The heroes in a half-shell are battling their way back to the big screen with teen crushes, insecurity, rage and that familiar old hankering for pizza in a franchise reboot for a new generation.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, based on the 1980s comic book series that led to an animated television show and then a 1990s movie trilogy, features four walking, talking turtle brothers trained as martial-arts fighters.
Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to the Turtles in 2009 and relaunched the Turtles TV series on Nickelodeon in 2012, introducing a new generation to the characters before launching them back into cinemas.
Megan Fox, previously best known as the love interest in Michael Bay's early Transformers films, stars as April O'Neil, the intrepid reporter who becomes a close ally of the turtles – and the object of Michelangelo's teenage infatuation.
The actress says she is a “superfan” of the franchise and enjoyed not being a typical damsel in distress.
“[April] never has to be rescued by a man in this movie, she’s only rescued by the turtles,” she says. “I didn’t at any point have to be sexualised in this movie. There’s no weird, gratuitous shot and I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a part like that.”
Fox is joined by the Arrested Development star Will Arnett, who plays Vern Fenwick, April's inept cameraman who also has a big crush on her. The actor says that the turtles bring a new superhero message to the audience.
“A lot of other superhero movies are about one singular guy, this lone wolf,” Arnett says. “This is about these guys together forming one unit and I think that’s what separates it.”
In their previous big-screen outings, the turtles were portrayed by actors wearing bulky animatronic suits – now the amiable quartet, named after Renaissance artists, are brought to life with the latest, state-of-the-art performance-capture CGI technology.
Reimagining the turtles was a job entrusted to George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) team, which developed performance-capture software to make the superheroes as photorealistic as possible.
The relatively unknown actors who played the turtles – Noel Fisher (Michelangelo), Pete Ploszek (Leonardo), Jeremy Howard (Donatello) and Alan Ritchson (Raphael) – wore helmets rigged with high-definition cameras capturing their every facial movement.
“You want to make sure you entertain the individuality of every one of those characters,” says Pablo Helman, the ILM visual effects supervisor behind the film.
“They’re all completely different from each other, but they’re brothers and they all feel they don’t belong in this world. That’s also why they’re so big – it’s a really good way to say they’re too big for the world in which they live.”
* Reuters
