Ninja Turtles Reveiw

What I liked: Allow me to begin by noting I watched the movie starting about 1 am. That may have impacted my watching experience. I liked the opening credits. I thought they were 1 kind of cool like the books in elementary school with pictures that were photographs of collages. 2 It seemed like a fun homage to comic books. 3 There weren’t actually pictures of turtles. I liked shredder’s suit. When it comes to giant robotic samurai battle suits, this one wins. Granted the only other one I have seen was in a wolverine movie, but still. It had many good features: magnetic throwing knives so you can throw them again and again and again. Millions of spikes. What are they there for? No one knows. Is there a reason that 5 million swords are better than just one or three or 75? Don’t be ridiculous, plus when you order that many you get bulk discounts. They did a surprisingly good job of keeping the reporter girl in the movie given that she has no super powers, cannot be a love interest since the protagonists are underage turtles, is a terrible reporter, can’t fight, and is altogether rather oblivious. I did like the references they piled in, I’m not sure how they were allowed to use all of the references they did but it was good. I want the mutagen lab machine. As best I can tell it has lots of little pokey columns that spin and then rotate around the other pokey columns. I’m sure I could find  some use for it.

What I didn’t: While CG was a huge improvement on the foam suits of the 90’s we are still left with the problem of 6’ tall talking turtle ninjas. I guess the movie can’t really change that detail but it is still a major shortcoming. Also they were raised by a rat. I just feel a kungfu panda moment coming. I remain concerned about the plan that bad guys seem to be using rather frequently recently: releasing X compound from a very tall building to affect all the citizens of X city. This is not a very predictable delivery mechanism. This bad plan was made worse in this movie because apparently this deadly whatever has been in a cannister in the spire on top of the building for at least 10 years. Did they have an antidote to X during those 10 years? Of course not. This is profoundly bad planning. If you mount deadly thing on top of your headquarters, what happens when there is a big windstorm and the spire comes down. Oh no all the bad guys have accidentally gassed themselves. I also feel like the bad guys are unclear on the purpose of blood “remove all of their blood, even if it kills them.” What were the bad guys expecting as the outcome if they removed all of someone’s blood? Apart from the cheesyness and flat delivery and retro 90s design and presence of turtles and rats and still completely unexplained hordes of bad guys (I mean seriously if your boss routinely poisoned people as a training exercise, would you stick around?) can’t think of much to complain about.

Who should watch this: Middle school, target age is middle school.

Would I watch it again? No but would be curious on the outcome of Shredder vs Silver Samurai.