Adi Shankar and Joseph Kahn’s short film POWER/RANGERS premiered online just a few days ago. I felt like it deserved a review, but the Quick & Dirty treatment seemed unnecessary for a film that’s only 15 minutes long. Instead, I’m just going to share a few of my thoughts about it.

The video is posted below, for those who haven’t seen it. (NSFW due to graphic violence.)

I was excited when I first learned about this on Wednesday morning. After all, Power Rangers was basically my favorite thing ever when I was a kid, and a version of the show with a darker, more serious tone felt like something I had always wanted as an adult. The professional cast and high production values only made me even more excited. I was certain that POWER/RANGERS was going to make my day… right until I watched it.

I didn’t like it. It made me uncomfortable, but not because of the violence, or the dark tone, or some melodramatic insistence that my childhood was being ruined. Rather, I got the sense that, despite this ostensibly being the work of fans… the people who made it didn’t like Power Rangers all that much.

I feel like the most successful re-imaginings create new stories while reaffirming what made the original work great in the first place. In other words, a good reboot doesn’t fix what’s wrong so much as it gives new context for stuff that already works. Consider how Batman Begins, the prototypical modern gritty reboot, doesn’t change anything about the core character or the theme of his origin story – at the end of the day, it’s still about one man’s decision to use a unique combination of iconography, gadgets, and non-lethal force to avenge his parents and clean up his city. Though the tone and aesthetic are unique, the film embraces the elements that have always made Batman appealing; the new vision doesn’t come at the expense of old fans or leave new ones unable to connect with other iterations of Batman.

That was where POWER/RANGERS let me down. The things that had always defined Power Rangers for me – teamwork; friendship; the certainty that justice would prevail; and, of course, silly multicolored jumpsuits – just weren’t there. They had just been removed wholesale, as if the old TV show had become popular in spite of those things, not because of them. It was an idea of “cool” expressed by someone who seemed embarrassed that he had ever liked Power Rangers in the first place. Compared to the original work, this was unrecognizable – violent and action-packed, but lacking a sense of style or identity. I wondered if there had been a point to this beyond ironic shock value.

It was a relief, then, when I read the director’s interview with HitFix and learned that reactions like mine were exactly what he was trying to get. In short, the film is a thought experiment, designed to show how unnecessary the “gritty reboot” treatment is by taking it to its logical extreme – creating a straight-faced, ultra-violent version of one of the silliest nostalgia properties out there.

The clues, of course, had been there all along. I should have realized that this wasn’t a completely serious project by the time I got to the dubstep credits theme.

At any rate, given that new context, I’ve changed my mind about POWER/RANGERS. It’s actually an outstanding film that fully achieves its purpose. It successfully points out that the “dark and gritty” treatment is not one-size-fits-all, and can even take away the identity of the original work. It also shows that adding violence/swearing/drug use does not automatically make a story more “mature” – in fact, it can make the cast and crew look like jackasses. Finally, with the number of people I’ve seen un-ironically praising this film and expressing a desire to see a feature-length version, it serves as a reminder of how few people really think critically about why they like something – about what it is that makes a movie or TV show or video game unique, special, and worth experiencing.

(In other words, if you genuinely like this film, I suspect that you like the dark aesthetic more than you currently like Power Rangers.)

I’m glad that POWER/RANGERS exists as a short film and a thought experiment. It’s important to explore art in unconventional ways. However, I can only hope that no one in charge of the planned 2017 Power Rangers movie is drawing any actual inspiration from this. That can only end badly.