Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Worst TMNT Iteration Ever, or Even Possible

The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a piece of garbage that is bad even by Michael Bay standards.

Because I am a terrible writer, I am just going to make this review in the form of a list. I might get a job at Buzzfeed!

Things that are terrible about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

April O'Neil

I don't really care much about most social issues. I know that racism, sexism, and other kinds of bigotry are wrong, and wish there was less of them. But I don't care. I don't feel anything. There's no emotional component to my views on these things, so it's really easy for me to be indifferent to - or even amused by - some pretty blatant transgressions of these kinds.

That said, I do get offended when someone rich and powerful decides to slip in some blatantly offensive thing in my entertainment and expects society to just dumbly accept it like he didn't do anything wrong. In these instances, I feel like I am being personally insulted, like the creator is playing a trick on me and expects me not to notice. Or, worse, that the creator is a much stupider and more terrible person than I am, and his wealth and power are an insult to all of human civilization.


Michael Bay's previous transgression that stands out in my mind were the two blatantly racist 'ghetto' Autobots in either the second or the third Transformers movie (I can't be bothered to check). Anyway, April O'Neil is this movie's version of those two alien minstrel show robots.

Megan Fox's only role in this movie is to look hot and be rescued. She is to give the male characters boners, which will then motivate them to do things for her, thus moving the story forward. We are constantly reminded of her boner-granting powers throughout the movie. It is her defining character attribute.

I knew this going in of course; Fox is a terrible actress, and as far as her acting career is concerned boner providence is perhaps her biggest defining attribute as well.* I just didn't know how stupid it would be.

There's a scene where, for literally no reason April pulls out a camera during a car chase and takes photos of their machinegun-wielding pursuers. This pointless demonstration of lack of self preservation is simply an excuse to show her butt on the inside of the truck, have Will Arnett (who is driving the truck) look at said butt, and then for there to be a joke about how Will Arnett enjoys looking at the butt that he is looking at and encouraging her to continue to be a stupid person who is uninterested in remaining alive so he may continue to enjoy looking at the butt that he enjoys looking at. 

April O'Neil is an ambitious reporter, but seems to lack any kind of critical thinking, self-awareness or communication skills that would make her able to, you know, be that thing she is ambitious as. When she tries to do 'real reporting', she is fired for behaving exactly like a blatant lunatic in an unfunny comedic scene with her boss Whoppi Goldberg. After this point her uselessness and reliance on men to do anything shifts into high gear. And it's impossible to talk about this without talking about

Vernon Fenwick

April O'Neil's cameraman partner Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett), who is the comic relief character in a movie where such a role should have been amply provided by the titular turtles, is a more important character than April O'Neil.

Turtle fans - do you even recognize this character? Incidentally I stole this image from another blog and couldn't be bothered to crop it, sorry about the Will Arnett comparison, because who cares. 

This is particularly notable because Vernon Fenwick is a character from the 80s cartoon so unimportant to the franchise that a friend had to point out to me, a man-child well acquainted with these silly fighting reptiles through everything they've been in, that he wasn't an original creation.

How has such a canonically irrelevant loser more important than the turtle's best human friend? Well, it's entirely through him that April is even able to participate in the story. April relies on him to give her rides to everywhere plot stuff needs to take place. He is her complacent chauffeur because he has a boner for her and wants to do sex to her. He continues pursuing this goal even after, partway through the movie, he comes to believe she is severely psychologically disturbed. (I find that a tad creepy.)

So basically, instead of just giving April a driver's license, Bay had to resurrect a forgotten nobody and have him in every scene the female lead is in. But it gets even worse. In the final showdown with the main villain, in which Vernon, April and said villain, armed with a gun, are in a room together, it's Vernon who single-handedly defeats the villain while April huddles in a corner or something.

Michael Bay can't, or simply won't, write a movie with a female character who isn't just eye candy who is lusted after by a dorky looser so hard that the dorky looser will do great things to please and/or protect her. Women are only useful as things to inspire men and to be enjoyed by them. I am appalled by how sexist this movie is. Nobody has the right to make me be appalled for reasons of feminism, or any kind of ism for that matter. Fuck you Michael Bay. I wanted to enjoy an adolescent male power fantasy and you couldn't even do that right.

The Villains and their Evil Plan

A man with a chair for a head would be a more compelling villain.

