Gritty reboot smacks of live-action Halo and Gundam.
If you were born in the 1980s, chances are you watched at least one iteration of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on TV (most likely FOX, after getting home from school). No matter how involved your love affair with the show might have been, we all get the cheese factor now. (Seriously.) The fight choreography, kid/daytime-friendly dialogue, and sparks-a-flying-man-in-a-rubber-suit effects are mid-90s facepalm-worthy, for sure.
But a gritty, live-action take on the franchise, that screams Halo: Nightfall? Sign me up. And that’s exactly what Joseph Kahn (Torque) and Adi Shankar Dredd) have pulled off with a new 15-minute short. The work-safe version is embedded up top, while a NSFW version was pulled from Vimeo earlier this afternoon.
The short stars James Van Der Beek (Dawson’s Creek, obvi) as Rocky (the second Red Ranger), and Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica) as Kimberly Hart (the original Pink Ranger), as the “war between two empires,” takes a decidedly dark and amazing turn. There’s even a subplot involving Tommy the Green Ranger, and meth! But we’re all here for the giant robots, naturally.
Director Kahn is calling it a “deboot fan film,” and it’s an unofficial project. In other words: There’s no feature-length movie or Netflix series in the works here (for now). As for the inspiration behind the demake, Shankar talks about the child solider angle, and fighting for “an intergalactic figure…in a tube,” (referring to Zordon) in a second video found here.
Source: io9
