Blah Blah Ninja Turtles

Not ashamed to say that I've seen episodes of every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, including the weird live-action one that crossed over with Power Rangers.



(If you go into it with an open mind and keep in mind it had a really low budget and cornball writing, which is fine because Ninja Turtles has always been silly and will always be silly, it's better than people give it credit for. Not great, mind you, but it is what it is and it's not terrible. Bad yes, awful no.)

I mention this because last night my sister and I finally watched the most recent movie, and actually watched some episodes of said live-action series to palate-cleanse afterwards (we'd had one we hadn't watched sitting around because of reasons). It was... less necessary than we'd worried, probably, anyway, although it definitely was the worst Ninja Turtles movie, and that includes the time-travel one where they wore samurai armor for about a third of their screentime.

(The best Ninja Turtles movie is either the original one or Turtles Forever, depending on whether you're asking me for an objective or subjective opinion.* Because the first Ninja Turtles movie is a surprisingly good movie for something that essentially was just helping boost what started as a quirky indie franchise, and Turtles Forever is for nerdy people who are already into the franchise, and handles cross-dimensional antics, metafictionality, and multiversal crises in a way that's more fun than any other such thing I've ever seen.)

I'll admit to being entertained and annoyed by turns; typifying the movie was the fact that Shredder's cutlery was a big silly exosuit that shot blades and retrieved them with magnets, which is both wonderful and incredibly stupid. Also, boy they made the turtles ridiculously durable. (My sister and I joked about one shot and its remarkable similarity to a scene from One Piece where the character Luffy screams "Bullets can't hurt me!")

Surprisingly enough, for a blatantly dumb action flick, my favorite moment was actually an emotional moment during the climax, where everyone thinks they're going to die and Raphael confesses that the reason he was always so hard on them was because he loved them. My sister and I agreed that this was something that is or should be true of more or less every version of Raphael, even if there's never a chance to visit the story beat.

Also, the changes they made to the origin story? What, man, what. My sister actually compared the changes to an origin story for Spider-Man where Uncle Ben is still alive at the end of it.

*My sister would always say the best one is the first one, I think, but she loves the first three movies unabashedly and unequivocally. She also decided to go ahead and take the plunge to buy DVDs of the newest cartoon, which I'd not have seen otherwise (I was a bit more hesitant, and we don't really have any TV, cable or otherwise, by choice).

-Signing off.