Low Wattage: POWER RANGERS

It wasn’t far into Power Rangers, a crude, clangorous and nonsensical attempt to make big budget franchise potential out of a live-action Saturday morning adventure show, that I felt my brain squinting to understand. So crass, ugly, and erratic, I found myself longing for the relative classicism of Michael Bay’s sumptuous visual eye and Brett Ratner’s crisp pacing. (Nothing like a terrible movie to throw under-appreciated pop filmmakers into a better light.) It’s not that I couldn’t follow it. There simply wasn’t anything to follow. Subplots are assembled haphazardly and developed in odd fits and starts. Worldbuilding careens between over-explained jargon and assumed prior knowledge of franchise lore. It’s at once punishingly faux-adult – built from buzzwords and edgy innuendo – and mind-numbingly juvenile – “They found their robo-cars,” I believe I heard the villain howl at one point. Who is it for? Why was it made in this way? Who will it delight, children’s entertainment buried under layers of phony character drama and filters of skuzzy dark grays and blues? Its incompetence is stunning, every canted angle, wooden melodrama, jumbled motivation, and confused exposition adding up to a punishingly dull chaos.

The plot, such as it is, is a generic superhero origin story, director Dean Israelite treating it much the same way he did time travel in his similarly smeary Project Almanac: as a fuzzy mess of familiar beats played off key. We meet a troubled Breakfast Club of diverse teens whose personal lives were seemingly assembled at random from suggestions drawn out of a hat labeled “sad backstory.” The white guy (Dacre Montgomery) is a former football star nearly killed in a car crash. (He happened to be fleeing police at the time and now is under house arrest, except for Saturday detentions.) The funny black guy (RJ Cyler) is on the spectrum, mourns his dead dad, and likes amateur treasure hunting. The white girl (Naomi Scott) has a confused subplot about sexting in which she’s somehow a bully we’re to think of as a victim. The Latina loner (Becky G) is maybe a lesbian. (Her subplot is half allusion, half wishful-think-piecing, if you ask me.) And the Asian guy (Ludi Lin) takes care of his sick mother, and for some reason they live in an abandoned boxcar by the railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere. Fortuitously, they all happen to be at the same quarry late one night when they accidently discover magic rocks that give them superpowers and also a massive underground spaceship that’s waited 65 million years for the Chosen Ones to find it.

The rest of the movie is simply about the teens overcoming their personal problems and interpersonal conflicts by training to become primary-colored armor people driving robo-dino-cars into battle against a green monster lady (Elizabeth Banks camping it up as the ridiculously named Rita Repulsa). She’s assembling a golden warrior giant out of fillings she rips out of the mouths of homeless people. Yes, all that and the teens are trained by a robot (voiced by Bill Hader doing a Patton Oswalt impression) and a wall from which protrudes a big Bryan Cranston face towering over them and speaking through what looks like one of those Pin Art toys. Any one bit of this has potential, but thrown together as a pile of clichés in a random hodgepodge of dim and poorly constructed images, it just grates and grinds. So humorless even the comic relief isn’t funny, it’s at once indebted to the mechanics of its source material and yet, in its muted monotonous teen-issues melodrama, also completely embarrassed of its candy-colored infantile roots. This is a movie for no one, cast expensively into the multiplex in hopes it’ll please someone. Unless you’re that someone, there’s nothing here for you.

Ill Communication: ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Like its main character, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has a big heart hidden under a surface of affectations. When the film, yet another fussily stylized coming-of-age Sundance winner, began, I was worried it was primed to get on my nerves. It charges out of the gate with self-consciously flippant narration wrapped around a teenage boy’s college application letter. Thomas Mann is the boy, Greg, the “Me” of the title. He opens the film delivering verbose voice over in a mopey monologue breaking down the social groups of his quirky high school over a montage of precisely framed tableaus. This set off all the twee faux-indie navel gazing alarm bells in my head. But then a funny thing happened. The movie settled into its rhythms, allowing its characters space to breathe and its style room to reflect an evocative teenage mood. By the end, it had worn down my defenses and moved me.

