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Saw this myself this past weekend. I didn't hate it, but some irreconcilable differences with the plot, dialogue, and script kept me from really loving it. Megan Fox... did her best, I'm sure, but this particular version of April O'Neill needs something more. I concur with a previous poster who said that her role in this movie needs a good comedic actress who can pull a good "What the crap" face, so that Whoopi Goldberg doesn't have to pull all the weight of her scenes (however briefly she was in). The plot and its various incongruities have already been hashed over (I think I most concur with Robot Hobo that the whole movie would have been much better if we didn't deal with Shredder at all, and this movie was about Eric Sachs being Baxter Stockman and doing mad scientist stuff, and if some action and plot beats weren't so blatantly ripped from other movies, mostly Batman Begins and ASM 2. ) But where the movie failed biggest for me was in terms of theme, particularly regarding the essential thrust of family and being a teenager. See, this new origin story ties together Splinter, the turtles, April, and Sachs together by having them all be started by an experiment with April's dad, bringing a whole notion of destiny to the setting that I don't really care for. One of the most poignant things I remember about the original series is that the family that happens between Splinter, the turtles, and their various friends like April is that the entire thing happens completely by accident. There's nothing binding the turtles together, no reincarnated spirits or surprises in biology: the four turtles and the rat just happened to be together when they were splashed with mutagen, and the rat just happened to have been owned by a master of ninjutsu. It's the same idea with a lot of comic book heroes, particularly Marvel Comics, of kismet granting heroic power to somebody and leaving it to each separate character what to do with it. It was happenstance that brought the turtles together and made them powerful, but it was choice that made them family as it was choice that made them heroes. Here, the only real accidental part was that they happened to be ninjas. I freely admit that this could be me being old and bitter, but that's my two cents. However, I really did like the interaction between the turtles, and join my hopes with the others that the sequel allows them time to hang out together, because that's been my favorite part of every TMNT movie I've seen. All of the voice actors nailed the characters spectacularly, and although there wasn't a lot of character growth, they were all really easily identifiable. The action was also really crisp and easy to follow (something that is becoming very welcome). So in the end, not the worst thing in the world. Also, perhaps now that we can establish that Megan Fox is indeed hot, we can cool it with the creepy innuendos, hmm?
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Aug 26, 2014 21:16
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 08:41 |
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The movie felt really disjointed to me and I'm not really in love with the new origins of the Turtles and how April ties into it. I think I would have liked the origin a bit more if they'd just used Hamato Yoshi instead of April's father and sort of folded those origins together to something more akin to the comics origins. Just like with Transformers, the human comedy elements are a real detriment to the movie and almost all of that could have been cut. Almost all of April's scenes as a reporter were some of the worst in the movie, too. However, I found most of the Turtles comedy stuff funny. Mikey's stupid comments all the time, Donny being goofy, it all felt great. Arnett made me think they really needed a Casey Jones figure in this movie, though.
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Aug 29, 2014 07:25
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JediTalentAgent posted:Just like with Transformers, the human comedy elements are a real detriment to the movie and almost all of that could have been cut. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they threw together a lot of those scenes in a weekend because they're super cheap to film and they needed to pad out the film when the budget ran out and they couldn't complete non-essential Turtles effects shots.
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Aug 29, 2014 08:36
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I wouldn't at all be surprised if they threw together a lot of those scenes in a weekend because they're super cheap to film and they needed to pad out the film when the budget ran out and they couldn't complete non-essential Turtles effects shots. All the Megan Fox comedy stuff, the more I think about it, is just horrible. She handles the TMNT and Splinter RELATIVELY well and calmly. Then she's in the newsroom, in her house, and she's completely scatterbrained and dumb and crazy-sounding. Does she even show the photo of the 'vigilantes' to her boss, or just Sacks? Other than a few comments from Mikey, I was sort of surprised how they made the whole thing really unsexualized compared to Transformers except for one butt shot and the credits scene. But overall, it was just sort of pleasantly average. It's got some really stupid plot points that we just are asked to accept out of nowhere, way too convoluted with certain things, but I get the feeling they were really aiming at that pre-teen kid market by making it something just clean and nice enough that their parents won't mind setting them down in front of, but just dark and scary enough that kids don't feel like they're watching a 'kids' movie. It's almost like a watered-down Transformers, and maybe that why I sort of 'liked' it. It never really hit the same points of being so extreme and exhausting to watch that I found myself just accepting the movie as it was and not coming out of it just stuck on the things I hated. long edit: I've heard of there being reasons why the film is so disjointed because of its production history, but I haven't had a chance to read up on those yet. I often hold up something like Daredevil or Green Lantern as comic book films that compressed several potential movies worth of plot into a single film, but TMNT 2014 feels strangely different than that. In its current state, the story feels more like someone took the first 13-episode TV season storyline edited down to a single approx. 2-hour movie, if that makes any sense. JediTalentAgent fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 07:46
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JediTalentAgent posted:I've heard of there being reasons why the film is so disjointed because of its production history, but I haven't had a chance to read up on those yet. If you can track down a copy of the 2012 script where the Turtles were aliens you'll notice that roughly 15-20% of the scenes in the final product are lifted from that old script even though the rest is radically different. If it feels like you're watching a different film at certain points during Ninja Turtles that's because you are. 
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Aug 30, 2014 10:28
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In a lot of ways the film reminded me a bit of the first X-Men movie. You've got Splinter pretty much following a lot of the Professor X arc from that film, a villain attempting a terrorist attack on NYC, the showdown on tall structure, the focal heroic lead character is the loner bad boy with a angry streak, and the team leader is the least developed character of the lot. I'm sort of surprised with how little I remember of Leo doing anything in this movie. The focus on Raph isn't unique, though. First film had a lot of focus on him, the CG movie about 8 years ago I think similarly featured him heavily (only saw about 20 minutes of it).
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Sep 2, 2014 21:57
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Raphael is the center of attention for a LOT of tmnt media, even though most of those times it's the exact same story over and over about how he learns that he is angry and maybe he shouldn't be so angry and then i the next one that lesson is forgotten completely.
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Sep 2, 2014 22:28
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 08:41 |
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Light Gun Man posted:Raphael is the center of attention for a LOT of tmnt media, even though most of those times it's the exact same story over and over about how he learns that he is angry and maybe he shouldn't be so angry and then i the next one that lesson is forgotten completely. Also, at some point he has a spat with Leonardo.
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Sep 3, 2014 01:59
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