Escape to the Movies: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Kids Deserved Better Than This
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
I hate when people say things like this. No, I wasn't blinded by nostalgia when watching the Transformers movies. Why? Because I never experienced the Transformers as a kid, so I didn't have any recollection of them.arc1991 said:
The movies sucked because they suck.
With all honesty, I was really going to give it a chance, even though they look...horrifying to say the least. I was hoping for either
1:It surprised me and its good
-or-
2:This is crap...but good enough to have a beer or two with friends and laugh at it the whole time.
From the premises alone though, and them looking like something that should be a mob in fallout 4 or the next Metro game.....yep, looks like this one is a pass.
1:It surprised me and its good
-or-
2:This is crap...but good enough to have a beer or two with friends and laugh at it the whole time.
From the premises alone though, and them looking like something that should be a mob in fallout 4 or the next Metro game.....yep, looks like this one is a pass.
Beating a dead horse by now I know.
Michael Bay's the producer, not the director. While the producer role might have some say in the final product they're usually not the one making the creative decisions for the film itself.
To put that in a perspective. Steven Spielberg produced the Transformers movies and I rarely hear anyone accusing him of childhood diddling.
Anyway, on to the movie itself.
It's not terrible and I didn't hate it.
To be fair, I was pretty much expecting it to take a big shit on my kitchen floor and all it really did was fart and blame it on the dog.
The overall story beats are pretty much identical to the first film. Foot Clan crime wave, News Reporter works on story at the detriment to her career, uncovers Turtles, accidentally gets them attacked by The Foot and taken hostage, remaining turtles have to mount a rescue and then rooftop battle for no good reason.
The really unfortunate thing about this flick is that there's only a hand full of really small tweaks it would have to make to the story to pull off a much better final product.
Needing the Mutagen to make an army of Mutant soldiers, or to enhance the Shredder's own powers would have been fine.
The poison mist and antidote plot doesn't really work or make any kind of sense.
Keeping Sachs as Shredder's pupil is fine, have Splinter learn his Ninja skills through a combination of the Mutagen and observing Shredder and the Foot would have worked just as well. There was no need to involve April in their origin story at all. (Plus it avoids the awkward exposition dumps from Splinter revealing plot critical points he had no way of knowing.)
Michael Bay's the producer, not the director. While the producer role might have some say in the final product they're usually not the one making the creative decisions for the film itself.
To put that in a perspective. Steven Spielberg produced the Transformers movies and I rarely hear anyone accusing him of childhood diddling.
Anyway, on to the movie itself.
It's not terrible and I didn't hate it.
To be fair, I was pretty much expecting it to take a big shit on my kitchen floor and all it really did was fart and blame it on the dog.
The overall story beats are pretty much identical to the first film. Foot Clan crime wave, News Reporter works on story at the detriment to her career, uncovers Turtles, accidentally gets them attacked by The Foot and taken hostage, remaining turtles have to mount a rescue and then rooftop battle for no good reason.
The really unfortunate thing about this flick is that there's only a hand full of really small tweaks it would have to make to the story to pull off a much better final product.
Needing the Mutagen to make an army of Mutant soldiers, or to enhance the Shredder's own powers would have been fine.
The poison mist and antidote plot doesn't really work or make any kind of sense.
Keeping Sachs as Shredder's pupil is fine, have Splinter learn his Ninja skills through a combination of the Mutagen and observing Shredder and the Foot would have worked just as well. There was no need to involve April in their origin story at all. (Plus it avoids the awkward exposition dumps from Splinter revealing plot critical points he had no way of knowing.)
Saw it yesterday, was one of the few movies I felt like just leaving but decided that's a childish thing to do.
It's...Really bad, like awful. I didn't mind the look of the Turtles that much, as I sort of like that they made them tall. But the action was terrible except the Splinter/Shredder fight, Megan Fox as April was worse than she was in Transformers, Splinter looked like an abomination that serial killers dream nightmares off...The Shredder was awful and his suit was utterly fucking awful, especially his "Two long blades...*snkkkt*Four long blades*snkkkkt*EIGHT long blades*SNKKKKT!!*I'm the fucking Swizz army knife bitches!"
