Power Rangers Director Explains Why The Zords & Suits Look Different

03/14/2017 09:31 am EDT

The Power Rangers reboot movie will be in theaters next week, and there is an entire legion of fans who are waiting to see if director Dean Israelite (Project Almanac) has adapted the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers property into something cool and exciting for the modern age.

Power Rangers has been heavily scrutinized all through its production process, and the Internet has had plenty of reactions to each new costume, character, or vehicle that's been revealed. Some of the new designs have been well received, and others (read: Goldar) have been less so. In a recent interview, Power Rangers director Dean Israelite discussed what led him to the new look of the Power Rangers costumes and there Zords, and it seems that at least there was a sound logic behind the decisions.

Talking with Collider's Steve Weintraub on the subject of the Power Rangers reboot's overall design and aesthetic approach, Israelite revealed that the reason things look the way they do in the film, is in order to help distinguish it from so many other big sci-fi/action/superhero franchises, which have flooded movies with colorful costumes and big giant robots:

"A big part of everything for us was to try and create a universe unto itself in Power Rangers - to try and come up with a design aesthetic that felt original to us. And what I mean by that [is] ... Transformers, Star Trek, Star Wars - there's a lot of angular design shapes that are going on. We wanted to bring a more organic design aesthetic and shape-language into the movie.

"And so everything, you'll notice, is very organic - from the ship to Alpha-5 to Zordan and the suits - there's a very organic nature to them, [down to] the Zords. And the Zords become bio-mechanical in a way - and yes they're going to draw comparisons to Transformers, because they're big dinosaur machines. But, I think if you take a real close look, the designs are actually very different, and we are trying to be really focused on these organic sort of shapes and bigger pieces to these machines so they don't feel ... hard to decipher. So that bio-mechanical philosophy entered into everything that we were trying to design."

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Whatever the logic behind it, the Power Rangers fan base (and general audience of moviegoers) has been split on this new approach to the material. Currently, the movie has a respectable 3.51/5 rating in our Comicbook.com user rankings for Non-Comic book movies, which tells us that even with some questionable design choices (like all-gold Goldar), there's still a general sense of excitement for this flashy superhero action origin story.

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