For the record, Dulcea was not just like Jareth from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Dulcea was actually just like The Sorceress from He-Man. A sexy lady who doesn’t age and has great knowledge that helps the heroes in their quests but is confined to a single location. It’s not a very subtle rip-off.

Terrible acting and writing aside, the Power Rangers movie actually does have a truly impressive amount of hand-constructed scenery and costumes that are worth admiration. Buildings and ruins that would be green-screened and replaced today were painstakingly crafted using chicken wire and plaster for the movie. The fight choreography is also surprisingly good. They used flying liberally in the scenes, and there’s lots of great wire work in there. Fiona especially liked the move where the White Ranger flying kicks a bad guy in the face a bunch of times in quick succession.

“That’s the best move because you can’t actually stay like that (horizontal, in midair) in real life, so it’s super powerful,” she explained.

The costumes worn by the villains are particularly notable. In the time of CGI, it’s far more cost effective to paint some dots on someone’s face and fill in the details later. Every one of the monsters in Power Rangers is meticulously constructed, and obviously underwent hours in a makeup chair.

That being said, when they do use CGI in this movie, it’s uncomfortably bad. So bad, your child isn’t going to understand what’s happening.

“That looks like a video game,” Fiona said. “Why does that look like a video game? It’s like, “I’m a video game robot. Don’t control me, though because I hate being controlled.’” (Her words. My guess is as good as yours.)

You see, my daughter was born in 2009, as year as Pixar’s Up. Fiona telling me that the CGI in Power Rangers looks like it’s a video game is, frankly, generous. It looks like it could have been from a video game that came out in 1999. Everything is too shiny and doesn’t quite integrate into the scenes around it. The ultimate battle scene in the film is between the Rangers in their terribly computer animated new Zords and Ivan Ooze who has taken possession of a giant ant robot’s body so his face is superimposed onto its head. It takes out any sort of weight and suspense the battle could have had because it is so very, very artificial looking. The use of CGI in the movie is jarring, and I have trouble seeing how it could possibly have been a good decision to utilize it so heavily.

To recap, Fiona loves Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, because she loves Alpha 5 (who has approximately 4 scenes total in the film), she thought the air board the White Ranger rides was really cool and now wants to get into snowboarding; she thinks the idea of having a robot that is shaped like an animal is pretty great. It’s reason enough for a 7-year-old to sit through multiple viewings of this crap, but as an adult I just couldn’t get into it. And I loved this movie when I saw it as a kid. I thought it would be a fun experience to see it again.