So the main villain is your Lex Luthor scientist-businessman who is also, arbitrarily and unnecessarily, trained in the arts of ninjutsu. His plot is to kill everyone in New York with some sort of chemical plague thing and then sell the government the cure, which happens to be mutated turtle blood.**

He's an already rich guy who just wants to get richer in the most convoluted and evil way possible. It's a combination of the two boringest types of villains: the type that does everything for the pursuit of money, and the type that is just evil for it's own sake. He is a bland villain who you can neither empathise with nor hate.

(Compare this to the franchise's staple mad scientist, Baxter Stockman. Baxter, when done properly (90s cartoon, original comic), is a man who is brilliant, arrogant but insecure, and pursues mad science as a way of proving his greatness to himself and the world. Dr. Greedy Evilstein on the other hand has no personality that appears to motivate his dastardly deeds. While no means a great villain, or super original, Baxter is still leagues beyound this movie's cookie cutter badguy.)

Then there's Shredder. Supposedly Dr. Murder McWantmoney's is his student and subordinate, but the story doesn't play this way at all. Shredder is just a thug lackey, devoid of any purpose of his own, doing whatever he does because the scientist told him it would advance their dumb evil plan.

A character from a better movie.
Yes, you heard me: Batman and Robin
is actually an example of a better movie
than the one I am reviewing here.
It's fucking mindblowing. 

And he's got a robot exoskeleton that gives him superhuman fighting powers. We only once get to see the guy outside of this thing, just barely. This isn't to preserve a sense of mystery or anything though - Bay's only interest in Shredder was to have him battle the goodguys in absurd Tekken-esque fight scenes. Essentially, he's Bain from Batman and Robin. Instead of being an imposing master of a martial arts discipline, he's hired muscle who needs to use a robot suit to measure up to talking karate frog men or some shit.

He has no personal connection to Splinter or the turtles aside from vaguely recognizing them from their childhood. Since there's no longer a story about Splinter being either trained by Shredder's old rival, or being a mutated version of that rival himself, there's no reason why this recognition even matters. Yet for some reason when they first meet Shredder bother's to remind the audience that he and Splinter were previously aware of each other's existence, as if it were somehow important and should be thought of as rivalry fuel for their fight. Dude, it was really fucking stupid.

Origin Story

Early concept art for this movie. 

So apparently Bay originally wanted to make the turtles aliens or something, taking a page from Biker Mice from Mars I guess. Fans bitched and he changed it back to the whole mutant thing. While it's perfectly reasonable to expect that a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would have actual mutants in it, part of me wonders how the alien version of their origin story could possibly have been worse.

I don't really feel like going into details, but basically the turtles were created by April's father and Dr. Capitalist Villainburg as part of the previously mentioned dumb superplot. They eat pizza as teenagers because that's what April fed the animal iterations of them when nobody was looking. And then somehow she happens to be the first human they come in contact with a decade or so later.

And Splinter, this hairy, greasy turd of a special effect with the least Mr. Miyagiesque voice of any past incarnation, learned martial arts from a book he found in the sewer, specifically so he could then teach it to his adopted sons so the outside world wouldn't bully him. Nevermind he was created by two men trained in Japanese martial arts who were overseen by a third who was a Japanese master of it, his discovery of ninjutsu was entirely unrelated. (How or why someone managed to flush an entire hard cover book down the toilet was never explained.)

The Turtles

I have to be honest here, I don't think the turtles themselves were as terrible as other elements of the movie. In some scenes, they were pretty true to the goofy spirit of the 80s cartoon. The movie didn't succumb to the superhero movie trend of making things 'dark' and 'serious' (a notion I find particularly laughable for a genre featuring men who dress up as bats so they can punch badguys) and that's one of the few good things I could possibly say about it. Still, the movie is massively incompetent here, like making them superhuman giants, and almost never having them do anything remotely ninjalike. But the worst thing, the fucking worst thing of all, is this one horrible scene.

It goes like this: April finds the turtles on a rooftop exchanging celebratory high fives after beating up some foot clansmen, and snaps a photo. They notice the flash, capture her and erase the photo from her phone, then introduce themselves as turtles who are mutant ninjas of the adolescent age. Then they tell her not to tell anyone about them (or the information they just volunteered to her for no discernible reason) because they know who she is and they'll find her.

