There’s nothing particularly wrong with this super-familiar, been-here-done-this, move-along-nothing-to-see-here trailer. Except that it’s supposed to be about the Turtles. And it’s not. Not really.
Really, it’s about Michael Bay. He just keeps making the same noisy, frenetic, dark, and poorly edited ‘action’ movie over and over, each time tromping on any real individuality or creativity in the produce he’s ‘licensed.’ (Hey, somebody look up the Jeffersonian difference between “license” and “liberty” and get back to us,okay?).
Watch below and brace yourself for severe deja vu. The big WHOOMP sounds, the superfast cuts, the speedmo-slamming-to-slomo cuts. Think, Armageddon, Bad Boys, Transformers, Transformers, and Transformers, and you’ll quickly see that the Turtles, just like Megan Fox, are just cinematic Legos clicked into place for another Michael Bay production.
And if you’ve ever wondered if two minutes of oversaturated crash-and-burn can actually be boring…wonder no more.
What hurts most is the wholesale dismissal of the Eastman/Laird origin. Yeah, yeah, we know all about the characters’ origins in parody of everything from Frank Miller’s Daredevil to Dave Sim’s Cerebus. We were there, man. But the trailer tosses out the whole gritty, street (or more precisely substreet) origin of pet turtles lost in the sewer and covered with ooze in favor of their intentional creation by a couple of mad scientists. See, one of the many cool things about the Eastman/Laird version was that they were our heroes, street people, secret, hidden, accidental. Now they’re just another super-soldier program gone wrong. (And whose brilliant idea was it to intetionally create heroes based on turtles? What, mammals weren’t good enough for you. ‘Cause, you know, turtles are naturally so fast and smart and deadly…
Anyway: it’s on its way, like it or not. Be entertained or forewarned, but here’s the new trailer.
Oh, and one last thing. Is Splinter in this movie at all? We know that there was casting news about it way back when, but not so’s you know from this trailer. It’s all April, scientists and CGI…
