Saban's Power Rangers

Originally written for OutLoudCulture.com

Eight years. It's been nearly eight years since anything remotely passable was officially laid to film in the Power Rangers franchise.

    Power Rangers has had its ups and downs over the nearly 25-year history of the franchise. The show has come close to cancellation and been rescued numerous times, there hasn't been a movie in twenty years, and the rights have changed hands twice. The series originated in 1993 on Fox, was sold to Disney and hastily uncancelled in 2002, and then sold to the Saban Capital Group in 2010 and hastily uncancelled once more. The rights to various bits of the series are splayed about many companies. The first seventeen seasons are exclusively available from Shout! Factory on home media, Fox owns the first two movies, and Lionsgate distributes home media releases for everything from Samurai onwards. Their ongoing partnership with the Saban Capital Group led to the creation of this movie. Just a shame it couldn't lead to them buying out the television series.

    In case you were wondering, or missed one of the many times I've ranted about this subject over the last three years, I'm not a particularly big fan of the way Saban, and by extension, Nickelodeon has been treating this franchise for the last six years. Their overuse of the classic theme-song and series monikers grate on many of the fans, myself included. Plus, the downright incompetent production behind the last seven seasons of the show is just baffling. Haim Saban routinely spends approximately $35 million on each 44-episode series of his flagship cash-cow, and yet the editing, writing, scheduling, airing and direction has been below standards set by some YouTube series. And yes, all of this is relevant to my review of the movie.

    Fortunately, the crew behind the television branch of the franchise has a total of jack to do with the movie. There's no lazy soundtrack "composed" by Noam Kaniel, no Nickelodeon anti-humor, no overuse of series tropes, no Fujoshi-baiting fanservice, the Red Ranger's dad isn't a deadbeat/dead, the direction is competent, the editing is solid, the characters are compelling, and the movie doesn't constantly and consistently break in-universe rules and/or willing suspension of disbelief.

Granted, a lot of the latter comes from the fact that this is stylized, high-budget reboot of the original series rather than attempting to succeed what came before, but I'm still willing to give the movie far more credit than the show in that regard, mostly because what it asks you to believe are either easy to slot into reality, or things long-time fans of the show recognize, and can fit into the worldview the film presents us. Note that I said "most of", we're going to come back to that in a while. We'll be heading into spoiler territory here, so if you want to back out, this is the last chance you've got.

    Approximately sixty-five million years ago, during the reign of the dinosaurs, Zordon of Eltar (Played by Bryan Cranston) led the original Power Rangers team to defend the Zeo Crystal on Earth. Presumably against Lord Zedd, the series recurring lead-villain. Zordon's Green Ranger, a sorceress named Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) turned against him, and used her powers to kill most of the other Rangers. In a last-ditch effort to protect the Zeo Crystal, Zordon orders Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) to unleash a meteor strike on the planet. Zordon buries the five remaining Power Coins before Rita makes her final approach. The two of them are killed by the meteor, Zordon being buried along with the coins, and Rita demorphing before landing in the ocean.

In the present day, star-quarterback and martial artist Jason Lee Scott (Dacre Montgomery) gets detention for letting a cow loose inside the school after-hours, and house-arrest for demolishing his truck and other vehicles in the escape attempt. His father berates him for this the next day and then takes him to detention. There, he finds a bully, Colt Wallace (Wesley MacInnes) messing with a very strange nerd named Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler). Jason decides to take Colt down a peg, and in doing so befriends Billy.

    Meanwhile, Kimberly Ann Hart (Naomi Scott) meets some of her friends from the cheerleading squad in the women's restroom. They're not too happy with her, and decide to kick her out of their lives. Kimberly decides to cut her hair shorter with the pair of scissors they leave stuck in the wall before rejoining detention.

    After detention, Billy asks Jason if he can help him with something. Jason tells him he can't, since he's got an ankle monitor on. Naturally, Billy can get around this, and Jason agrees to help him if he spoofs his monitor's location. Billy gets Jason to help him haul some of his gear into an abandoned mine so he can look for cool stuff. Jason agrees, but only if he gets to use Billy's van afterwards.

Billy's incredibly strange method of locution leads to Jason bowing out of helping him inside the mine, but on his way out, he runs into Kimberly. The two of them debate whether they should just up and leave Angel Grove before Billy activates a detonating rod and gets their attention and that of two others. Zack Taylor (Ludi Lin), a local daredevil who was chilling on an abandoned train, and Trini Kwan (Becky Gomez), who was listening to music and meditating.

    They go into the mine and find a wall of peculiar glass with five glowing coins inside it. One calls out to each of them, and the colors are assigned as you would expect. Jason is Red, Kim is Pink, Billy is Blue, Zack is Black (No he's not :P) and Trini is Yellow. The authorities catch on to their presence, and the five pile into Billy's van. They try to escape, and nearly do, before Jason gets them all hit by a train. The five then wake up the next morning in their beds, in their own houses, not knowing what the hell happened. The only clue is that they all still have the coins, they're all perfectly fine despite having been hit with a speeding freight-train, and they all have powers like nobody has seen before. Not only that, Jason's bad knee stops bothering him.

Meanwhile, on the high seas, a fishing boat picks up the body of one Rita Repulsa, along with her power-coin. The reunion of the two restores Rita's body, but with a mental state far more unhinged than before. She kills a police-officer sent to investigate her body, and begins a quest to gather all the gold she can. Partially to restore her staff, which channels her awesome power, and partially to resurrect her trusted minion Goldar.

    At school, Colt attempts to ambush Billy and break his fingers (God only knows why he was using a technique that would likely dislocate your wrist and/or elbow if done properly, maybe he knows nothing about human anatomy) but Billy's newfound powers cause Colt to knock himself out. Billy becomes pretty popular because of this. He meets up with Kim and Jason, who both confirm their experiences. They're tougher, faster, and stronger all around. Their coins cause a bit of havoc in the school cafeteria, so they decide to meet up later at the mine.

