Okay, I haven’t posted in a long time. That’s mostly because I’ve become a boring adult with a boring job in the boring real world and usually use my free time doing anything that doesn’t resemble work, which means I’ve accomplished a significant amount of Netflix bingeing in the past little while However, I have experienced a plight so horrific that I feel compelled to raise a warning voice to anyone who may fall an unsuspecting victim to it as I did: the newly released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
For those of you who may not know, I am quite selective in my choice of movies for several reasons. First, movies are expensive. As much as I may have dreamed once upon a time of being a movie critic and getting to see all movies for free as part of my job, thanks to bloggers and vloggers everywhere, I may never realize that dream and have to pay from my meager salary for the ever rising costs of a theater ticket. So yeah, I’m going to be careful with what I spend my funds on.
Second, speaking of money, what we choose to spend our money on is the only real power we, the middle and lower classes, have left in this capitalistic world of ours. It’s the vote of our dollar. The movies we pay money for sends a message to the millionaires who make the movies that says: hey! make more of this! So yes, I feel a bit of responsibility for the cultural society I live in to do my little part to improve what it calls entertainment.
Finally, I ascribe to the notion that what kind of entertainment you consume can affect you as a person. However, unlike many I know, I’m far less concerned about being desensitized to violence or sex by graphic content of such in films as I am about being desensitized to dull, unimaginative, unintelligent, asinine, unchallenging, or coddling ideas. Art should never be any of these things, and, since film is a creative endeavor, it is art.
So Blake, you may ask, why then would you go see a film that had such horrid reviews and bad press? Let me be clear: I love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Growing up with three moms, I really didn’t have a chance to be exposed to a lot of the icons that my peers adored: X-Men, Power Rangers, Spider-Man, Batman, etc. But I had the Turtles. You can ask my mom; she still has my old Turtles action figures and Technodrome (still so cool). And granted, I didn’t want to see this film. I would have been perfectly happy never having seen it . . . but a friend of mine with a particularly astute sense of schadenfreude made me promise that I’d go with him months before it came out. At the time I tried to believe that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. When the reviews came out and my fears were realized, I had no choice but to fulfill my promise and go so my friend could “drink my tears.”
Well, luckily I didn’t cry. I had thought that maybe if I went in with really low expectations it wouldn’t be so bad. Oh but it was so bad. It was sooooooooooo bad. Was my childhood destroyed just a tiny bit more than it had already been by the 2007 animated TMNT? No . . . it was destroyed almost entirely. Any hope that I may have had before that perhaps someday a decent Turtles film adaptation could be accomplished, unhampered by neither clunky 90s effects (those rubber suits) nor clunky screenwriting, have been all but obliterated. So for those of you who may have even considered it, I implore you: stay away. Here, in no particular order, are ten reasons why:
10. The Screenplay
Okay, let’s just deal with this one now, since it’s the largest. I could probably write an entire post of how awful the script is for this film. In fact, it would be a great candidate for the book How Not to Write a Screenplay. But, since we’re already entering TL:DR territory, here are some highlights . . . or lowlights:
– Megan Fox the Exposition Fairy
– not even a farthing of measurable character development
– some actual lines of dialogue: “RAPHAEL!!!!” (screamed for no apparent reason); “tonight, I will have turtle soup” (in what was, based on its dead serious delivery, supposed to be Shredder’s stone-cold villain line); “SHREDDER!!!!” (also screamed for no apparent reason); and (no, I am not joking), “you killed my father.” (I wish I had brought a notebook, I’d have so many more).
– The Derivative Drinking Game: I’m not a drinking man, but my friends who do drink are welcome to try this. Take a shot every time you recognize something from a different and better superhero film. Here are some hints to give you a little (and I do mean little) head-start: a father killed in a lab “accident” by his turncoat partner; a villain planning to poison a city by releasing a dangerous gas into the air from a skyscraper (that’s the third time, now?); the genius zealot who turns out to be the villain; a young reporter not being taken seriously; a dramatic “death” scene; using pop-culture lines associated with the franchise in the actual script; giving a character a line that turns the traditional pop-culture name of the heroes into something awkward, because that’s still funny, right? (I’ll stop here)
9. Poorly Filmed Fight Sequences
Maybe I should just called this “poorly filmed in general.” For a film that does use some pretty impressive CGI to create the turtles, it’s annoying that so many of the fight sequences are so difficult to follow. What directors of the Bayhem movement (more on that later) fail to understand is that the human eye can only take in so much action at once. If you never give us time to see what is going on before moving to the next thing we will have no idea what the hell is going on. And like followers of Bayhem, this director has no concept of a static shot. I think I literally counted three times in the whole film where the frame was not moving. It’s boring and one-noted. Stop it.
