4-Color to 35-Millimeter: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

In 2014, Nickelodeon, Paramount, and Michael Bay teamed up to reboot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was wracked with controversy before they even started filming. The end result is — mediocre at best, as it’s a retread of the 1990 film while managing to do pretty much everything worse than the prior film. The great superhero movie rewatch looks at the 21st-century reboot of the heroes on a half-shell.

An excerpt:

The CGI Turtles are hit-and-miss as well. Mostly, the detail work is excellent—I like that each Turtle has a distinct look beyond the color of their mask, from Raphael’s full bandana rather than a domino mask to Michelangelo’s surfer-dude shell necklace to Leonardo’s button that has the old NYC token logo on it to Donatello’s steampunk-ish accoutrements for his gadgets. But the movements are a little too over-the-top. The fight scenes are more like watching a videogame than actual physical living beings jumping and hitting and kicking and swinging. By this point, CGI had evolved to the point where computer-generated images had mass, but the 1990s movies (especially the third one, where the animatronic turtles used actual martial arts moves) felt more tactile.

Advertisements