    They try to chase down Trini and talk to her, but she runs and leaps across a chasm. Zack stops her from running further and the others follow. Billy nearly makes it, but falls down into the water below. Billy calls up to them, and the other boys follow. Kimberly has to trick Trini into following, but the five ultimately wind up down in the water. They dive down and find a strange barrier below. They cross it and fall into a spaceship below. Down there, they meet a mysterious talking robot, Zordon's assistant, Alpha 5.

    He introduces them to his master, whose soul he sealed into The Morphing Grid. Zordon lays out their task. The five of them are the Power Rangers, successors to Zordon's original team. They must harness their powers to protect their world and the Zeo Crystal from exploitation by those hungry for their power. If Rita gets ahold of the crystal, she can use the power it holds to create and destroy worlds. They have eleven days (The estimated amount of time it will take Rita to return to full power and recreate Goldar) to get themselves ready, or their world is likely doomed.

Naturally, most of them take this poorly and decide to leave. Jason is the last to go. He almost leaves, but Zordon's desperate plea makes him stay, and reconsider his position. Jason manages to convince the rest of the Power Rangers to return for training, and they spend the rest of the week getting into fighting shape. No matter their determination, they can't figure out how to Morph. Alpha decides to try and give them a bit of inspiration, and shows them the Dinozords. Mastadon, Pterodactyl, Triceratops, Sabertooth Tiger, and Tyrannosaurus.

    This is where we get to one of the few problems I have with the changes the movie has made. The Zords themselves are basically alright, except there's really no reason for them to swap the positions of the Mastodon and Sabertooth Tiger.

    The problem is that while Zordon and Rita came to Earth ten-thousand years ago in the show, therefore excusing the presence of the Mastodon and Sabertooth Zords in a so-called DINO Megazord, they came to Earth 65 million years ago here. Before the Mastodon and Sabertooth had even evolved. This could have been solved by simply keeping the ten-thousand-year thing and connecting Zordon's final battle with Rita with a different cataclysm in history, but considering they were foreshadowing Zeo from the beginning of the film, and appear to be foreshadowing Jungle Fury, I wouldn't put it past them to have the entire opening sequence of the movie be foreshadowing for Dino Thunder, since the subtitles at the start specifically mention "meteor" despite the object that actually wiped out the dinosaurs likely being either a comet or an asteroid.

    Anyways, Zack takes the Mastodon on a joyride, but can barely control it. Once he returns, he gets into a fight with Jason. Billy charges in to stop them, and spontaneously Morphs without realizing how. When they try and figure out how to replicate this, they fail. Zordon becomes frustrated with the lack of progress, and decides to send the Rangers home.

On his way out, Jason overhears Zordon and Alpha talking, and finds out that once the Power Rangers connect to their powers, the connection to the Morphing Grid will open up so Zordon can come back to life. This angers Jason, who sees this as Zordon and Alpha manipulating them, storms off. The rest of the team has set up around a fire outside, and they decide to stick around for a little while and try to bond. Billy talks about how he got in detention, and about how he used to come up to the mine with his dad. Zack's mom is dying, and he doesn't want to be there when it happens. Jason is something of a local superstar, so he's not too hard to explain. Kim holds off until later, and Trini generally has issues with the image her perfect parents and perfect family expect of her.

They return home, and the now fully-powered Psycho-Rita ambushes Trini in her bedroom. She gives her an ultimatum. Join her, turn over the location of the Zeo Crystal and live, or fight and die. Trini goes to the other Rangers, and they decide to stand up and fight. They head to the docks to fight Rita, but she quickly overpowers and restrains all of them, despite her incomplete Ranger suit. She figures that they have to know where the Zeo Crystal is, and she's right. She tortures Zack until Billy, who pinpointed its location earlier in the film, divulges the location. It's buried below a Krispy Kreme in town.

    Rita drops Billy into the water below, charging the rope with her magic until he's dead, and releases the other Rangers. They drag him up and attempt to revive him, but to no avail. They take him to the Command Center, and beg Zordon to do something, but he can't. Eventually, they realize something very powerful, that any of them would die to protect the other, the way Billy had. This unlocks the Morphing Grid finally, granting them the powers of the coins. Rather than choosing to come through himself, Zordon sends Billy back. This give the Rangers what they need to don their suits and take the fight to Rita.

    Repulsa sics an army of Putty Patrollers on the newly-Morphed team, but their training takes over and they beat through them. They summon up their Dinozords and set off for Angel Grove to take down Goldar, with the original MMPR The Movie theme-song pumping in the background.

They make quick work of the Putties, but Jason has to leave his Zord to rescue his father from his crashed vehicle. The Power Rangers regroup, confident that they can handle anything after the Putties, but Goldar is something else entirely. The individual Zords are no match for him, and the golden monster pushes the five into the pit he created while digging for the Zeo Crystal. The Rangers almost come to terms with their fate, but the Zords all link up to form the mighty Megazord. I'd go into more depth about this fight-scene, but it really needs to be seen to be appreciated. Suffice to say that you get to see the Megazord German Suplex Goldar!

Rita says that there will be more to come, more to try and claim the Zeo Crystal, but the Rangers just smack her into space, and she lands on the moon.

    All in all, this movie was better than we had any right to expect. It hits the sublime middleground between character and action that so many films fail to reach. The characters are generally about right, and the plot never missteps the way I've seen many films do over my time as a critic

I feel I should draw a few comparisons to another blockbuster reboot, Transformers. This movie does now what Transformers should have in the second film. It's got enough references to the original while incorporating enough musical cues and stings from the original series that the soundscape still feels connected to the original in theme. Brian Tyler does an excellent job on the music in this film, and it almost sounds like Ron Wasserman, or even John Williams composed it at times. The music forges its own identity while remaining true enough to the original that it's recognizable. This is something that we should have seen in Revenge of the Fallen, but didn't.