8. Whoopi Goldberg and the Job of Ridiculousness
Yes, Whoopi Goldberg is in this film. And yes, it is heartbreaking to see this accomplished and talented actress plodding through the horrific scenes that she’s in. Megan Fox’s Amy O’Neal works for Channel 6, where apparently all adults act with the professionalism and maturity of junior high students. I can’t take seriously O’Neal’s plight of not being respected as a reporter because I can’t take seriously that this job she has (interviewing fitness instructors who are promoting exercising like birds . . . no I am not joking) or these co-workers she has resemble anything in the real world. Whoopi, I realize you may have needed a paycheck but this is just sad.
7. Convenience Buttons
I counted these twice, but perhaps there’s more (another fun drinking game). At one point our reptilian heroes are having their oozy blood drained, and our brave Megan Fox must save them by pumping adrenaline to their system. How convenient that the shiny, medical console-thingy has a touch screen with nice large red widget on the home screen that literally reads “Adrenaline Injection.” The other is the “Lab Abort” button (yes, that is what it says) in the “climax” of the film that causes steam/smoke to spray from the ceiling which apparently stops bad things from happening.
6. His Master Plan is What?
If there’s one pet peeve of mine in films, even cartoony superhero films, it’s villains that have no clear purpose, direction, or goal. Say what you will about Disney movies, at least their villains always know what they want and go after it. But villains with vague intentions seem to be more and more the standard as witnessed in films like Into Darkness, The Amazing Spider-Man (both) and even Skyfall to an extent. I find myself asking more and more in films with clear antagonists: what are they after? What’s the endgame here? In this film, on multiple occasions, our antagonists express that their ultimate desire is to “own the city.” Here’s my first question about that: what? No, really, what the hell does that mean? (Even better is when said villain who owns a freaking castle talks about how rich he’ll be . . . ummm . . .) I think the problem here can be pinned on Christopher Nolan. His Joker was so popular that people seem to think that a villain with that kind of reckless abandon and seeming directionless . . . ness can somehow be the norm. What people fail to realize is the Joker should be the exception, not the rule. Not all villains can or should be chaos-seeking anarchists . . . I mean, I guess if you really want to do that, you can, just commit to it. Anything’s better than a villain with no real clear objectives or goals who doubles as a walking advertisement for Under Armour (yes this is the case).
5. What Have They Done to Donatello?
The bow-staff-wielding , purple-masked Turtle is my favorite, as I’m sure he is to any smart person who needs a cool hero, so I’ll make this short and sweet: Donatello is supposed to be intelligent and bookish in an appealing and sophisticated way . . . sexy smart, if you will. He should not be geeky and nerdy and freaking wear glasses with tape around the bridge!!! Okay I’m done.
4. The Megan Fox Drinking Game
Looky there! You get three drinking games! This one’s quite simple. Take a shot any time you see Megan Fox do one of the following things (be prepared to get wasted) –
– becomes the Exposition Fairy (see above)
– says the word “vigilante” (I don’t know why, but her delivery of this one word is so awkward).
– pulls out her freaking phone to take a picture (there is a moment she does this that defies all logic and sanity)
– says another character’s name for absolutely no purpose that exists in reality
– and finally, my favorite, any time she makes this face:
Or really anytime you catch her holding any sort of expression with her mouth slightly open like that. Is there a reason she can’t close her mouth?
