ELIZABETH BANKS RITA REPULSA IMAGE MOVIE
ELIZABETH BANKS RITA REPULSA IMAGE SERIES

Writer John Gatins and director Dean Israelite make sure to take the characters’ emotions seriously even as they celebrate the ridiculousness of everything else. (Zack and his mom speak Mandarin with English subtitles, a nice touch.) Zack fares well, too: he loudly advertises himself as the “crazy” one, but in private moments he cares for his sickly mother with the same grim matter-of-factness that the title character of ' Logan' brought into Professor X’s room along with meals and meds. And the screenplay makes this cheerful kid the heart and soul of the group, and sometimes its comic relief, without sapping him of dignity. Um, thanks?)īilly, however, becomes a genuinely memorable character, thanks mainly to Cyler’s heartfelt performance (which overcomes a lot of fuzziness about what, exactly, the character’s condition is). (It’s like when Paramount congratulated itself for making Sulu gay in “ Star Trek Beyond” when all it did was give audiences a two-second glimpse of a photo revealing that Sulu's significant other was a man.

ELIZABETH BANKS RITA REPULSA IMAGE MOVIE

The film’s marketing hypes the fact that Trini has been re-imagined as the first openly gay superhero in movie history, and that is quite a milestone but if you go out for popcorn in the scene where that’s established you might not figure it out, unless you detect the undertones of Sapphic menace in the scene where Rita bullies Trini in her bedroom. The “stronger together” message of the original show has been given a post-Obama makeover here, sometimes convincingly, other times awkwardly. “I shall destroy Rita myself!” Zordon proclaims when the training isn’t going so well. “Let's go and do the one thing that's been asked of us and kill Rita!' Jason exhorts his colleagues. To drive this point home, the film repeats the phrase “kill Rita” so often and with such zeal that it becomes a shared joke between the movie and the audience. The best way to save humanity, Zordon explains, is to kill Rita. There's a plot about the Rangers trying to protect a crystal hidden inside a Krispy Kreme donut shop, and a detailed mythology about the life force of planets, but while Rangers purists will appreciate the fine points, the film doesn't get too hung up on them. He wants them to defend the Earth against his nemesis, Rita Repulsa ( Elizabeth Banks), by karate-kicking and body slamming Rita’s beloved stone golems, then joining forces to defeat a gigantic golden warrior called Goldar. The teens are trained by Zordon ( Bryan Cranston), sole survivor of a prehistoric battle that ended with a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs.

ELIZABETH BANKS RITA REPULSA IMAGE SERIES

Do better, costume departments.The team consists of Jason Scott ( Dacre Montgomery), the future Red Ranger, a juvenile delinquent with a barely disguised noble streak Kimberly Hart ( Naomi Scott), aka Pink Ranger, a depressive who’s in detention for texting an embarrassing private photo of a classmate Billy Cranston ( RJ Cyler), aka Blue Ranger, who’s got a spectrum disorder in this version Becky G as Trini, the soon-to-be Yellow Power Ranger, who stays a blank slate until the movie fills in her backstory during the second half and Ludi Lin as Zack, the Black Ranger, who was African-American in the original TV series but has been cast as Asian here. Points given for not forcing her to fight the Rangers in stiletto heels, which happens way too much with female superheroes and villains these days, but the same amount of points is also deducted for the obvious boob armor. The rest of her says, “I just crawled out of a swamp” while her cute wedge boots say, “Still ready to party though.” The only thing carried over from the original costume is the scepter through which Rita channels her evil dark magic, which actually looks pretty cool in this photo.

There’s also a lot of face-vein stuff going on, which I can’t explain.

Her sleeves don’t attach to her shirt, which is a very ’90s alt rock kid thing to do, and she’s either wearing a lot of necklaces, or she found some green rope and figured she might as well accessorize. We’ve got green scaly armor that looks kind of old or like it’s been through the wash a few too many times. Her updated costume is nothing like the horned babushka look of the original, but rivals it in the “there’s a lot going on here” factor.

Elizabeth banks rita repulsa image