Then each of them threateningly repeats some variation of "we'll find you" as they leave. On paper, it doesn't sound that bad, but when you see it... Basically, if you watch this scene and don't feel a little ill from the rape-y aura of it all, you might not be from the same planet of me, and I envy you. It was really, really fucking creepy.

More gross than this by spades. 

As Michaelangelo, the turtle who is most blatant about his April O'Neil boner throughout the movie, does the final version of this threat as he leaves, he does it in a way that seems like an attempt to sound charming and threatening at the same time, and then says something like "no, wait, that sounded a bit creepy, but you know what I mean". The thing is, the whole fucking scene was creepy. If his 'funny' iteration of the threat was supposed to undercut the serious tone or whatever, it failed miserably, because his self-correction didn't even make any fucking sense. It's like "We're going to gang rape and murder you. Sorry, that came out wrong. But that's literally exactly what I meant to say."

The diarrhea icing on the vomit cake that was that scene is that a few scenes later, Donatello hacks into her computer to send her a message to meet them in some dark alley somewhere at a certain time for reasons he felt no need to divulge, and of course she jumps at the chance and rushes right on over.

I wanted to embed the surreal/icky
'TMNTijuana Bibles' here but
 I couldn't find it on YouTube.
 Look it up.
My personal highlight
 is Krang whining
"Shredder, cum in my mouth!".

This movie is shit.

This is the worst iteration of the Ninja Turtles franchise in so many ways that it's mind boggling. If you think it sounds bad from what I've written, please bear in mind that my memory is horrible and I've doubtless forgotten as many horrible things about it as I remembered.

I think it's a given that Michael Bay is a horrible human being. However, if you watched this movie and enjoyed it, you are a horrible lifeform. You are a failed branch of evolution, and your very existence threatens to erode the work of millions of years of natural selection. Please do not reproduce. To ensure your genes die with you will be your greatest accomplishment.


===


* I don't want to get sidetracked by talking about how awful her acting is, but it really is terrible. In this movie she fails to play a serious character, isn't funny when she is required to be, and there's even a scene where she is massively unconvincing at appearing to attempt to be stealthy. It's actually the last one that I found so appalling. If you can't stand behind a pillar and appear to genuinely want to avoid being seen by a badguy on the other side, you are just a fucking terrible actor. There is literally no excuse to perform this simple action that any child who's ever played hide and seek basically has down pat. This doesn't even have anything to do with acting - if you don't know how to hide, then you have not evolved from life on this planet. You are not a person, you're not even alive.

** I am majorly glossing over the stupidity of the evil plan, the facets of which are multitude. I think one detail that is probably worth mentioning as a footnote is how the finale - in which the turtles battle a cyborg Shredder on the top of a tall New York building after he activates a machine there that will do bad things to all people in Manhattan - appears to be inspired by the finale of The Amazing Spider Man, in which Spiderman attempts to stop the Reptile and his rooftop machine that will transform everyone in the city into lizard people. That this movie would be inspired by a plot element from another movie that was such banal Saturday morning stupidity that stories like it have been appearing in Saturday morning cartoons as parody of that very Saturday morning banality for years says a lot about... look, the movie is fucking shit, is all I'm saying, again and again, in as many ways as I can until I get bored.

So Much to Hate about Skype for Windows 8

Skype for Windows 8 is the most incredible piece of garbage I have ever used. It is one of the best examples of terrible interface design I can even think of, and that isn't just because I have a terrible memory. It's surreal. It's almost as if a bunch of intelligent, talented people were explicitly told by Microsoft to make the interface in exactly the worst way possible, and then these people went and did just that instead of telling management to fuck off and die like they should have.

So here is what I hate:

1) Skype is now hidden in that weird dumb alternate universe touchscreen OS that runs parallel with Windows 8. Is that Metro? I think it might be called Metro. Look, Metro sucks. It's like this dumb extra level of complexity to an operating system, which is already at the maximum level of complexity. So now not only can you switch between tabs on browsers, and alt-tab between windows, but you can also switch between entire operating system interfaces, each which run their own programs. This is a Windows 8 thing as much as anything, but I'm not complaining about Windows 8. I'm complaining about the goddamn retarded decision to actually work with Windows 8's dumb Metro bullshit and act as if every computer on the market is a touchscreen tablet.

