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Movies

Michael Bay To Remake TMNT As Aliens 481

Nidi62 writes "We all know that Michael Bay loves to put 86 minutes of explosions into a 90-minute movie. But it appears that he has found a new way to screw up a movie. He is directing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot in which the turtles are not created with ooze: they are 'from an alien race, and they are going to be tough, edgy, funny and completely loveable.' No word yet on whether he's consulting with George Lucas on how to totally destroy the origin and essence of a classic story." Responding to criticism, Bay thoughtfully explained that fans need to "chill."
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Michael Bay To Remake TMNT As Aliens

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:08PM (#39421249)

    And I like turtles.

  • by scottbomb ( 1290580 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:11PM (#39421285) Journal

    ANOTHER remake. How sad.

    • Some reboots haven't been that bad (Battlestar Galactica, Ocean's Eleven). A couple have improved on the original (Battlestar Galactica). Some have been downright awful (Land of the Lost, 21 Jump Street). And some the jury is still out on (Star Trek).
      • by PhrstBrn ( 751463 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @09:16PM (#39422401)

        I'm pretty sure the jury on Star Trek is already out, and that it was good, just different. The movie changes the series from an adventure drama to more of an action movie. Although the reboot feels like a dumbed down version of Star Trek, they tried to stay true to the original cannon.

        While I'm sure any Trek fan will point out all the things they changed, they did change things up a bit, they did a lot of things right (ladder in the hallway, redshirt on an away team mission, rigging the Kobayashi Maru Test, Sulu is a fencer) to make sure everybody knew that the movie was really Star Trek. Besides, the original Star Trek already established split timelines as cannon, so any changes you make can be considered cannon in an alternate universe.

        The movie was good, tried to stay true to the original, what's not to like?

        • by master_p ( 608214 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @04:21AM (#39424619)

          TOS was an exceptionally good scifi series, when it comes to televised scifi. In 1966, when computers at home, mobile telephony, tablets, etc were unheard of, and when most of the world did not even have television, there comes a show that;

          -shows people working on computer screens, by touching them.
          -have mobile communicators.
          -people work on a computer network
          -computer accepting voice commands

          Let's also not forget warp drive, teleportation, antigravity, and the first ever interracial kiss on TV.

          That was groundbreaking, wasn't it?

          Fast forward 40 years later, and much of what ST showed has been implemented in one form or another. We have networked computers, mobile computers, communicators, tablets, and interacial relationships are aplenty every day on TV.

          So, what this new movie offers us over the old one, from a scifi perspective? nothing at all.

          Not only that, but as an action movie, it is rather lame. The plot holes are as big as Kirk's ego, and all the consistence the old universe had had gone out of the window.

          To me, that means one thing only: it was a bad movie.

          Did it make a huge profit? yes, it did. But that does not mean anything. The movie audience has been brainwashed with so many bad movies the last 20 years, that they do not know what a good movie is any more. They will watch any shit thrown at them, if they get their entertainment fix. The general audience watches Big Brother, America's Most Wanted and every MTV teenage trash series. For them, STXI may have been even intellectual, but that does not mean it was a good film.

          • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @07:15AM (#39425591) Journal

            A few other things that were groundbreaking in Star Trek:

            • A (black!) female officer as a member of the bridge crew.
            • A Russian officer, at the height of the cold war (okay, a lot of the writers used him as comic relief, but even so...)
            • An intelligent asian who was an expert in a European sword fighting style (asian actors at the time were mostly comic relief, eastern martial artists - as Sulu was in the 2009 film, or other stereotypes in US TV)

            It wasn't just portraying technical developments in the future, it was portraying social changes. In the 2009 films, Sulu fought with a katana in a Japanese style, Kirk was a frat boy, Spock was a geek, and, aside from the space ships, it could easily have been set in the USA today.

      • by tragedy ( 27079 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @09:40PM (#39422627)

        The jury is still out on the Star Trek "reboot" movie? I watched it in the theatres when it came out. I should preface the next thing I say by pointing out that I have eclectic tastes and can enjoy just about anything. As a dumb action-comedy/self-parody movie, I found the movie enjoyable enough. As part of the actual Star Trek franchise though, the jury is in. It wasn't any good.

