Let me prefix this post by saying that I did not get to grow up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was right before my time, so the only real memories I have of it is of my older brother watching it. I never tried to get into it and therefore just never "got it". Until today there was only one thing TMNT I had watched, and that was the CG animated film from 2007.
It doesn't feel that long ago that everyone on the Internet was going crazy with the news that Michael Bay had gotten his hands on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, TMNT for short, franchise. Most of them were dreading what that would entail, they dreamt up various scenarios filled with explosions and half-naked women throughout, most of them cringing at the very idea. When it was rumoured that Bay was trying to make the Turtles aliens people got even more upset, they felt it was too far from the source material and was too bizarre. Personally I might've seen it was too far from the source material, but I found it slightly less bizarre than mutated turtles in the sewer growing up while being trained in the art of ninjutsu by a rat, but that's a thought for another time. Bing, bang, boom, suddenly it's today and the film is released.
I didn't quite know what to expect going in. I had picked up various memes and tropes from the show via other shows and films, and I have heard people talk about it, but as I said above, I never got into it. The fact that Michael Bay was involved was probably my major indication of what I could be walking into. I've never been a big fan of Michael Bay, but I've mostly not hated what he's made (except for maybe Age of Extinction). I have a soft-spot for his in-your-face blockbusters. They don't pretend to be anything they're not, they're just fun and entertaining.
TMNT started off with a kind of weird montage segment, seemingly mimicking old-school opening credits, but with a lot of exposition as well. We're told about the Turtles and the villains, and there's a lot of slow-motion shots of swords cutting apples, bananas, and video tapes. All of this is essentially pointless as we're introduced to all of this again at other points in the film. Unfortunately it turned out that that was definitely a trend in this picture. The film is filled with pure exposition segments. It feels like we're in a story told through bulletin points rather than a fleshed out text, but at the same time each bulletin point includes far too much information. There are segments that only last a minute or two that sets up entire plot lines for the film. We never get any chance to let things settle in, or for us to ponder up the implications of what we've learned. We go straight onto the next item on the bulletin list. Well, as straight at they will allow us.
Because one of the more off-putting features of the film is how many unnecessary segments there are. Smacked between the expositions are transitional segments that do nothing but tell us what's going to happen in the next one. One of the earlier examples of this is when April O'Neil, Megan Fox' character, is going to go back to an earlier location to interview someone.
In Segment A she tells a friend that she's going to do that, then in Segment B we see her call the guy she's going to interview to set up the meeting, then in Segment C we get to the actual location.
I see now that Segment B may sound more important here in writing than it appeared in the film, but it felt as if someone tried to fill in a "plot hole". Not a real plot hole, but the kind people often think is one. The kind when someone gets in a car and then instead of showing us the entire car ride we just cut to where they ended up. It seemed like someone thought "but how does she get from there to there?" even though that was explained in Segment A by the character saying she was going there and getting on her bike. And it gets more and more obvious as more kinds of these segments appear.
The Turtles themselves are fortunately quite fun. They're funny, interesting, and at the very least a parallel to what I was expecting them to be like. The biggest issue with them is that we don't get to see them nearly enough. April O'Neil acts as the main character of the film for the first twenty minutes, researching various crimes and eventually stumbling onto the Turtles in the dark of night. Then we enter a strange limbo were both the Turtles and O'Neil are main characters, despite them often being separate. This could've been handled well, I've seen it done before, but the way they chose to do it here was to stay only with O'Neil for the first part of the film, and then immediately start following the Turtles when they're introduced. It seems off and unnatural, it's not common to just switch main characters like that. Especially not when they keep going back and forth between the sets of characters like they've all always been the main ones. The film could definitely benefit from more of the Turtles, from the get go.
Overall I thought the film was completely okay. It was entertaining enough, I didn't start wondering how much longer the film was going to go on, but it wasn't especially good. The dramatic bits felt misplaces, and most of the time it just got too dramatic all together. It didn't come off as a cute mix between comedy and drama as other blockbusters, it just came off as stark contrasts from different tones of films blended together. I say you watch it if you want a decent CG blockbuster, it's alright enough, and it's not three hours long like certain other blockbusters this year. *cough*
I doubt I will remember it for long, however.
Epilogue:
There was one slightly meta thing that amused me slightly throughout the film. Remember a little while back when some on-location pictures of Megan Fox went around the Internet?Megan Fox in tight clothes jumping on a trampoline. People went all over this about how sexualised the film was going to be, when funnily enough, this entire segment is about how silly those kind of things are. O'Neil has to do that for her job, and immediately after she switches into more comfortable clothes and rants about having to do fluff pieces like that. Her camera man (played by Will Arnett) says that people like that sometimes. Just having fun things to look, and that everything doesn't have to be so serious all the time (somewhat channeling Michael Bay perhaps). But throughout the film otherwise she is hardly sexualised at all. She wears normal clothes that cover her up more than some people you'll find in a normal street, and despite being the "love interest" of one of the Turtles there's not a lot of "she's so hot" stuff going on. Which was refreshing as it seems that's almost always Megan Fox' function in films like this. Too bad she acted rather poorly in it.
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