rangerBlog - March 29th, 2007

02:29 am - TMNT Movie

I should probably get around to reviewing the new Power Rangers season.

...but I just found out the Transformers movie prequel book is out, so that's not going to happen. Sadly my local store can't find their copies, so I'll be hitting the Mall of America tomorrow, where a copy is on hold for me.

While discussing anime with someone today, I had him reflexively tell me there was 'no such thing' after he was unable to find it on Wikipedia. While, admittedly, it is bizarre that there could be a completely-fansubbed anime out there with no Wikipedia entry, I find his response (never even bothering to use google or some lesser search engine) vaguely disquieting. Will the user-reviewed status of Wikipedia one day cause it to rise to a level of authoritative fact, such that any fact or source that is not wikipedia will be viewed with suspicious skepticism? "Anyone with an axe to grind could have thrown that site together. Singe-user-constructed sites are inherently less trustworthy than massively-peer sites."
I could see it happening- the question is... is it a bad thing? The internet has elevated the personal opinion and doubting voice of the lone moron to coequal status with the lone expert. And most of the time the moron is claiming to be the expert too, so it gets really hard to tell who speaks truth and who speaks bullshit. When I was doing global climate change research (which is filled with alarmist hippies on one side and military-industrial holocaust deniers on the other,) I polled 100 sources to try and find where the consensus was, and more to the point- to figure out who was backing up what they said with arguments (and the implications of those arguments) and who was talking out of their ass.
(Answer: The people behind The Great Global Warming Swindle are probably correct- but they are framing their argument in terms that deceives you about the implications of what they are saying, and it is something that needs to be worried about.)

At any rate- unrelated to any of the above, the new TMNT movie came out, I saw it, and boy was I... baffled.
It's not a bad movie. It commits nothing that could in any way shape or form be called a mistake. It does many things which must, objectively be called good in fact- the villains get an appropriately small amount of screen time, the characters are spot-on, the animation is gorgeous, the character designs wonderfully expressive... but it's not a good movie either. I'm tempted to call it mediocre... but that's not the word. The word... is 'safe.'

Safe is an ugly word for a movie. Safe means it was perfectly balanced, not out of any inate sense of what it should be- but out of fear of doing something wrong. This is a movie about 11 monsters... and we barely see them. In fact- they're not really relevant to the plot at all. The villain gets maybe 2 minutes of screentime. His stone generals... nada. So clearly it's not about the threat.
It's not about the universe because they don't spend any time exploring it. Admittedly- most origin stories are deathly boring, the TMNT have one of the better ones (as the first live-action movie proved.) This movie assume we know who all these characters are already- to a fault.
It's all Raph and Leo, which is great- but it also has a generous helping of Casey Jones, which is really... strange. Why is Casey getting 4 times the screentime of either Mike or Donny? I think this is supposed to be a movie about how the boys need to hang together as an ad-hoc family unit- because they balance each other's polar (quadripolar?) personalities. ...But the movie skips the 'opening 15 minutes spent getting to know the characters' that should be the heart of this plot. And, again, it shits on Donny and Mike.
The plot is much tighter and faster-paced for having skipped on that slow, flabby 15 minutes... but it also really needed it for the central plot to work.

In the end, it seems like it was more important to keep the plot snappy than to actually accomplish what the plot had to do to hang together- since what it had to do was spend 15 relatively quiet un-fun stagnant minutes with the cast. In short- it lacked the will to do what the plot needed in order to properly function... and instead took the safe route of making the plot snappy and fast-moving, and turned the movie into a nice, hollow theme park ride.
Also- Raph didn't make a big enough mistake when he lost Leonardo. If the movie isn't actually making us uncomfortable with Raph's headspace (like, say, Splinter's interrogation made us uncomfortable in the original) it fails to meet the requirements of 'edgy.' And if it's not edgy, that means Raph is just playacting at being a bad boy- his edge is pastede on, and it's pathetic, not pleasing- like any crapped-out vehicle for a teen heartthrob smugly secure it's making him a bad-boy... without ever once risking his non-threatening image. "Oh sure he's a delinquent, but he can't smoke, that's not the kind of image we want him to have."

This movie was safer than Wolverine, and Wolverine is the safest, more predictable, most non-edgy character in comics. He just goes through the motions. TMNT- it wasn't willing to commit to being about anything, to stick its neck out and take a risk for anything, so it's really about nothing.

...admittedly fun to watch, but it's Leonardo and Raph doing an exhibition match. "I'll do my angsty doubting, hurt leader thing, you be the angry thug with a problem with authority. Annnd Scene!"

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