Cartridge by Chris Jeffery

Okay, so I took a moment to absorb the Ninja Turtles trailer. Let’s do this.

So surprisingly, there’s not a whole lot of Ninja Turtles in this Ninja Turtles trailer. It’s mostly Shredder. Or maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering how much human focus the Transformers films have. There’s some implication that Shredder helped April’s father create the Ninja Turtles. We’ll see how that works out.

What we did get of the turtles is… very Michael Bay. Very fast action, to the point that even taking stills from the trailer produces very few clear shots of what we’re looking at. There’s a couple of posed shots, but mostly it all whizzes by. The CG is obviously unfinished in this trailer, and they don’t want us spending too much time looking at it.

Which brings me to what we did get to see. Those eyes, lips, and noses. Everyone kept telling me to hold off my judgement until I saw it in motion, and I can honestly say I hate it every bit as much if not more. No. No likey. Creepy lips. Bad touch.

There’s a lot of shit on the turtles. I haven’t seen this much shit hanging off of someone geared for battle since the last time I went to a renaissance festival. Donnie is wearing a proton pack thing that looks incredibly easy to grab, especially since the one shot where we get to see it has him in close combat.

Also, these fuckers are huge. They tower over the admittedly small Megan Fox, but they’re also big enough to crush a Hummer. They jump onto a brick wall and knock bricks off of it. These guys don’t even need ninjutsu. They’re tanks on legs.

Also, we don’t actually spend a lot of time on rooftops at night.  There’s a lot of snow and daytime New York City, and a few quick shots of sewers and subways. Kind of a shame because the new Nickelodeon cartoon has been doing a great job of keeping the focus on the sewers and nighttime rooftops where the turtles work best, but whatever. The first film strayed from those settings and it worked out. I can deal with that.

There’s also no Splinter to be seen. Not too surprising since I expect his change in race will be difficult to handle. Come to think of it, we never see Shredder geared up either.

So what do I think? Very Michael Bay. If that’s your thing, there won’t be anything here to detract you. It’s not my thing. I was expecting to hate this, and this was exactly what I expected. At least we’re done speculating. This isn’t the indefensible turd the Blue Door script was selling us, but it doesn’t make me excited for the film, or even convince me it will be good. Considering what a huge Ninja Turtles fan I am, that’s not a good thing.