I had hopes it'd been like the Transformers movies, something I could enjoy but that is greatly flawed...It wasn't, and I think that's because Bay did NOT direct this, as it even lacked his sort of semi-fun "Things Really Blow UP"-attitude.
I liked Vernon though...Which is a sentence I never would have expected myself to say.
It's...Really bad, like awful. I didn't mind the look of the Turtles that much, as I sort of like that they made them tall. But the action was terrible except the Splinter/Shredder fight, Megan Fox as April was worse than she was in Transformers, Splinter looked like an abomination that serial killers dream nightmares off...The Shredder was awful and his suit was utterly fucking awful, especially his "Two long blades...*snkkkt*Four long blades*snkkkkt*EIGHT long blades*SNKKKKT!!*I'm the fucking Swizz army knife bitches!"
I had hopes it'd been like the Transformers movies, something I could enjoy but that is greatly flawed...It wasn't, and I think that's because Bay did NOT direct this, as it even lacked his sort of semi-fun "Things Really Blow UP"-attitude.
I liked Vernon though...Which is a sentence I never would have expected myself to say.
I take this as a reference to him questioning the intelligence of those who disagreed with his ASM1&2 reviews?jobu59749 said:
That had more to do with his behavior on his blog and less to do with his reviews themselves. Anyone who follows Bob on his blog, twitter, etc knew what he was going to think about the Amazing Spider-Man. Why? Because he was utterly trashing it since the moment the first movie was announced to be a thing. Every casting choice, every costume design, every production shot and even every trailer was completely lambasted by Bob every chance he got to do it.
In short, he had decided to hate it on principle rather than on merit. And while I think Amazing Spider-Man 2 is far, far, from perfect Bob treating it like it's a travesty of film is a bit of an over reaction and does make some of us question his professionalism.
He can be biased all he wants, hell the best critics ever are always going to be biased. Siskel and Ebert hated some of the best horror or action movies around and loved other movies that were clearly crap. The problem is that he seems to feel it's necessary to continue attack a series of movies that in the long term will be just considered some average pop-corn flicks and also insult those who do like it and feel that Bob didn't give it a fair shake.
Takashi Miike also made a kids movie called Great Yokai War, this is how it turned out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy1ITOpC9Jc
It can be done, just not with that director/producer.
Failing that, they could just get NINJA from Ghana to produce the movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SEBmy-M4RQ
It can be done, just not with that director/producer.
Failing that, they could just get NINJA from Ghana to produce the movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SEBmy-M4RQ
Every review I've read of this has convinced me that it's far, FAR worse than I had ever expected it could be. Most of them point to it wanting to simultaneously be all Grim Dark Batman style and Cowabunga Dude Retro 90s, whilst having terrible acting, plot holes up the arse, generic action set pieces and worst of all product placement for Pizza Hut.
Just awful.
Just awful.
People complained that they were changing a Japanese character into a white guy? Guess racism only works one way. Otherwise flopping a white guy into anything else is cool?
I'll be honest, I had more fun at this movie, just laughing at it than I did with Guardians of the Galaxy. Although I see that GotG is the better movie, I just got more enjoyment out of TMNT.spoonybard.hahs said:
Heimdall from Thor says hi.Lightknight said:
EDIT:
Of course, in the case of Heimdall, the backlash was really all about racism. Because in a comic universe where the writers took all things Norse and pretty much did whatever the hell they wanted - including putting Asians in and Robin Hood ripoffs - god forbid you randomly cast a black man in the role of a "traditionally white character in a traditionally white universe."
Also. if white male wasn't the dominate actor in films and television, you'd have something of a point.
