The Power Rangers Gritty Reboot Gets a Gritty Reshoot

The new Power Rangers movie already looks to be a much grittier remake of the original franchise, since the very first trailer has shown us these teens with attitude getting into all sorts of trouble–and getting detention, too. Plus, Rita Repulsa’s new costume and demeanor have made her seem a lot less campy and more serious than she did in her original iteration. Overall, Power Rangers seems to have lost the cornball spirit of the TV show.

Apparently, the first cut of the movie just wasn’t gritty enough, though, because Power Rangers has just gone into reshoots at a surprisingly dismal location: the Burnaby cemetery in Vancouver, Canada.

The fact that the movie will have a cemetery scene provokes the obvious question: will there be a fatal twist? Will one of the Power Rangers die in battle? That goes beyond just baseline “gritty” all the way into “tragedy.”

Characters have died before in the various iterations of the Power Rangers TV series over the years, but it’s rare, and it’s usually the villains who die while the heroes survive. It would be pretty unusual to see one of the main characters fall in battle, and definitely a very different direction to go in comparison to the light-hearted, goofy, kid-friendly version of the original TV series.

I’d be surprised if Power Rangers ended up killing off one of the core cast, but perhaps a close friend or relative of one of the Rangers will die. Even that would be surprisingly grim by Power Rangers standards, though, particularly compared to the very early years of the TV show.

Earlier this month, Cheat Sheet reported that the film would probably be rated PG rather than PG-13, and that director Dean Israelite described the narrative as follows to IGN: “I read the script and was really surprised by it and thought there was a really cool, contemporary, mature but still playful, buoyant and fun take on the material, and was updated in a really interesting way.”

That flies in the face of the fact that now we know there’s a cemetery scene in this movie. Doesn’t sound very “buoyant” to me! But I guess we’ll have to wait and see, yeah?

(via CBR, image via YouTube screencap)

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Maddy Myers

Maddy Myers, journalist and arts critic, has written for the Boston Phoenix, Paste Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and tons more. She is a host on a videogame podcast called Isometric (relay.fm/isometric), and she plays the keytar in a band called the Robot Knights (robotknights.com).

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