In the opening, Greg explains his plan to stay invisible during high school, friendly enough to avoid getting picked on, but distant enough to avoid close associations with any one group. He acts like he’s uninterested in making meaningful human connections, but really he’s just scared of getting hurt. Better to have no real friends than risk losing them. Instead, Greg spends his time enjoying culture, his sociology professor father (Nick Offerman) and mother (Connie Britton) having encouraged his serious-minded eclectic exploration of everything from food to literature. But film is his favorite, marching through the Criterion Collection canon and making his own little parodies (with titles like My Dinner with Andre the Giant) in his spare time. It’s not long before this movie’s arch stylization is put to good use reflecting Greg’s worldview. It knows it’s a movie as much as he wishes his life could be understood that way.

His closest acquaintance is a fellow cinephile, Earl (RJ Cyler), who likes the same movies and collaborates on the parodies. They hang out every day and have fun together, but they’re not friends, exactly. Greg calls him his co-worker, but we, and Earl, know better. Over the course of the film, Greg slowly lets down his emotional barriers as he allows himself to step out of the constricting comfort zone he’s built. The first step is a shove. A classmate, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), has been diagnosed with leukemia and Greg’s mother forces him to go over to her house. Despite neither teen feeling especially thrilled about this diagnosis-inspired play date, an embarrassed friendship forms, dropping the embarrassment as they begin to feel comfortable around each other. But Greg remains painfully socially awkward, as the movie thankfully doesn’t become glossy teen romance. It remains realistic about how much we could expect a person so stubborn could change in a relatively short period of time.

Because Rachel’s the “Dying Girl,” we have a good idea about where this is going. But she’s not completely reduced to her condition or used exclusively as a prop for other’s emotional growth. Though she is that, too. Greg and his outlook remains the focus, the characters turning around him vaguely defined, outside his immediate interest. But as he gets to know them, they come into focus, relationships developing in a sweetly fumbling way. The supporting ensemble capably fleshes out what could otherwise be stock eccentric types. Jesse Andrews’ screenplay, based on his novel of the same name, has familiar teen comedy elements (wacky mom (Molly Shannon), wise cool teacher (Jon Bernthal), hellish cafeteria, set cliques, accidental drug use). It’s self-aware and loaded with artifice (split-screens, title cards, winking narration, precisely dropped soundtrack cues), but also totally sincere in its evocation of a pinched emotional perspective. Greg feels things so deeply he holds himself back, preferring movies to the real world because it’s a channeling of emotion. (How many film fans can relate?) Human connection isn’t so easily contained.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who has mostly directed TV episodes for Ryan Murphy’s Glee and American Horror Story, is no stranger to letting loose with all manner of wild emotions and attention-grabbing style. Here he deploys an extravagantly directed showiness with long unbroken takes, tight framing to emphasize strong feeling, dramatic focus pulls, cutaways to animations and flashbacks, blocking to enhance emotional distance by pushing characters to the extreme sides of a wide scope frame. But it’s in service of a delicate tone, matching the wild imagination and moody inner life of its main character. As he grows closer to the Dying Girl, and realizes how important his friendship with Earl really is, the film draws them closer in the frame. Soon he’s no longer sharing the shot, but sharing the space. The dramatic style settles down, decreasing its posturing as Greg does.

Its climactic moment – you can probably guess the broad strokes – is its most beautiful, a scene of pure earnest connection mediated, but not superseded, by cinema. The camera focuses on Cooke’s eyes, wet and trembling, the light from a projector dancing colors across her face as their connection reaches its purest expression. But this moment doesn’t solve Greg’s problems, spiking a potentially sentimental moment with a more realistic picture of the emotions and situations involved. Greg gains confidence in risking connection despite possible pain. There’s enough reflection in this end to prevent the film from becoming only blinkered approval of his initial attitudes. So even though the other characters only exist here to put the protagonist on the path out of adolescent selfishness, they remain individuals. He learns to see other people as continually unfolding surprises, with more to learn the more you stick around and get to know them. Films can be like that, too. Sometimes if you take a chance, let your guard down, you can be rewarded with meaningful, maybe painful, connection.