    Speaking of which, something the middle two Transformers movies lacked were decent characters. Fortunately, they don't skimp on character development. Nor do they stray too far from the originals, mostly. Jason takes command, Kim makes jokes, Zack is a cool dude, and Billy is still the oddball who speaks in such a manner that your brain goes numb like you took a bite of an Oragel creme donut. Trini is the only one who's really changed a lot, going from soft-spoken and wise to misfit outcast. Apparently she's questioning her sexuality too, but considering the looks she and Zack were exchanging, I have a feeling it won't be in question much longer.

A while ago people were making a big deal about the announcement that Billy was autistic. My reaction was "Breaking News! Power Rangers movie retains defining characteristic of lead character! In other news, Marvel has killed another beloved hero and replaced them with an evil clone working for Hydra!"

    Yeah, Billy Cranston being autistic has always been something of a given. His social awkwardness, his somewhat obsessive behavior, the near lack of a sense of humor, and the mind-numbing speech-pattern only a few people really understand kind of gave the game away. Sorry Wikipedia, you done jumped the gun on saying this movie was "(T)he first blockbuster film to feature LGBTQ and autistic superheroes." The 1995 movie beat you to the last one.

Alpha 5 is alright. I've said before that I like Bill Hader as a voice-actor, but they seem to have gone out of their way to give him extra lines in this movie that really shouldn't have been in the final product. It's nothing too too bad, but enough of the original Alpha would get on anyone's nerves too.

Now we come to Zordon. Bryan Cranston was perhaps the perfect choice for Zordon of Eltar, and the portrayal of the character in this movie is pitch perfect. Cunning, intelligent, loads of patience, and self-sacrificing to a fault. The scene where he resurrects Billy instead of himself had echoes of the In Space finale playing in my head, which tells me that director Dean Israelite and the writing team know what they're doing, and will handle it well.

    Finally, Rita Repulsa. Elizabeth Banks was the perfect choice for this role, hands down, and this movie does a lot more to show her as a viable threat than the show usually did. Rather than sit around her base on the moon sending monsters after the Rangers, she overpowers them herself and kills people. I like Crazy Rita a lot, and this character will fit in well once Lord Zedd shows up.

A few minor things to mention. I was a little disappointed that they didn't get Austin St. John to play Jason's father, since David Denman basically looks like a discount version of him. Amy Jo Johnson and Jason David Frank's cameos were cool, but JDF and AJ should have been either teachers at the school, or parents of one of the Power Rangers (Possibly Kimberly).

    On that note though, I'm glad they didn't go all-out the way the DC television series have been and have all the previous Power Rangers they could find play small roles in this movie, because that would have been going overboard.

    Finally, the designs. I like the suits generally, but the silver highlights could have been white, and the helmets all look a little strange. I hope this is something they fix in future, along with the design of the Megazord not really matching up with the individual Zords. I like the new Megazord, it looks a hell of a lot better than the toy versions did, but it still could be a bit more coherent in design. More color and flash, less generic metal.

    Now that I've gotten what I think of the movie out of the way, here are a few things that I would like to see out of the first of the six confirmed sequels.

    First off, bring in Tommy as-is. Give us our long-haired, green-bedecked native American charismatic ass-kicker who can stand toe to toe with Jason and either tie or win. Don't gender-swap him as has been rumored. Give his suit plenty of gold, and make sure to give him some kind of Morphing sequence. Re-create the fight between him and Jason, possibly within an MMA cage. Something else, make sure to give him an actual Dragon Dagger, and an actual Sword of Darkness. The Power Sword was cool, but Tommy's gear should remain as unchanged as possible while remaining coherent with the rest of the aesthetic. Something else to mention is that you'd better make the Dragonzord look cool, and you'd better tell Bandai to make the toy version compatible with the previously released Dinozords.

    The suits are mostly alright, the helmets could use a bit of a change to look more like the animals they're based on, or even just the original helmets. Tommy's helmet especially could use an overhaul to be a bit more unique. Without the teeth it doesn't really look all that threatening. Also make sure that the Dragon Shield is detachable, and tell Bandai to do the same for Tommy's Legacy and Action Hero figures.
    The only thing I would really change about the suits would be to change all of the silver on them to white to throw back to the original series a bit.

    Now, let's address the product placement. It's fine. It's barely there and they actually kind of make a joke out of it. It's fine. Just don't take too far, okay Lionsgate?

    The second movie is where Brian Tyler should kick right in with recreating musical cues from the original score. 5-4-1, Fight, We Need A Hero, Go Go Power Rangers, and especially Go Green Ranger, Go! If Tommy's going to be one of the primary antagonists, then his theme-song should be in the movie. If you can't get Ron Wasserman back to do the vocals, then make sure you get someone who has a similar kind of voice for vocals. Kevin Rudolph wouldn't be a bad choice, but this is something you need to work on until you find the right guy for the job.

    Going back to the characters, there was a romance sub-plot with Jason and Kimberly that was cut from the final version of the movie. I think this was a good choice, since it kind of throws a wrench into the plot-integral Tom/Kim romance later on. All I have to say is that unless Naomi Scott or whoever winds up playing Tommy dies somewhere along the line, you'd better not split these characters up. Hell, going into the season two, three, and Zeo adaptations, you'd better not replace any of the characters unless you absolutely have to. You're not working with Sentai footage at all, so you might as well go all out on the plot. I just hope that the Thunder Megazord is done justice.

    Anyways, even though I've been laying down all this fan-service I want to see, it's important to not go too heavy on it. I see that they're foreshadowing at least sixteen series into the future, but you have to know what to cut and what to leave. It will be perfectly fine if they skip straight to the Green With Evil arc for the second movie, as long as the second movie is littered with some decent character development. After that, they should slow down a bit and make at least one more movie before hitting the Green Candle arc. Once they hit Green Candle, I expect to see some hardcore action and visceral confrontation between Tommy and Lord Zedd.