2) Basically almost everything else just flows from this. Remember how you could just drag and drop files into a chat window to send them? Remember how you could have an eye on one window while you worked in a totally different program, perhaps while collaborating with a coworker on a project? Or maybe just entertaining yourself while chatting with boring family members. Remember sitting down at your computer and being able to tell at a glance that someone had sent you a message? Well now you can't.

3) Skype now follows the limitation of looking at one thing at a time all the way down to the program's interface itself. You can't even view the contact list while you're chatting with someone. Every version of every desktop IM program I remember since ICQ has allowed you to look at both things at a time. Imagine an alternate universe where the phrase 'multitasking' was never invented, and people only did one thing at any given time on a computer. Imagine Microsoft eliminating the single advantage of IMing over any other means of instant communication.

It is seriously garbage and everyone involved in the project should be, I dunno, gassed to death or something. Ok, not gassed. I went too far there, and I'm sorry. But something bad. Not death, nothing like that. Just something that would make them wish they were dead.

Things That Are Bullshit About Final Fantasy Tactics

I've been playing through Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on PSP.  It's my first time playing through it properly, though I did try it for a few hours on my friend's Playstation close to the time it first came out.  Since that time I've played the other two FFT games, and so I decided recently that I might as well go back to where it all started and see if the original was as superior as most people have been saying.  Generally it is, but...

When I first played it back in the 90s the thing that struck me as the coolest was the 3D terrain that you could rotate to get a full view of the battle.  When playing through Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2, I remember wishing that I could do the same with the maps.  Now that I've played through most of Final Fantasy Tactics, I can tell you that it is one of the most annoying aspect of the game.  The rotatable view allows for more interesting level designs, but it also you have to constantly spin the thing around to see everything on the battlefield on some levels.  On some maps there are sections that you simply can't see very well from any angle.  Also, when you have the sound off, or can't hear (such as when I'm on the subway) you won't be able to tell if a character is killed if he is obscured by background when he is attacked.  After a while I get tired of rotating the thing and seeing it spin around for different attacks.  (Plus, the environments aren't as crisp or detailed as the raster-based ones in subsequent games.)

Also the menus are kinda bullshit.  Some of them, anyway.  There's tonnes of tiny little things that are less than optimally designed but one of the things that annoys me over and over (and it's pretty minor but still) is how few screens will tell you what your current job level is.  Even in the job change screen, it will show you your level in every single job except the one you're currently in.  Why?  Why isn't it just on the regular character info sheet you get when you highlight the character?  They had room to put the character's zodiac sign and a bunch of other numbers, and there's a big blank space where they could have put it.  Annoying.

Magic in this game is bullshit.  When you tell a character to cast a spell, they don't cast it right away - every spell has a certain casting time it takes to prepare, so if you're not careful a targeted enemy could move out of the way, or your spell caster could be killed before they finish casting their spell.  This is actually not that bad on it's own - it ads a bit of strategy to spell casting.  The problem is that many of the non-magic classes (Samurai, Monks, etc) have their own ways of doing magic-like things including healing, resurrection, and elemental attacks, but without this delay, without MP cost, often with a greater hit rate, and without requiring the unit to be a physically weaker job class.  (Dragoons also have a delay for their Jump command, but with them it's even worse, because unlike with magic you have no way of checking the time it will take to complete the attack with the turn order list.  I did not use Dragoons much consequently.)

I think my least favorite aspect of the game is how slow some attack animations are.  A lot of the spells and attacks are really well animated given the time the game was released - flashy and filled with all kinds of particle effects and the like.  The problem is you have to watch the entire animations every single time.  It's fine the first few times you see an animation, but it really grates, especially for attacks that hit multiple targets - you have to watch the same animation for each character hit by the attack.  Some animations have to be watched even when they don't hit the targeted unit.  My desire to avoid lenghty animations is one of the largest influences on what character classes I take to battle with me and what abilities I use.

The game's story is definitely the best of the three FFT games, though, and the game can be a lot more difficult than the portable ones if you're used to playing these games lazily like I was.

Things I Love and Hate About Nehrim

I just beat the amazing and free Oblivion total conversion Nehrim (from German modding group SureAI) last night.  I enjoyed the game start to finish, and I encourage anyone who enjoyed Oblivion (or hated Oblivion but enjoyed Morrowind) to give it a shot.  It's free, after all.

That said, nothing's perfect.  (Especially not me with my compulsion to complain about things.)  There's a few things I don't really like about it, or at least feel could have been done a bit better.

