Here's a recent news flash I posted online just yesterday:
http://www.moviescene.nl/p/156312/nieuwe_trailer_ninja_turtles
http://www.moviescene.nl/p/156308/character_posters_ninja_turtles_online
These are not my turtles. What else can I say? They don't look like the turtles I grew up with, they don't sound like the turtles I grew up with. However, upon rewatching last year, the turtles I grew up with didn't seem that great as I remembered them. It was a painful tete-a-tete with my cherished childhood memories that suddenly left sort of a sour aftertaste. The early Nineties' cartoon was definitely targeted at kids, and just didn't seem so awesome as once it did as an adult. (At least the action figures still do, but that's a different thing.) As for these new Turtles, the phrase 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' immediately comes to (my) mind. If the trailer is any indication, this movies offers everything the cartoon used to offer in a (half) nutshell. All the core ingredients are there, including the hokey humour telling us we should not take any of these ludicrous situations involving mutated animal/human hybrids at all seriously. Like we were going to. The characters are largely identical, except Shredder doesn't seem Japanese (or at least the actor who portrays him, William Fichtner, doesn't). The quartet of reptiles and their rodent sensei, as well as dashing star reporter April O'Neil (Megan Fox, take it or leave it) seem pretty much unchanged in nature.
More so in look, obviously. I can't deny giving the four titular protagonists more divergent styles of clothing instead of having them all dress the same except for their colours (and their signature choice of weaponry) isn't such a bad idea as it gives the characters more distinct personalities. Too bad these characters seem written around such overly archetypal lines. They always were of course, but you never noticed it that much because they all looked so similar, making one team of characters seem more dynamic than it actually was. I'll admit to the kids in the street these Ninja Turtles might very well seem like the next cool thing, as the studio and its partner-in-profits Hasbro get ready to groom them for buying movie tie-ins they don't really need, just like the cartoon made me do back in the days. I won't go in the typical cynical, whiney state of complaining Michael Bay (the producer, if you didn't know yet) raped my childhood, since voluntarily revisiting my childhood heroes, or at least their audiovisual equivalents, caused some emotional trauma in itself by my own hand. I do regret the choice of director in this case though, as Jonathan Liebesman has so far mostly made very bad movies driven by expensive but bland visual effects coupled with an abundance of American patriottism. It's likely this movie will therefore prove to have been just his cup of tea, then.
No evil transdimensional disembodied brain in this one? I guess they're saving that for the sequel.