    As much as I would caution against fan-service for the sake of it, I would love to see Bulk and Skull in the next movie. Just make sure they don't turn into Victor and Monty from Ninja Steel.

In the end, this was one hell of a movie and I definitely recommend it. Pick up the soundtrack after you see the film too, because Brian Tyler did a damn good job on the score. It'll have you on an emotional roller-coaster from start to finish. The characters are pretty great interpretations of the original, and the movie is at least as good as the Boom! Studios comics, if not better.

Image from Impawards.com

Ghostbusters (2016)

A movie that's tortuously late to the party, headlined by former SNL cast-members, one character that seems as frustrated with the world of the movie as the audience is, a dumb character that may or may not be pretending to be stupid, a walking talking stereotype, one kinda cool character, strange vignettes that pad out the run-time, a musical number, boring pacing, horrible writing, and possibly four jokes that work in the entire thing. But enough about The Angry Birds Movie.
Ghostbusters is a movie that's tortuously late to the party, headlined by former SNL cast-members, one character that seems as frustrated with the world of the movie as the audience is, a dumb character that may or may not be pretending to be stupid, a walking talking stereotype, one kinda cool character, strange vignettes that pad out the run-time, a musical number, boring pacing, horrible writing, and possibly four jokes that work in the entire thing, with a majority female cast. Because of course it is.
For those who have been living under a rock without television for the last thirty years, Ghostbusters is one of the biggest media franchises of all time. Of all time. Two blockbuster movies, one of the most popular songs of all time, multiple comics, two animated series, video-games dating back to the Atari 2600, and a sequel to the movies a few years ago. Action-figures, toys based on the gear, board-games, merch up and down the spectrum with no end for thirty freaking years. You've most likely seen the ancillary material before you've seen the movies, or at least caught the movies on television. If you've never seen the movies, you've definitely heard the theme-song at some point, because they play it on loop with The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack and Thriller every Halloween.
This review isn't going to start with any of the long-winded preamble about me being a huge fan of the franchise and knowing it in and out like I've done for some reviews, partially because I'm trying to not do that anymore and partially because I'm not particularly well-versed in Ghostbusters outside of the two movies. I don't own any of the toys, I've never read any of the comics, I've never played any of the games, and I've never watched either of the cartoons. I either never got around to them or they were just out of my reach. The cartoons were never on TV and I never really cared enough to look them up on the internet. Don't get me wrong, I loved the original movies. I still have both of them on VHS for crying out loud. One of these days I'm going to get them both on Blu-Ray and watch them in high-def glory but for now I'll stick with them on DVD.
While I'm not really an expert on series lore, I do know several essential facts about it. First off, don't cross the streams. Second, you can't kill a ghost, you can only contain it. Third, be careful with the freaking proton packs. They're unlicensed nuclear reactors, you could literally explode if you weren't careful with them. Not just that, it's a freaking nuke for crying out loud. The chain-reaction could literally be catastrophic.
Basically all of these rules are either ignored or never established to begin with. In fact, the only rule they actually did bring up was the "be careful with the gear" thing, after they spent several scenes being incredibly reckless with it in a failed attempt to elicit laughs.
The movie begins with what I believe are supposed to be social-commentary jokes told by a tour-guide in a "haunted" mansion. Some spooky stuff happens, but it's all faked by the managers of the estate to promote tourism. At closing time, all of the fake haunting things get packed up, but actual ghosts show up and mess with him. Cue Ray Parker Jr's iconic theme. For less than a minute.
We cut to Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) teaching in her school. Some guy comes and talks to her about a book she wrote with a friend of hers that she thought was destroyed. A book she co-wrote.
She is informed that the book is on Amazon, and this leads into an insult to people who like audiobooks disguised as a joke. Erin looks this up on Amazon, and finds that the book is definitely on Amazon.
Here's a few problems with this scene. The way everything is timed in the scene, Gilbert clicks once for a search and winds up on the product page. That's not how Amazon works. Yes, she could have seen it on the homepage, but the most likely scenario is that she searched it up first. Either way, the reaction should have come before she got to the product page.
Her boss comes into her office to talk about her application for tenure, and instead of alt-tabbing away from the page, opening a new tab, minimizing the window, shutting off the monitor, or outright closing the browser with one fucking click, she turns the monitor away, covers it with papers, etc, etc. Also, for some reason her computer has Internet Explorer pinned to the taskbar. She's not using it, but it's still pinned to the taskbar. Nobody uses Internet Explorer for gods sake, why is it pinned to her taskbar?
Erin goes to talk to her co-writer, Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) about the book at the college she works at. After some searching, she finds her and confronts her about the book. Abby refuses to take the book down and claims she doesn't need Erin's permission to put the book up. This means that either Erin signed away her rights to control over the book, or Abby forged her signature. If the latter is true, which it seems to be, then Abby has committed several federal crimes and deserves to go to jail over this. But if that happened, we wouldn't have a movie to watch. Can't wait for How It Should Have Ended to cover that.
In exchange for getting the book out of circulation, Erin agrees to introduce Abby and her research partner, Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) to the people in charge of the mansion where the ghosts were sighted. For some reason, after she does that, she accompanies them. They encounter a ghost, it spits all over Erin, and she screams about how ghosts are real, and this gets her sacked from her job before she gets tenure. So she decides to go work with Jill and Abby, who also get fired from their jobs because the dean of the college didn't even realize the department still existed. This is actually a pretty funny moment, because the dean is basically telling the leads what I wanted to tell to the movie. To piss right off.
They leave to find a new place to work out of, and they steal the equipment from the college. Pretty sure that counts as grand theft, mishandling nuclear materials, and several other laws they've probably broken. While the original Ghostbusters were using unlicensed nuclear reactors, they weren't actually caught in the act of misappropriating their equipment the way these morons were.
They shop around for a place for them to operate out of, and they find the fire-station the original Ghostbusters were based out of, but as opposed to the original movie, it's in full working order, and the rent is massive on it, so they wind up working out of the top of a Chinese-restaurant. The Chinese restaurant that Abby keeps ordering from despite them screwing up her orders. This is supposed to be a Ghostbusters movie, cut it out with the freaking food jokes!
Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) an MTA worker sees some guy go off into the subway after talking some crazy things and then witnesses a ghost in the subway, so she contacts the three other leads and they go out into the field and test out their "proton laser" on the ghost. It works, but because this whole scenario is from the planet Outlandish, nobody believes them.
Eventually they adopt the Ghostbusters moniker, as well as the same basic look of the iconic team. They head off to one of their first paying jobs at a metal concert that's some kind of tribute to Black Sabbath. This whole segment is telegraphed horribly. When the crazy dude Patty ran into in the subway, Rowan North (Neil Casey) goes to the concert to unleash the ghosts, he runs into a metalhead screaming about "Ozzy!" Keep this in mind, something stupid is about to happen.
The four leads are told that the ghost was assaulting people before it vanished, and that they need to handle this quietly. They search through the building until they find it, with some stupid "jokes" to accompany it. The ghost phases through the stage, interrupting the band, but the crowd thinks it's all part of the show, because the ghost looks like a devil. As it raises up behind the most country-sounding vocalist I have ever seen performing with a fairly decent metal band.
The four leads track the ghost down to the stage. For some moronic reason, Abby crowd-surfs to where she needs to be and Patty tries to do the same thing and falls flat on her back, making a very stupid "joke" in the process.
Eventually they capture their first ghost, and they come to public attention as the Ghostbusters. Then, out of nowhere as the scene is wrapping up, the camera cuts to Ozzy Osbourne walking on stage. John. Michael. Ozzy. Osbourne. The madman. The Prince of Darkness. The Godfather of Metal himself shows up in this movie. Not to perform, not to really do anything. He basically shows up to say "Eh, what's goin' on?!" and then disappears. This is the second movie from Sony that I've seen this year with out of nowhere, out of place Black Sabbath references.
Eventually, a skeptic, Dr. Martin Heiss (Bill motherfucking Murray) calls out the four leads on television because he thinks ghosts are fake. Because Erin is stupid, she releases the ghost and it kills Heiss by throwing him out the window. Nobody is charged with anything over this as far as I can tell.
Let me repeat. This movie somehow managed to get Bill Murray out of his cave and they killed off his character when he had less than one minute of screen-time. If you're thinking this is what the movie thinks of the real Ghostbusters, then stay tuned.
The four leads are taken to see the mayor and some representatives of the federal government who tell them that they're doing a good job, but they need to knock it off because they're getting in the way of the governments operation. I kind of get what they mean, but the government doesn't seem to have the kind of gear that can support ghost-hunting, so why didn't they ask Holtzman to make them the kind of gear to support that? As is shown later on, they don't have the proper equipment, so what the hell was going on?
Despite being told to knock it off, the four keep up their investigation and triangulate the ghost sightings along ley-lines that intersect at a hotel in Times Square. A place where weird things have happened forever.
There they find Rowan in the basement of the hotel, working on a huge machine to summon ghosts with, but rather than be captured, Rowan kills himself. In the aftermath, they find a copy of the book Abby and Erin wrote, with crazy drawings inside of it of things Rowan has seen in his visions.
Erin tries to inform people of this, but Abby gets possessed by Rowan, and attempts to kill Jillian, but Patty stops that from happening and Rowan posses their secretary, Kevin Beckman (Chris Hemsworth) and takes off. He unleashes the ghosts, and the army, police and homeland security try to subdue him, but he takes total control of them and stops them from interfering.
The four leads gear up and fight through the ghost army, running into a Staypuft Marshmallow Man balloon possessed by ghosts, which gets popped by a swiss-army knife from Erin, who has been trying to get around the city in a cab. The cab is driven by a ghost-savvy cabbie played by Dan Akroyd, who cannot be anyone but Ray Stantz from the original movie, because he knows way too much about ghosts, and even spouts the old Ghostbusters motto, "I ain't afraid of no ghost".
Eventually, the four of them fight to where Rowan is, and he divests himself of Kevin's body, and after a bit of seriously stupid action, he takes the form of the classic Ghostbusters logo, who then grows like Rita Repulsa's staff got embedded in his spine and busts through the hotel to wreak havoc. The four route their vehicle with a nuclear reactor on top of it into the portal to summon the ghosts back to ghost realm, and then shoot Rowan in the crotch to get him back in the portal. Despite him being a fucking ghost, this works. They then proceed to rip off the climax of Big Hero 6 with Rowan grabbing Abby as he's sucked back into the portal. Erin ties a rope around her waist and jumps in, shoots Rowan in the fist, and hauls Abby out of the portal. They emerge with white hair for some ungodly reason, and for some other ungodly reason, when the ghosts got sucked into the portal, all the destruction they caused was reversed.
The four get told they can basically have what they want in terms of funding for saving the city, so they get the classic fire-station, and new gear, but for some reason they don't have the kind of cash to support replacing their car, the car Patty borrowed from her uncle, played by Ernie Hudson.
Jillian creates a grid to suspend ghosts in, and her mentor, played by Sigourney Weaver (Who seems to be as fed up with this movie as I am) shows up to examine it, and says that it's a disaster waiting to happen, foreshadowing the grid being shut off in the second movie.
Speaking of which, Patty finds a reference to Zuul on a reel-to-reel audio tape, and then the credits roll. The credits of this film play over the dance scene/musical number that wound up getting cut from the final version of the film.
All in all, while it's not operating on the sheer concentrated level of awful everyone expected the movie to be based on the trailers, it's still not worth watching. If you haven't seen the original, watch the original instead. If you have, then watch the original again. Don't waste your time on this movie, there aren't enough jokes to justify the two-hour run-time, and most of what's there would be the weakest jokes in a good movie. While there are some good bits here and there, the good doesn't outweigh the boring, and the good stuff basically has nothing to do with Ghostbusters. The climax, for one thing, is pretty freaking awesome, but it makes no sense in the context of this being a Ghostbusters movie. They smash ghosts into other ghosts, they chip ghosts with a ghost woodchipper, they blow them up with ghost grenades, they punch ghosts with ghost gloves. They actually main and supposedly "kill" ghosts. They shoot ghosts with ghost guns for gods sake. Yeah, the climax is awesome and so is the fight-scene, but that's not Ghostbusters, that's fucking Doom! Duke Nukem! Hell, it's way closer to Luigi's Mansion than it is to freaking Ghostbusters!
In fact, most of the new gadgets they introduce to sell more toys about halfway through the movie look like things that were either copied from or directly inspired by Luigi's Mansion. Their main trap is a ghost-vacuum after all. Combine that with the ghost-chipper and what the hell is the point of ever using anything else?
They also have a ghost bear-trap for some reason. With lasers and motors and glowy crap.
