find it believable in the least.
The character bits they try to set up are also a bit odd, what with Jason apparently talking about "a big screw up", Kimberly dealing with some of her fellow cheerleading peers, and Billy dealing with a bully of his. Trini also gets a bit where someone scrawls on her locker...but Zack gets...nothing. I don't even think he has a speaking line in the trailer. Not that he was a big part of the team or got a large amount of character development (then again neither did Trini or Jason before they got Peace Conference'd...) but he's still one fifth of the team and honestly I would have hoped he'd get a bit more an appearance.
In what is sure to be a massive bit of controversy within the fanbase, the Rangers also have powers outside of their morphed form - Jason exhibited an enhanced physique in a scene taken right out of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man as well as enhanced strength, and Billy showing off enhanced durability when a bully headbutts him...and is promptly knocked out cold for his trouble. The Rangers never had powers outside of their morphed state in the original series (that came with later seasons), and, to paraphrase Linkara of Atop the Fourth Wall and his History of Power Rangers videos, it really does take away from the special status their powers are given if the Rangers can just crush a sink with a casual swipe or lift a car without so much as an inch of spandex on them.
...though some would argue that THAT IS NOT SPANDEX!!!...but I'm getting off topic.
In the one bit of praise I can give for this, Elizabeth Banks as Rita has a fairly menacing scene where she's telling Kimberly about how she's killed Rangers before. Short, sweet, and setting her up as an actual threat for directly facing the Rangers instead of hiding behind stock footage. The outfit still looks stupid, but at least she doesn't look like Queen Amidala and Madonna's forbidden love child anymore.
And, in what is a consistent problem with movies nowadays, everything looks so dark. Even scenes that are in the daytime look dark. It doesn't make the film look cool or edgy, it makes it harder to see and it makes me pissed off because I can't see anything. If I didn't know what Power Rangers were and knew nothing about the 20+ years that have come before, I'd assume this was some dumb shlock teen action movie. Which, it's sad to say, is probably what this is going to end up being.
And this is by Saban, the same people who had made the original show such a hit. What has happened?! Admittedly, I haven't kept up with the show (my interest in it waned in my youth after In Space, though I did watch Dino Thunder because of nostalgia), but when Saban bought it back I had honestly thought that it meant that they were going back old school with it. By the look of this, if they knew what they were doing back then, they don't know. It looks like absolute garbage, and is about as far away from the uniqueness of the original as you can get.
That being said, I'm sure it'll make tons of money and get plenty of sequels. After all, it's not like good taste has ever stopped Michael Bay, either.
Saban's Power Rangers is set to be released in theaters on March 24, 2017 by Saban Films, Lionsgate, and the Toei Company.
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