Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 Trailer

The 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes movie was awful, let’s get those cards on the table right here at the start.  I did a full review of the film at the time but I get the sense in the time sense it came out there’s been a tendency by most to mellow on its awfulness.  More and more the defense I hear from people is “it’s for kids and it’s not that bad aside from the changes,” to which I say: no, it is exactly that bad.  I’m not even really a fan of the Ninja Turtles so much as a thoroughly concerned observer and even I know the movie is terrible, mainly because it insults you with every chance it gets. 

Seriously, the writing in the film is so incredibly broken and incompetent that the finale is hinged on a call-back to something that was never established in the first place.  The movie is essentially a first draft that received no polish under the assumption people wouldn’t care.  However, it made a whole lot of money at the box office so now we’re getting a sequel just a scant 2 years after the original, pretty much the same approach as the Amazing Spider-Man franchise that the new TMNT draws so heavily from.  Now we’ve got the first trailer for that new film entitled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and surprise; it doesn’t look that bad.

There’s a lot going on in this trailer and I’m willing to bet not all of it’s in chronological order so I’m going to start with some of the smaller things I liked before building up the major plot points and possible reveals.  Firstly, the visual design of the turtles still looks grounded in the ugly and rubbery facial animations that marred the last films but things seem a little bit more stripped down and cleaner in terms of all the paraphernalia that blighted the turtle outfits last time around.  Mostly, this one seems to have a thoroughly improved visual palette, both in terms of a lighter visual design over all compared to film one’s darker visualization and the colors being a lot brighter and more neon this time around.  The whole “dark nighttime” setting of film 1 was kind of in deference to the classic Mirage comics, which genuinely were grittier, but in all honesty it was there because night time is easier to render through CGI.  That’s why a lot of action films that require CGI but don’t have huge budgets tend to throw the action in dark sequences like Paramount’s equally terrible Star Trek reboot series or the aforementioned Amazing Spider-Man.  I’m not sure if this changes means there’s going to be more budget behind this film or not but I like the ambition at the very least.

That lighter visual identity also seems to walk hand-in-hand with the cartoony and more comical tone of the trailer.  One of the reasons I find the claim that the 2014 film was “for kids” to be such a non-argument is that it really wasn’t.  Sure, it had giant humanoid turtles that did kung-fu but they tended to play second fiddle to the hot reporter chick and when they did show up they usually played the part of frat bros.  Certainly the action and core subject was aimed at kids but the characterization and focus seemed more in line with the 13-year-old male focus that would fall in line with Paramount’s central toy franchise Transformers.  So, the fact that this trailer seems to favor dopier action, comedy, and a more direct transliteration of the designs from the 1987 cartoon is a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

Speaking of which let’s talk about actual content here because there’s a lot of it and it’s honestly pretty awesome.  The Turtle Van looks great and I especially liked that opening highway sequence of shooting man hole covers at the motorbike bandits.  What I like even more than that is the quartet of villains on display in this trailer.  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have some of the coolest villains in comics so the fact that we’re getting Bebop and Rocksteady alone in live action is pretty great.  I especially like how much those characters have been faithfully recreated, especially compared to the hatchet job done on classic villains in a lot of recent adaptations.  Not only do they look right (seriously, thank God these guys aren’t just dudes in suits like the Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2) but the actors seem to be having a blast with the “dopey crooks turned Hulk-level beings” role. 

We also don’t see much of him but it looks like we’re getting a soft reboot of the Shredder in this film and while I’m not a fan of him ditching the mask he looks pretty cool.  Shredder has translated shockingly well across a lot of mediums with the turtles and they really failed him in the last movie so hopefully we’ll get something a bit more classy and plot-central this time around.  Additionally there’s Baxter Stockman played by Tyler Perry doing his best Nutty Professor impression.  I’m not exactly sure why Stockman is on hand or why they got Perry for the role but he looks pretty fun in this, especially after his turn in Gone Girl proved he could turn in a well-directed performance.  I’m not sure how much of Baxter’s evil science will show up here as in the comics and cartoons he’s created all manner of killer robot hordes and even turned himself into a fly man at one point.

What I don’t care for that much in this trailer is Casey Jones, the Turtle’s equivalent of the 5^th Power Ranger, showing up.  He’s played by Stephen Amell, TV’s Green Arrow, and given that I’ve always found him the weak link of his own TV show having him pop up in the movies isn’t that much of a thrill.  The action with Casey as a kind of hockey based sports vigilante looks pretty fun and I like that one shot of him roller skating away from Rocksteady but the scenes of he and April hanging out are risky to say the least.  I mentioned earlier that it’s a Paramount standard approach in toy franchises to push the title heroes to the side to allow human characters to take the center of the action as a way of letting disaffected 13 year olds feel like they aren’t enjoying a robot or turtle movie but something slick and cool so there’s a major chance this flick could end up “The adventures of Casey & April, also some Turtles or something.” 

Finally, let’s talk about the giant sky portal and robot army ripped directly from Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Battle: Los Angeles and plenty of other giant sci-fi action blockbusters that have peppered the summer season for the last 5 years.  While that may not have looked too original I’m hoping that it turns out to be a build up to Krang and the Technodrome from Dimension X.  Though not a part of the original Mirage Comics Krang’s role on the ’87 cartoon has really cemented him as a major part of the Turtles mythos, which has always made it kind of a glaring oversight that he’s never made it into the live action adaptations.  Granted, his visual design is decidedly goofy but no more so than the Turtles themselves and a lot like Galactus even though his design is goofy it’s incredibly memorable and brimming with personality. 

If those ships really are a build up to him though, I get the distinct premonition Krang and Galactus will have another major commonality in that they’ll both be getting the shaft in act 3 of their franchise’s sequel because there’s no way you could cram Krang of Dimension X into the 3^rd act of this film and do it well.  Hopefully they just go with having it be the technodrome, assembled from Stockman’s science for the Shredder and don’t try and force Krang into the mix by turning him into some kind of guiding AI for all the individual robots as a very, very, very lose adaptation of his central “brain in a robot body” concept.  

I’m not sure this new iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles really has the stuff in it to be a stab at actual depth and meaning like the first live action film was but this movie, so far, looks like a big step towards actual fun and trying to appeal to an audience actually excited by the source material rather than one that’s ashamed of it.  As I mentioned I like the tone and palette of this trailer and overall nothing in this gave me the kind of reflex disdain I got from the trailer’s for 2014’s Ninja Turtle’s movie but I’m still pretty skeptical.  

The biggest red flag for me is the release time, this is more or less the exact same release schedule employed by Sony for the now defunct Amazing Spider-Man films and there’s a good reason for it.  It’s usually an indicator that even though the first film made money it didn’t really generate the buzz and merchandise sales that the studio was looking for so they ramp up a soft reboot sequel as quickly as possible trying to address audience concerns.  That approach didn’t help Spider-Man and I’m not sure it’ll save the Turtles either but at least they’re aware something was wrong with the previous movies, that's a step forward. 

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