Allow me to explain to Paul Feig why bear-traps are so cool. First off, they're made of nothing but hard fucking metal, they don't have any weird things attached to them, they are a very simple device with a singular purpose, to snap shut on a limb and hold it in place. This is why they got used as jump-scares in Resident Evil 4. Second, they snap shut with a lot of fucking weight. When a bear-trap is sprung, the jaws snap shut so fucking fast that nothing that's not Sonic The fucking Hedgehog can conceivably get out of there fast enough to get out unscathed. Leon S. Kennedy is an elite member of The Secret Service in Resident Evil 4, but even he can't get his leg out of the way fast enough for the jaws to not clamp down tight.
This thing is covered in bleepy bloopy bullshit and snaps shut with the weight of a god-damn toy. I've actually owned toys that have more weight to them than this piece of crap does. I'd ask who thought that was a good idea, but I found my answer. The same person who thought proton-grenades, proton-gloves, and proton-pistols were a good idea. The people who wanted to sell more toys. Toys that have been sitting on the shelf, gathering dust and going on clearance across the country before the movie even came out.
Let's make this clear here, the characters all suck. Even the two characters I kinda wanted to like, Jillian and Erin descended into absolute nonsense towards the end. Erin is the meek kind of character I like, but she's not consistent enough with that portrayal for it to entirely click with me. Kristin Wiig seems like she's worn out and disgusted with the movie as a whole, and doesn't want to be on set, but that's not the majority of the reasons the character is inconsistent. The rest comes down to the writing.
Speaking of actors fed up with the movie, Melissa McCarthy seems to be having to actively stop herself from expressing her utter contempt with the movie with every breath, glance and word. If the rumors are to be believed (And considering the movie turned out exactly the way the leaks said they would, that would seem to add to their credibility), McCarthy is a huge Ghostbusters fan, and signed onto the film back when it was supposed to be inspired by the Ghostbusters cartoons. As time went on, it got further and further from the movie she signed on for, and she's become very unhappy with the film if the Midnight's Edge video on the leaks are to be believed.
In fact, a lot of the actors don't seem to be particularly happy with what they're doing. Leslie Jones doesn't seem particularly invested in her role despite her vehement defense of the movie, and basically everyone but Kate McKinnon and Chris Hemsworth.
I'll be blunt, I don't particularly like Chris Hemsworth's character, not because Kevin is dumb, but because the dumb humor isn't executed properly. Hemsworth at least looks like he's having a damn good time just goofing off on set, dancing around, doing zany stuff. If they were a bit more controlled with his characters stupidity, it would be great, but it's not. The dumb humor just goes too far, and it basically means that most of what his character does is either predictable or just dumb. I think the only way his character can really be salvaged is to reveal that he's not as dumb as he acts, either through him secretly being Q, or a Q-type character all along, or him having been acting like that because he thinks that's funny. However, that would require this movie to have a sequel, and I don't want to see a sequel, I just want to see Chris Hemsworth, Liam Neeson, Don Cheadle and Robert Downey Jr as the Ghostbusters in an actual Ghostbusters movie.
This brings us to McKinnon's character, Jillian Holtzmann. If it wasn't for a handful of scenes, and a handful of lines, I would find Holtzmann intoxicatingly hot. Edit out a few of the really stupid things inserted for no discernible reason, such as her dancing to a DeBarge song, the utterly misplaced queef joke at the beginning of the movie, tone down the neo-SNL loudness, her licking her guns and the obviously bleached hair (Keep it natural or go all the way, just pick one) and have a few more scenes of her as the tech/grease monkey and boom, she's perfect. I really liked the way she kicked ass at the end of the movie, but again, that's utterly out of place in something that's not an old-school FPS. Her character has a few of the funnier lines in the movie, and I'll say this, McKinnon at least seems to be getting into her role.
Apparently Paul Feig wanted her character to be a lesbian, but got shot down by the studio. I have to say that this was actually a pretty good thing, because then she'd basically just be the stereotypical butch grease-monkey, and wouldn't be as unique a character. Not that she's particularly unique as is, she's basically a copy and paste of Charley from Biker Mice From Mars, but without the common sense to not lick a piece of dangerous equipment.
Now we come to Leslie Jones. Her character is basically a bad Madea impression. A Madea impression written by someone who completely missed the point of the character. Plus other wacky stereotypically black antics and dialogue written by someone who took a look at Eddie Murphy's career and missed the point harder than a drunk, blindfolded Stormtrooper. A bit of the tiny amount of energy this movie has is brought across by Jones, who I will give some credit to for that, but aside from a handful of scenes, she looks as irritated with this movie as everyone else in the film.
A quick addendum before we get to the rest of the article. This is something I meant to put into the original draft, but didn't. It was 4AM when I finished up, and I was incredibly tired, so cut me a bit of slack.
The scientific lingo is all wrong. They use "theory" in place of hypothesis like they didn't have a science consultant on the team, they use technobabble in place of actual scientific terminology even when they could conceivably be using actual science. Or they could be using actual science, it's not like anyone could tell underneath all of that smugness.
Then we've got the fact that Paul Feig and Sony alike seem to be oblivious as to what is trendy in technology. McCarthy's character has a cell-phone helmet that looks like something stolen from Doc Brown's workshop circa 1985. She says it's the future, but she seems to have completely ignored Google Glass, which is smaller than that and has more functions, or pretty much any of the other tech we've got today. We don't like wearables that are clunky and make you look like a dork. That's why smartphones have been getting smaller and lighter as time has gone on. Sony makes technology, they should know better! Then again, they put out the PlayStation 4 with outdated tech inside, so maybe they're out of touch with the tech industry these days.
Back to the originally published article!
One of the biggest issues with the movie aside from the writing is the effects. The ghosts seem like they were ripped from Haunted Mansion, and are only one step above being ripped from Luigi's Mansion. None of the ghosts seem otherworldly enough to actually be there in the scene with the actors. This is to say nothing of the CGI ckyline they use, which looks utterly horrendous. They had a really good CGI skyline in The Amazing Spider-Man movies, why didn't they just delete Oscorp tower and re-use that?
Speaking of the city, something which bugged me throughout was the fact that nothing really screamed "New York" about the scenery in this movie to me. I couldn't really put my finger on this until the credits, when they revealed that the bulk of the movie had been shot in Boston and Australia, with a handful of scenes filmed in Triebca and near Columbia University. Then it really clicked with me. That was the main thing that wasn't sitting well with me, the movie had no New York identity despite being set in the city. This is opposed to the original movie, which is very New York in feel, and in look. Sony has made movies with that New York feel in the past, even when they don't actually have all that much actual New York in them, so what was the problem here?
