With big budget superhero films, audiences have become accustomed to CG spectacle. And by the looks of it, Saban’s Power Rangers is no exception. But the film’s young cast is quick to defend the production, noting more practical effects were employed than moviegoers might think.
“The spaceship: They built the whole thing in one piece,” says Dacre Montgomery (the Red Ranger). “It’s like eight city blocks [long]. And the perimeter is green screen. I think that is relatable to the whole film. The perimeter is green screen and that’s where you’ll be seeing the CG.”
OK, but what about all those massive kaiju (a Japanese word for “giant monsters”) battles in the film?
“Even with something like the Zord, you’re looking at a 50-foot flight simulator, hydraulic system,” explains Montgomery. “The [visuals of the] Zord is obviously going to encapsulate around that, but we’re sitting in a cockpit flying around. It is real. There’s so much in this film of an epic proportion that we’re actually allowed to have that 80-percent ‘it’s real’ feeling.”
Of course, it helps to be looped into the look and feel of the film from the get-go to really drive home that believability.
“What was left to our imagination, the special effects team made us very knowledgeable on what it was going to look like,” says Becky G. (the Yellow Ranger). “So even before we got into the pod to do our Zord scenes, we had an idea of what that was going to look like. And where everybody else was in the scene. So we actually knew what the scene was play by play, and we knew what it was going to look like.”
