Released: March 23, 2007
Director: Kevin Munroe
*****
Certain concepts and films demand to be made traditionally with live action actors. Other concepts, though, lend themselves to any form of animation. Walking, talking, full size animals-turtles and a rat-fall squarely into the latter category. Designed as a reboot of the franchise, TMNT brings the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back into pop culture without their most notorious enemy, the evil Shredder.
Every three thousand years, the stars of Keegan align, opening a rift in the universe. Untold power comes through the rift and threatens to give one man-Max Winters-the power over life and death. As he grows his power, the disbanded turtles must overcome family strife and feelings of abandonment when Leonardo comes back into the fold after being in "training" for a year.
There is an infectious fun which permeates the film from the opening shots, complete with Laurence Fishburne narration, that tells us it's okay to get emotionally involved in the story without being self conscious about it. After all, these are life sized turtles. A tightrope had to be navigated to make the movie more adult friendly than any of the previous versions and retain the kid audience. The plot here does get convoluted toward the end and the Leonardo vs. Raphael dynamic is a bit dark for kids used to seeing the current animated version of the characters. But there are more than enough flat out cool ideas in the film to keep everyone happy. Long time fans will understand subtle references to Turtle history (Shredder, Karai, pizza, Casey and April) while everyone else should be amazed at the level of detail rendered by the CGI artists. (Especially take note of the Raphael/Leonardo fight in the rain.)
If there is really any problem in the story itself, it's that there are too many side plots and the running time isn't enough to accommodate them all. The central conflict is between Leonardo and his brothers, as it should be, which gets shunted to the side occasionally to bring the April/Casey storyline to the forefront...or a extra Max Winters moment, for instance. The only concern with the abandonment story is that it dovetails all too easily with the Winters' stone soldiers. In reality, these kinds of things don't happen. The stone soldiers, you ask? They were originally human and are immortal; in order to become "real" again, a series of 13 monsters needs to be captured so the power of the aligned stars can be harnessed. Like I said, convoluted.
You can't be terribly upset with the film. In the end, it makes pseudo-sense within its world and, remember, this is a comic book movie. It's much more real than any previous incarnation and looks damn good. At times, you even forget this is a computer movie. The detail of something like Ratatouille isn't quite there (Splinter's face looks a bit...fake), but the level of detail approaches a comic book. With the camera shots, whip pans and the simple shot composition, this could have been taken straight from a graphic novel. This could never have been done with live action.