Another fairly major issue, and a complaint that Paul Feig and I share, is that they cut the dance-number from the movie, although I have a feeling we have different reasons. The original script and directors cut have Rowan in the body of Kevin forcing the police and soldiers who have gathered to stop him to partake in a choreographed synchronized dance-number. See, while it sounds kind of stupid on paper, it's a testament to the power and credibility of the villain if he can control a bunch of people like that. It's also a really casual way for the filmmakers to show off what the villain can do. Plus, it really seemed like that was where the whole scene was going, and if I were a villain powerful enough to do something like that, the first thing I would do is march out the president, secret-service and cabinet out onto the Whitehouse lawn and perform Thriller, because I think that would be funny.
While some of the issues stem from casting issues, the majority of the "jokes" in this movie, much less the writing couldn't have been saved by anyone. Not the original cast, not a better cast than this one, not anyone. Emma Stone was approached for this movie and rightfully declined considering the last franchise Sony roped her into. If you changed McCarthy out for her, and stuck Freema Agyeman in Leslie Jones' place, without changing anything? The initial appeal would go up, but it still would have suffered from those trailers, and the movie itself wouldn't have been any better aside from having two prettier actresses in it. Change the cast to all men? Change out the female-centric jokes for male-centric ones? Make Leonardo diCaprio the lead actor and populate the rest of the cast with Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Morgan Freeman? Still can't be salvaged. The issues with this movie lie in the direction and writing, not in the cast.
Speaking of which, this brings us to said director and writer, Paul Feig. Feig is well on record that he thinks that men aren't funny. I think this movie has gone a long way to proving him right, because his direction, coupled with his writing (Katie Dippold worked on the script too, but I detect a bit more of Feig's writing throughout the movie than hers) is some of the worst "comedy" writing I've seen in fucking years. I'm having a hard time telling if the writing on this is worse than the writing in The Angry Birds Movie. They're both very similar, but I think the writing in this movie takes it by a short margin, because it had to live up to the standard set by the last two movies and every other piece of tie-in material from the last thirty years, and they failed, while The Angry Birds Movie just tried to rip off everything under the sun. Then again, the latter film was packed full of memes nicked shamelessly from the internet. On the other hand, this film is full of delivery, direction, jokes, and lines copied straight from various internet comedy series. In fact, I reckon Paul Feig thinks he's an internet comedian. He seems just out of touch enough to think he can pull off the same kind of jokes that work in a rudimentary indie production in a polished Hollywood setting without realizing he's not talented enough to pull much of that off. Paul Feig ain't LittleKuriboh or KaiserNeko, and none of his cast comes anywhere close to the kind of talent Nowacking, Takahata101, Lanipator or Antfish or any collaborator of TeamFourStar's have in pulling off that kind of humor.
Speaking of LittleKuriboh, I will say this, he's absolutely, the movie isn't really worth the half the backlash it got. While you can tell the movie is trying to insult the fans and is trying to insult the haters, it wasn't nearly bad enough for any of that to irritate me. Even knowing that certain scenes were re-shot to incorporate jabs at the internet for the backlash, they don't really come across as nearly as malicious as I expected them to be. That's not to say that the movie has any right to exist, even if the original Ghostbusters had never been made, this movie would have no right to exist. The "jokes" aren't funny, the movie is paced horribly, and it's written like a modern-day SNL skit, and we all know how bad that show is these days.
Despite this film having utterly tanked at the box-office (Paul Feig is on record having said that the movie would need to make north of five-hundred million to actually make money) they've greenlit a sequel for some reason, when they refused to make The Amazing Spider-Man 3 despite TASM2 doing incredibly well at the box-office. Better than X3: The Last Stand did in fact, and Fox hasn't stopped making X-Men movies!
Sony Pictures seems to have a problem with management. They want to reign in Adam Sandler, but they don't. They need to reign in Paul Feig, but they don't. They shouldn't reign in Mark Webb and Sam Raimi, and they do. It's weird.
Not only do they have issues with management, they also have issues with security. Sony has a history of movies leaking out well in advance of their theatrical releases. DVD and Blu-Ray leaks no less. I have it on good authority that the directors cut of the film leaked out on DVD and has been circulating New York City in the form of bootlegs for a good week before the movie came out, and a quick look at The Pirate Bay shows us Blu-Ray and DVD rips of the movie out a good week and a half or so prior to release. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had cam-rips and DVD-rips circulating before the movie had come out as well. This, coupled with the various PSN hacks, plus all of the credible leaks we've seen out of Sony makes me wonder why anyone trusts the company to keep any secrets at all when the idea of "security" seems to be a suggestion more than a rule.
And now, because I seem to have forgotten to leave any space elsewhere in the review to talk about the music, I'm going to address it now. There are a good seven remixes of the classic Ghostbusters theme-song in the movie, ranging from little ditties played on piano, to an orchestral remix that plays during the climax, to an oriental remix, to the infamous Fall Out Boy cover featuring Missy Elliot, to the other four or so remixes listed in and playing during the credits including one by Walk The Moon of all groups! Sony got possibly the hottest eighties throwback group in existence right now and instead of letting their version of the song play during the film, you relegate it to the credits and let the Fall Out Boy version play during the movie?
In case you were wondering, the original version of the song plays for less than a minute early on in the movie during the title-sequence. That's right, Ray Parker Jr.'s original version of the song is barely in this movie. Thankfully, the FOB/Elliot version has a short runtime too, but not short enough.
This brings me to a point I want to make. It's been thirty years since the original movie, and there have been covers up and down the world ever since then, loads of which have been just as good as the original. Why couldn't they have just gotten someone who did a good cover into the main bulk of the movie? Hell, they had Walk The Moon performing the theme-song! Why did they need six other remixes on the soundtrack?!
This seems to sum up all of the problems with the movie, they had a few good ideas, but decided to go way too far and things turned belly-up. Is there a way to salvage a sequel? Yeah. Fire Paul Feig, kick Amy Pascal to the curb and let someone like Joss Whedon handle the movie. Or better yet, turn it back over to Reitman and let him make Ghostbusters III. In the end, I give this movie a 0.9*. I'll see you guys next week with Star Trek: Beyond!