3. Moments That Defy Logic and Have No Relation to Reality
I can’t tell you how many times I held my hand out to the screen in disbelief, thinking, are you serious? That made no sense. Here’s a sampling (again, how I wish I had had a notebook to better document this)
– An explosion rips through the Turtles sewer hideout, dropping rubble onto Splinter. April somehow manages to remain unscathed and keep her yellow leather jacket free of both tears and even dust and also overlooks her newly found but dying rat friend who just got pummeled moments before. Instead, she follows after the captive Turtles (without being caught) who are clearly being kept alive and who she is clearly not in a position to help.
– Sensible actions seem to be difficult for Miss O’Neal, even as a child. When the fire is set to the lab that burns her father’s body, rather than being traumatized at finding her dead father, or, if she were more astute, recognizing that he was shot first, she instead turns her attention to a rat and four small turtles that she will brave an inferno to save (and again, no signs of having walked through a burning room).
– At the end of the film, the Turtles keep the top of skyscraper carrying earlier mentioned poisonous gas from hitting the ground because if it does it will explode and the gas will be released into the air for a ten-block radius because that’s totally how gases work. Let’s keep in mind that prior to them getting the said skyscraper top safely and gently to the street, pieces of this building have been falling into the onlooking crowd for about fifteen minutes, so I’m pretty sure they’re going to notice the massive hunk of metal falling to the ground with four large reptiles onboard. Also keep in mind that this all happens in broad daylight. Yet the Turtles thank April after the event for “keeping their secret” and not exposing them to the media. Ummm . . . what?
2. Audience Confusion
This is, I think, the biggest struggle to overcome for any Turtles film adaptation. Sure, franchises like X-Men and Spider-Man have had to decide what audience they wanted to appeal to, but I think it’s harder in this case because the idea itself is perhaps more juvenile and far-fetched than most others. Anyone taking on this endeavor has to ask: do we try and create new fans from a younger audience or do we appeal to those who feel nostalgia for the characters and do something a bit more adult? Or both? This film was all over the place. The humor ranged from what would appeal to a five-year-old to what would appeal to a fifteen-year-old. The complexity of the story and characters were such that a snail or a tree could grasp them, but sprinkled here and there were some fairly adult moments, including one in which a character clearly and deliberately checks out Fox’s bent-over derriere. Plus the choice of language wasn’t exactly suitable for anyone under the age of ten (give or take, depending on your level of tolerance). Any attempts at depth were . . . well, actually, I’m not even sure we were going for depth at all, even though that may have seemed the case a time or two, meaning adults aren’t going to have much if anything to take away, and kids have no morals to the story.
1. The Rise of Bayhem
What is most disturbing about all of these things is what it portends for the future. Contrary to popular misconception, Michael Bay did not direct this film, he produced it. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, we have indulged this man’s loud and obnoxious pipe dreams of being an important filmmaker for so long that he now has enough money to finance films. What’s worse, TMNT leads me to believe that he has a following, a cult, if you will, of young filmmakers who will stroke his ego by replicating his style* and turning out the same kind of mindless schlock that he has been blasting onto the silver screen for over a decade, thus making him more money with which he can make more films. These are dark times.
*The style of Michael Bay (or “Bayhem”, as one vlogger called it) – never-static shots; distracting CGI; void of beats, pauses, or even a gulp of air; the script usually has some element of nostalgia to draw in adults; the actors are usually just one rung above B-List (if that); helicopters and lampposts. Lots and lots of helicopters and lampposts.
And it is precisely for this fact that I ask of you, my four blog-readers, to cast your vote elsewhere. Demand better of Hollywood. Don’t justify this one just because you love the Turtles. You’ll be heartbroken anyway. Don’t let the opinion of your friends who say “oh it’s not that bad” deter you. Don’t even let the idea of a movie so bad it’s entertaining lure you into putting more money in Bay’s pocket. He must be stopped. Think of your other beloved childhood memories. Think of the one you love the most. Now imagine Michael Bay getting his hands on it . . . gross. Do you want to see the Michael Bay-produced Pokemon film? Or the MB Dexter’s Laboratory? Heaven forbid the MB Reboot or Powerpuff Girls. If we are to stop this madness, if we are to stop the Bayhem, then we’ve got to start by keeping his films from always being number one at the box office.
Okay, if only because it means it would get made I’d let him do Reboot.
-Blake L.
[Awkward Pause] 