Things I Didn't Like

1.  NPCs with nothing to say - The game is loaded with characters who will either tell you they don't want to talk to you, or say some mean things about the Aeterna, the hated Elf-Jews of Nehrim's medieval world.  Even after all the deeds you've done by the end, and even in areas where the Aeterna are respected and even admired, they still say these things.  There's never a reason to talk to townsfolk unless they're running a shop.  The ones who have quests will walk right up to you and start the conversation themselves, thankfully.

Another way this disappoints is with certain named boss characters, who will rush at you and attack without saying anything.  There's one rather large sidequest in particular (spoilers) where an unseen villain tricks you into unleashing an evil through a series of innocent notes.  When you finally meet him at the quest's conclusion, and rather than taking the opportunity to explain why he did it, he wordlessly attacks you.

2.  Skill and Attribute kerjiggering - A few changes were made to Oblivion's Skills and Attributes.  I can forgive the fact that Conjuration was removed entirely - I never used it much to begin with; the thing that really bothers me is the fact that Light Armor is the only Speed skill.  It makes raising your Speed more tedious and makes the whole system seem uneven.  Also, Illusion is no longer under Personality, which might make sense for some but it basically renders Personality totally useless.  Which brings me to

3.  Personality is totally useless - I love the inclusion of useful non-combat abilities in RPGs, but in practice Bethesda did a poor job of making the Personality skills that compelling outside of Illusion. Nehrim doesn't quite make good of that missed opportunity.  There is never a point in the game where you need to use that Speechcraft minigame to befriend someone - in fact, on most characters you can't use it at all because of the one-line conversations mentioned in #1.  And Mercantile is as useful as it always was (ie not at all).  And, as I mentioned, Illusion is no longer under Personality.  So why leave Personality in the game at all if it's of no use?  They should have either removed it entirely or thought of a way to better use it.

4.  Bugs and crashes - It's hardly their fault, as Oblivion was crashy to begin with, but Nehrim seems to crash a lot more frequently than Oblivion ever did.  It also runs a bit sluggishly at times, probably because the game pushes Oblivion's engine well past Oblivion's limits.

5.  A little sparse for sidequests - Nehrim focuses on the main quest, and consequently the sidequests suffer.  There's a few, but no TES-style guild questlines or anything close.  That said, my favorite quest in the game is a pretty epic sidequest (mentioned in #1) to which nothing in Oblivion can compare.

To assuage my guilt for picking on a free game made by modders, and also to be straightforward honest about how I felt about it, I have to also point out the things I really liked about it - things I hope someone at Bethesda noticed for inspiration in Skyrim or some other open-world game:

Things I Did Like, Very Much So

1.  Stuff to collect - One of the most fun things about Oblivion was hunting down those Nirnroots out in the wild.  The actual reward you got was lame and negligible - for some reason finding a Nirnroot was it's own reward.  SureAI noticed this and put two new non-respawning plants in the game that litter the wild waiting to be found.  Unlike Nirnroots however, these two plants are useful - one increases your carrying capacity by 1 point, and the other your Luck attribute (which was the hardest one to raise in past TES games) by the same.

There's also experience-granting magic symbols hidden in dungeons, and a ton of named special armor sets to find that give additional bonuses for every armor piece of the set worn at the same time.

2.  The main quest - SureAI manages to do what Bethesda failed to do - to make an engaging main storyline.  It starts out simple and intriguing and by the end is pretty epic in scope.

3.  Level design - There were few areas in Oblivion where I sat back and thought "this is really cool looking".  There are plenty in Nehrim, including airships, floating islands, and a capital city built on a mountain spire.  The levels themselves have neat setpieces and puzzles that keep them interesting, and even though they're all built from the same pieces as in Oblivion, the devs have done a good job of making everything feel different.

4.  Translation - It's not that the English translation is super-fantastic that impresses me (though it's decent), but merely the fact that it exists at all, and is (mostly) complete.  A few untranslated books and dialogue snippets here and there are quite forgivable.

5.  It's more "Oblivion" and it's free - It's a bigass TES-like game and it'll cost you nothing.  Not much more to be said.  The perfect thing to tide me over till 11.11.11.

That's all I have to say.  Can't wait for SureAI's next project, which will apparently use Skyrim's engine as its base, which will probably come right in time for something to tide me over until TES6.