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Image from Impawards.com

J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot/sequel

Star Trek is one of my favorite Sci-Fi franchises. Star Wars, Stargate and Animorphs are a few others. While I didn't particularly like Star Trek: The Original Series for a lot of reasons, this revived my interest. You see, for every decent episode in my eyes, they had many that were extremely uncomfortable to watch. That sometimes happens with shows, but I just found The Next Generation so much more polished, entertaining and fun. Granted, I will watch it occasionally when it's on TV, which says something about the state of Television these days if a show from forty years ago that had a ton of episodes that were just unsettling and horrifying in their content, if not downright boring when you watched them more than once is better then anything else on TV. Besides, I much preferred the books based on TOS to the actual TOS. That might infuriate some people, but I just like TNG better. Why? Well let's put it this way: Holodecks, and a lower mortality rate.
But now, into the actual review.
Star Trek is a 2009 film that is a quasi-reboot for and quasi-sequel to the classic Star Trek franchise, which utterly tanked with the failure of the last film in the series, Nemesis. Whether that was due to them slicing the film up to draw attention to a confrontation that wound up being short, sad, lame and anticlimactic, or due to the fact that it (Almost completely) destroyed a beloved ship and killed one of the main characters, just like in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (And wound up having exactly the same amount of long term impact as the events of ST2 did) the relevance of this statement is fading, so let's talk about Star Trek.
The movie feels as if it's had a few scenes cut out, but not in the amount or severity that its predecessor was subjected to. In the end, it feels a lot tighter, and it's most definitely a better movie. I remember thinking that this was a horrible idea, that it wasn't going to be any good, and that it couldn't live up to the things that came before. Then I saw Star Trek Nemesis.
I'm going to level with you, I liked all of the Star Trek movies except Nemesis. I'm weird like that, but then again I did see them all one after another in the space of about a month.
I've been going off on a lot of tangents in this review, so I'm gonna reign myself in and talk about what the header says I should talk about.
The special effects and music are as good as the ones from the sequel. I've found when review a sequel before its prequel you can't say much about it that you didn't say about the sequel, demonstrated in my Modern Warefare 2 and CoD4 reviews. But here, they're two very different movies. Star Trek is very much about both how the universe came to branch off from the main one, and about how the characters became who they are, and that's something that hasn't been explored much in official materials as far as I know (But there are so many Star Trek books out there I could be wrong and just not know it because I didn't read them) and it makes for a good movie.
One thing I have to complain about is that the kid they got to play young Kirk doesn't look like Chris Pine, the guy they got to play the adult Kirk. Other than that, there's not much. It took a while for me to get used to the idea of Zachery Quinto as Spock, but eventually it clicked for me. And as for the other actors, I pretty much like all of them. Scotty doesn't look a whole lot like James Doohan, but he knows how to act like him. And Leonard Nimoy has a rather major role in the plot as the Spock from the main universe.
The plot is actually both swift and sweeping, despite the fact that the movie seems to pass like Sonic The Hedgehog was tapping into The Speed Force while jacked up on caffeine.
But a movie that passes too quickly is always better than one than has you tracking the time until it's done. It might not be the perfect movie, but in the end that's not what matters. What matters is that it's a better movie then what came before and it's spawned what could be this generations epic science fiction series. Star Trek: Into Darkness is one of my favorite movies from last year, and it's also one of the best I've seen.
Star Trek has a few flaws, but the original series had its flaws as well. As did TNG, DS9, Voyager (Ugh) as well as the movies.
All in all, it's a movie that begs watching, because it's something that's fun to watch. It's something that lets you escape the drudgery of everyday life and step into the shoes of adventurers who travel the cosmos, saving worlds and solving mysteries.
Perfection is not what to look for, because that's unimportant. A good movie has its flaws, but the polished bits overshadow them. Looking back upon when I first saw it several years ago, I remember it fondly. For everything someone might say is wrong with it, it's fun.
10.2*
Check out my review of the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness.