POWER RANGERS: The Morph the Merrier

Director: Dean Israelite
Writers: John Gatins, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney
Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Ludi Lin, Becky G., Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston, Bill Hader
Runtime: 124 mins.
2017

One of the first lines of Power Rangers is a joke about masturbating a cow. Power Rangers features three characters who are or have been dead, but never bother to dwell on the ramifications of that fact. The only straight white male on the Power Rangers team is the de facto leader, and he is told outright that his opinion matters more than the others'. In Power Rangers, wise mentor Zordon is an enormous cock, berating the Rangers constantly, acting needlessly petty, and manipulating them towards his own ends. Power Rangers ends the way Toy Story 3 would have ended if the toys actually did fall into the fire pit, and instead of getting burnt up, they inexplicably become one powerful Megatoy that kicks the purple bear's ass.

Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa is both sexy and grody, and she drips everywhere she goes. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa goes a lot of places, yet she only seems to saunter casually whenever we see her on the move. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa also straight up murders a bunch of people and eats their gold.

In Power Rangers, a building may explode despite being a jewelry store with no flammables inside. Power Rangers features an autistic character who figures out the location of an important MacGuffin using only maps and the power of his autism. The Power Rangers crew slaps a character so hard she flies into space. The CGI in Power Rangers is so vomitously designed that one can tell that the red ranger's Zord is a T-Rex, but the rest are pretty much a grab bag of prehistoric-seeming Transformers knockoffs. There are about ten scenes in Power Rangers in which the corporate franchise Krispy Kreme is either mentioned or attended.

KONG: SKULL ISLAND - Run Through the Jungle

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Writers: Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly, John Gatins
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman, Corey Hawkins, John Ortiz, Tian Jing, Toby Kebbell
Runtime: 118 mins.
2017

Twelve years ago Peter Jackson's King Kong was released. Hot off the monumental success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson tackled another passion project. The result was an overbloated labor of love, its failures symptomatic of Jackson's indulgent impulses, its successes clearly issuing from passion and immense skill. Its legacy endures thanks to the lavish attention Jackson paid to Skull Island. The film was swimming in Jackson's signature talent for all-encompassing dread. That mystique is embodied in Kong himself, as motion captured by the great Andy Serkis. Jackson/Serkis's Kong is a high mark for CGI creations. He is the soul of the film, a brute that exudes empathy, and one of a long line of Serkis motion capture triumphs.

PJ's King Kong exhibited all the strengths and pitfalls of the auteur-driven style of Hollywood filmmaking. Now a dozen years later we have a film that exemplifies the producer-driven model. For Kong: Skull Island is, to nobody's surprise, the impetus for a shared cinematic universe. Kong and Gareth Edwards' Godzilla are slated to tussle in 2020. To establish this universe Warner Bros. has tapped second-time film director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, no doubt a talented creator, and no doubt one who doesn't have the clout or the vision to stand up to the studios. Kong is an exercise in style over substance. It's clear that there are strong ideas at the core of the reboot, but they suffer from a backslide into generic blockbuster territory.

GHOST IN THE SHELL: A Pale Imitation

Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando
Runtime: 107 mins.
2017

Ghost in the Shell is a thin movie, thinner than the white sheet that covers a spectral being. You suspect there is some substance beneath the surface, but once you remove the sheet and look at it directly you discover that there is nothing to be seen. The apparent substance was in truth the echoes of a long distant, watered down source material.

To be more specific about Ghost in the Shell's thinness: it's an adaptation of the then-ahead-of-its-time 1995 anime of the same name. The bare bones of the plot remains the same. Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a cyborg with a human brain. She's the centerpiece of a squad of variously-upgraded soldiers working for the Hanka corporation. They track down this cyber terrorist fellow Kuze (Michael Pitt) in order to assassinate him, but Major finds that he has answers to questions she's been asking about herself. In the original this interplay has a philosophical bent; in the new release, it's all profanely literal-minded.