        For starters, it's a time travel story. Time travel stories can be quite good sometimes, but 90% of Star Trek time travel stories aren't very good. You have to be very careful with time travel as a plot point. Beyond that:
        * Red matter? They drill to the core of a planet to turn it into a black hole with something called "red matter". The stuff works without needing to be at the core of a planet, which means you could destroy a planet just by dropping some on the surface, but the villains still need to drill a hole to the core.

        * Crazy villains. It's common for villains to be crazy. But the villains in this story were cloudcuckooland nutso crazy. Their planet blows up, so they go after someone who was trying to stop it for revenge. They end up back in time and then wait around for decades for him to show up so they can commit genocide a few times while he watches. All this for love of their lost empire. For some reason, despite being from the future, with advanced technological knowledge and future technology in their possession, they don't hook up with their beloved empire and share the technology.

        * Wacky supernova. Despite a supernova being a natural phenomenon we understand pretty well and not one of the wacky "anomalies" that crop up in the Star Trek universe, it apparently manages to hit the entire Romulan empire at once by surprise (they knew it was coming, but it supposedly arrived early), even though everyone and their mother has FTL communication and starships. For that to happen, the entire Romulan empire would need to be in one star system and the star of that system would have had to be the one that went supernova, which means that an entire technologically advanced civilization was living for centuries with sufficient technology to evacuate in a place they would have to know was doomed at any moment.

        *Wacky supernova solution. Red matter makes black holes. Got it. How exactly does that stop a supernova, which is the big explosion when a Star collapses into a black hole?

        *Wacky chases. Guy runs from space monster. Monster gets attacked by bigger monster which then chases guy. This isn't action movie stuff, this is wacky comedy stuff. This is the sort of thing that happens to Wile E. Coyote, not captains of the Enterprise. This is just stupid and it this sort of thing happens way too much in movies these days. Either directors or general audiences are clearly taking too much crack.

        There are all kinds of other problems. Of course plenty of stuff like this is present in all kinds of other Star Trek material, but it's all present in the stuff that we put our faces in our hands and groan for, not the good stuff. Lots of directors (especially those like Bay), just really don't seem to get it. This seems to have always been the case. Just look at all the Batman movies made by the people who seemed to have their minds stuck on the old TV show.

    • by Ihmhi ( 1206036 ) <i_have_mental_health_issues@yahoo.com> on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @08:13PM (#39421897)

      Just stop.

      We are very near the point where the free stuff out there is good enough to replace the stuff in theaters and on television (and I'm not talking about The Pirate Bay kinda free). Freeware games. *Excellent* YouTube series. Really original daring stuff.

      Just stop watching Hollywood's crap.

      • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

        I'm currently wading through Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf. I'm also slowly building up a list of good authors who are independent of publishers. It's very difficult as there is zero rating system and you have to spend time to read what ever book they offer for review. Since by reading it I'm making a commitment to them that first one should be free, proofread and edited by a professional and be someone consistent and coherent. (ow ow ow).

        I now have all of two ebook only independent authors picked o

        • by IICV ( 652597 )

          Why go through all that effort and then not mention the two authors you like? The applicable content rating system is word of mouth, after all, and if you mention them you'll help raise the signal to noise level.

  • And in other news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by realityimpaired ( 1668397 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:11PM (#39421289)
  • by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:13PM (#39421305) Homepage

    Did... did he just tell us to chillax?

    We've suspected it for years, but I think the trolling has just become completely overt.

  • Fuck him (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:13PM (#39421309)

    Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles = TANT

    As in, this dude is tainting my childhood memories!~

  • by oldhack ( 1037484 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:15PM (#39421329)

    Everyone who paid to see Michael Bay's movie must pay extra 10% income tax.

    Those who took their kids with'em need to be referred to child protection agencies.

    • by Nursie ( 632944 )

      I musn't have had enough coffee, I read it that 'Those who took their kids with'em need to be referred to the child protein agencies'.

      Soylent green *is* ninja turtles....

  • by chill ( 34294 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:16PM (#39421347) Journal

    Done!

  • An Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:16PM (#39421349) Homepage Journal

    Michael Bay is to 80's cartoons as Uwe Boll is to Videogames.

  • The latest: Shredder's not a Japanese gang leader, but a kitchen merchandizing mogul. Baxter Stockman is played by Vince "with the Slap Chop" Offer. You're gonna love his nuts.
  • by Kincaidia ( 927521 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:18PM (#39421361)
    I mean, FFS, it's in the goddamn name. It's like remaking Pirates of the Caribbean with Cowboys instead of Pirates.
  • I was about to be really upset, until I remembered that pretty much every other TMNT film or TV series has been pretty terrible too. Maybe the original comics were good, but TMNT is one of the few things I doubt even Michael Bay can make any worse. Plus, it's been 5 years since the last remake, so it definitely needs a new one.

    Personally, I'm looking forward to Michael Bay's series of Jane Austen movies. Pride and Prejudice just isn't complete without the alien invasion subplot.

  • If you didn't know that Michael Bay films are visceral extravaganzas that do not bother with substance, I just told you, so now you do. If you are worried about him ruining our beloved turtles, I doubt future generations will look to a 2012 blockbuster to understand a 1980s cartoon.

    Complaining about bad art is like complaining that the ipad is not user serviceable.

    • by wanzeo ( 1800058 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:35PM (#39421539)

      Reply to self:

      After some quick wikipedia, I realize that the cartoon I grew up loving in the late 80s was actually ripped from a comic book series I have never read. So I guess I prove my OP wrong. Some 12 year old kid could go see this movie, and it would forever represent the ninja turtles in their mind. Oh god, where is the art police when you need them?

      • by PRMan ( 959735 )
        And the comic is actually pretty good...
        • Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:54PM (#39421739) Journal

          The Palladium roleplaying game was pretty awesome too

          • by keytoe ( 91531 )

            The Palladium roleplaying game was pretty awesome too

            Completely agreed on that one.

            It was GURPS based, so somewhat interchangeable with other systems. Not exactly a hard core RPG since it was pretty easy to cheese out an overpowered character, but my group found it a refreshing change of pace to our long running D&D campaign.

            You could slap together a hack and slash, come up with some crazy mutations and skills for your new characters and charge through in a night. Half the fun was rolling characters, s

  • by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:23PM (#39421439) Homepage Journal

    Calls it Transformers 4.

    • by QuasiSteve ( 2042606 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:41PM (#39421615)

      I think you meant...
      1. Michael Bay takes a shit
      2. Sets it on fire
      3. Calls it Transformers 4
      4. ???
      5. Profit. Mad, mad profit.

      Transformers 1 - budget: $150M, worldwide gross: $710M
      Transformers 2 - budget: $200M, worldwide gross: $836M
      Transformers 3 - budget: $195M, worldwide gross: $1123M

      The only reason he gets away with this stuff is because he's bringing in umpteen millions on his films so far.

      He may flop entirely with TMNT and consequently be pulled from ThunderCats, though. Hollywood can be fickle like that. But then they'll just find somebody else to screw that up :)

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:25PM (#39421451)

    So... Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles? Unless they are proud warriors who have grown to full maturity, and its not a joyride to earth... Then its Adult Alien Ninja Turtles! But wait! If they are not mutated from turtles, then they are not turtles. So maybe Adult Alien Ninja Humanoid-Herpetolicoid Beings! But if they learned their martial arts on another planet, then its only Ninja-esq... So the new theme is
     
      "Adult Alien Noble Martial Arts Weilding Humanoid-Herpetolicoid Beings,
      Adult Alien Noble Martial Arts Weilding Humanoid-Herpetolicoid Beings,
    Adult Alien Noble Martial Arts Weilding Humanoid-Herpetolicoid Beings,
      Heroes in a Half Shell,
      Alien power!
     