The same should be applied to video games. Just because "it's for kids" doesn't mean it has to be a formulaic collectathon platformer with no other features and no sense of humor about itself.RJ Dalton said:
To see proper "for kids" material, I suggest Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra (but not the goddamn Shyamalamadingdong film), Phineas and Ferb, most everything by Pixar, Jak and Daxter (the first one at least), and Calvin and Hobbes. I have two kids, one is almost 4 and the other is 1, and watching them grow and learn has led me to be incredibly annoyed with many alleged "kids" entertainment due to the lack of treating them like intelligent humans. When my son, the older kid, watches TV, it's PBS shows and nature documentaries that don't pause to let the kid repeat a new word, they just talk about things in a somewhat simpler manner so that kids can comprehend and enjoy. Malcolm is incredibly smart and spent a few minutes the other day explaining to my wife and me about how octopi don't have bones, but do have "smoke" when they need to get away. He's not even 4 yet.
I don't see how that's possible. If GotG was the better film, it should follow you'd have more fun with its real humor, tighter writing, better acting, and just.... better everything. *sigh* This is Signs all over again.lightsentry said:
Not really, the humor was a little bit off base in Gotg and it had tighter script, but there were a lot more cringey moments in gotg that really pulled me out and maybe they were cringey on purpose, but the tone felt a lot less consistent than TMNT. The acting was sort of...a wash I feel, I really did not like Chris Pratt to be honest, just felt like I've seen the character so many times and the movie wrote in some scenes that he had to carry hard and it felt like he dropped the ball a bit for me. That being said, Megan Fox couldn't really carry a scene either, but there were a lot less where she was forced to. Also I didn't need to go read wikipedia after TMNT to figure out what the heck was going on.spoonybard.hahs said:
TMNT wasn't that bad of a film, really. It was dumb, yeah. Silly, yeah. Filled with giant turtles punching dudes. Yeah. And a lot of jokes and some culture references.
So, you know, same old same old. I enjoyed it, and i'd see it again.
It was about 100 times better of a reboot then Godzilla.
So, you know, same old same old. I enjoyed it, and i'd see it again.
It was about 100 times better of a reboot then Godzilla.
How is anything in GotG more cringe-worthy than Mikey's hard-on for April? And you really didn't need to read Wikipedia to find out what was going on in GotG. If you did - or felt you had to - you weren't even trying to pay attention. You say Pratt was meh because you've seen the character before but... How is TMNT didn't? MovieBob was not kidding about how much it riffs off of The Amazing Spider-Man, nor how you could literally take any other property and plop into its story and get the same outcome.lightsentry said:
Because I didn't need to care about the characters to enjoy TMNT and I did need to enjoy the characters to enjoy GotG. The movies focused on different things and were structured to take advantage of their focus and I just feel like the strengths of TMNT carried it higher above its shortcomings while GotG got bogged down in what it was trying to do.spoonybard.hahs said:
EDIT: Also I've never seen either Amazing Spider-man
Hello Heimdall, I see you made it into the movie anyways. Cool.spoonybard.hahs said:
I'll personally admit that I far preferred the new Heimdall but I didn't really have any preferrence or knowledge of Heimdall from before. Samuel L. Jackson (or Lawrence Fishburne if I were to repeat that idiot radio show that confused the two with Samuel L. Jackson on the line...) is an amazing choice for Nick Fury. I mean, I'd heard of him and seen him in practically every cross over but I didn't really care about him or follow his story.
But let's be honest. These are generally not the big title characters. Shredder is. He's the main villain. How many people do you think had actually heard of Heimdall before that movie? How many non-comic book readers had heard of Nick Fury? These aren't the characters that have spread into larger pools of knowledge. These are niche characters that were ripe for changing come mainstream.
I'll grant that Shredder was also a little more specifically Japanese. What with the martial arts and teams of Ninjas it would be a little extra weird to make him a white guy.
Heimdall happens to be a more than 1,000 year-old character. Even though I don't care about the comic book character I can understand not altering a character that was part of even a dead religion. So it's a bit different but Marvel clearly doesn't care about appropriating other cultures for profit.
Wait, you mean in the US media where the US population is over 72% white (includes white Hispanic) that the majority of the actors are white too? I'm shocked and appalled, the nerve of them! [/sarcasm]
A fair world has proportionate representation. It does not give more representation to any group than its size warrants. You don't see me watching a Bollywood movie and complaining that there aren't enough white people. I get it, people are Indian there. They aren't being racist in casting the most common demographics they have there.