How Does The New 'Power Rangers' Movie Reboot The Franchise While Linking To The Old Series?

Whether you like it or not, there's a new Power Rangers movie coming from Lionsgate, with the studio hoping to ignite a successful new franchise as The Hunger Games comes to an end this fall. We'd heard that the new movie would somehow keep the mythology of the original Power Rangers series intact, and now we have details on just how that will happen.

The beginning of the movie has been uncovered, with details including a reveal of the original Power Rangers, how we meet the new team, and what our new heroes have to do in order to save the planet. But if you choose to keep reading, beware of spoilers for the plot of the movie. Find out more about the new Power Rangers movie plot after the jump!

Heroic Hollywood seems to have gotten their hand on the script or a detailed treatment for Power Rangers, and they reveal the movie begins on Earth all the way back in the Cretaceous period with Zordon and his group of Power Rangers fighting Rita Repulsa. In order to defeat her, Zordon somehow detonates a black hole, and that seems to be the end of the prologue.

Then 65 million years later, we begin to meet our team of new heroes. There's 16-year old Jason working in the garage of a car dealership in Angel Grove, California, and he just so happens to be getting text messages from his friend Billy, described as being brilliant in his own way. At the car dealership, Kimberly eventually shows up, described as a perfectionist on every level, academically and physically. Her father owns the dealership, and isn't to happy when he finds Kimberly and Jason making out in the garage.

Meanwhile, Zack is working at a Dave and Busters. He's seen scoring an impressive number of points on an arcade basketball game. But when an assistant basketball coach offers him a position on the school basketball team, Zack isn't interested because there isn't an "I" in team. Clearly he misunderstood that old saying, and he's got some pretty obvious lessons to learn.

And finally there's Trini, described as a bit of a loner, and we find her in the desert doing yoga. Becoming part of a team will clearly be something she has to get comfortable with too.

The story is set in motion because Billy has been texting Jason about the fossil of a tyrannosaurus rex he found by way of Google Earth, and the two friends head out to a decommissioned military base to check it out. As they try to unearth part of the skeleton, the find a strange coin. In fact they find five of them.

They're power coins from the original Power Rangers. But after arguing about taking the coins with them, Billy throws them back on the ground.

Here's where things start to get a little silly (as if they weren't already). An unprecedented meteor shower collides with the moon, causing insane tidal activity on earth. And when a young mother needs to be rescued from the massive waves that have begun forming in the ocean, that's when Jason, Billy, Zack, Kimberly and Trini end up meeting and working together to save this woman.

Meanwile, a teleportation room suddenly sees the return of Zordon as a being of light, an ethereal version of himself in a glass tube (his whole body, not just his face like in the original series). Zordon is reunited with Alpha 5, where we learn that the black hole tore the fabric of time around the solar system, bringing them into the present.

But Zordon and Alpha 5 aren't the only survivors, as Rita Repulsa has landed in Russia with a plan to steal gold from around Earth in order to rebuild her trusty thug Goldar. For some reason there's a ticking clock of 71 hours left to stop Rita. Director Dean Israelite recently described the script as mature but playful, but this just sounds goofy as hell.

By this time, the power coins have bonded with our five teenage heroes. Zordon isn't sure these primitive humans have the skills in order to become the Power Rangers the world needs them to be. It would take years to train them, but they'll have to come together in 71 hours in order to save the planet.

So there you have it. That sounds about as crazy as you'd expect a new Power Rangers movie to be and since they're using the names of the original Power Rangers from the first iteration of the series, this seems to be a pretty basic reboot. There's no mention of the Putty army in here, but I'm betting some form of them will be in the movie. After all, the Rangers need something to fight, and Rita rarely does her own fighting, choosing to rely on weird monsters instead.

This sounds just as goofy and hollow as the reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which was something that I didn't enjoy at all), but it's likely to hit the right mark with kids as well as adults who still have nostalgia for the imported Japanese series. At the very least, maybe the Zords will be cool to see on the big screen, since they weren't all that impressive in the other two Power Rangers movies. Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

Power Rangers hits theaters on January 16th, 2017.