    They're the world's most fearsome fighting team (From Another World!)
    They're heroes in a half-shell and they're green (Hey - get a grip!)
    When the evil Shredder attacks
      These Aliens for some reason focusing on one small local crime lord when they have interplanetary travel don't cut him no slack!
     
    (Refrain)

     
      Just doesn't have the same ring as it used to...

  • by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:32PM (#39421509) Journal

    No word yet on whether he's consulting with George Lucas on how to rape people's childhoods.

    FTFY.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Walt Dismal ( 534799 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:38PM (#39421571)

    Next up, Bay takes on Wizard of Oz remake:

    "Flying monkeys with bombs. Lots of bombs. Wicked witch with machine gun on broom! Megan as Dorothy! Toto upgraded to pit bull. Shia LeBoeuf will ace it as the Tin Man with laser-eyeballs and missile-firing butthatch! Cowardly Lion now a Mexican political-asylum refugee who knows how to fight! The Straw Man now the Token Black Gay Teenage Computer Wizard in a wheelchair. With glasses. And braces. Eats HotPockets and Pepsi and Pringles while racing against time.

    Old plot bad, new plot good. Secret Oz government lab accidently released virus that mutates Munchkins into slobbering zombie vampires. Only Dorothy can save them because her blood has radical new antibodies. Witch nearly kills her, but sex with the Tin Man revives her. New totally unexpected ending not involving explosions!"

  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:43PM (#39421629) Journal

    Michael Bay is single-handedly improving the economy, at least for me, by populating the theaters with movies I have no wish to see.

  • > Responding to criticism, Bay thoughtfully explained that fans need to "chill."

    Fans need to ignore Michael Bay and his movies entirely. I've never seen one of Bay's movies, he has never "ruined" anything for me, and I am perfectly content.

  • by readandburn ( 825014 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:53PM (#39421735)
    My Dinner With Andre. In 3-D.
  • You know (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @08:07PM (#39421849)

    You know, I honestly don't give a crap about TMNT. Not at all. Never a fan. But this STILL MAKES ME SEETHE.

    Why the fuck can't Hollywood EVER GET ANYTHING RIGHT, EVER?

    It's like Bryan Singer admitting he never read comic books as a kid. [inspirationalstories.com] So what do they do? Give him the X Men franchise to direct. Great thinking, guys. That's exactly what you want. Directors who never read the source material. Pilots that never read a flight manual. Doctors that never read a book on physiology. Truck drivers that never read the drivers code, driving on the wrong side of the streets. Perfect. And it's not uncommon. Same goes for Tim Burton, [imdb.com] which perfectly explains Edward Bathands.

    But this time, I have to be impressed though. This time, the ignorance of Hollywood rings true a clear as a bell. You know right at the outset that this is going to absolutely suck. Some people like Mr. Singer and Mr. Burton admit to not knowing the source material. Mr. Bay has basically admitted that he hasn't even read the fucking title. Because it's Mutant turtles, not Alien turtles as others have correctly noted. A new low, even for Hollywood.

    Why the fuck do they keep hiring these people? A total fucking stranger they pick randomly off the streets could do better. They certainly couldn't know less about the topic. You can only go up.

  • by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @09:32PM (#39422559)
    From Topless Robot [toplessrobot.com]: "Okay, I'm getting a little pedantic here, but the fact remains that by making the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aliens, Bay is needlessly changing one of the core components of the series -- one of their three fundamental adjectives, one might say -- for no discernible reason or benefit whatsoever. You know, I used to think that Bay was just an immensely successful idiot, but honestly, now I think he's our nerd satan. Here we are, enjoying Game of Thrones and the Avengers movie and unparalleled nerd art and prestige, and Bay is the Anti-Nerd, the serpent in our paradise, the one who will stop at nothing until all nerd goodness is ruined with aliens and pissing and balls and humping dogs and steaming piles of shit. Seriously, Michael Bay is the Nerd Devil"
  • by chinton ( 151403 ) <chinton001-slashdot&gmail,com> on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @08:53AM (#39426697) Journal
    They're from the planet Zeist.

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