Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Dear Dawn Barkan, Rat Trainer,

Seems like a dangerous time to be training animals. Apes are riding horses and shooting machine guns. Raccoons are flying starships and shooting machine guns. Sharks are falling from the sky and being mowed down by machine guns! Now it’s mutated turtles turning into ninjas and – you guessed it – getting shot by machine guns.

Business is really booming, huh?

Luckily you had a much safer job: working with the wise old rat, Splinter, spiritual leader and father figure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He’s a much more frail presence than his young green protégées, and it’s his new found vulnerability that spurs the turtles into action…

Oh, what am I talking about? This is a Michael Bay joint. Everyone is an action star. Splinter was obviously enrolled in the same parkour classes that Yoda took in preparation for the prequels—he’s just as badass as the teenagers he raised. It must have taken you years to train that beady-eyed martial arts master to move so quickly! Or did you just use a regular rat for the flashback sequences and let the special effects team go wild on the older version of the sensei?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Maybe this is a good time to start talking about my own pet peeves with the film.

See, TMNT reigned supreme in my childhood. Which meant, yes, it took me most of the movie to adjust to these new voices, adapt to the new look, and feel comfortable with my boyhood buddies squaring off against machine-gun toting terrorists. But I eventually came around (or gave in to) these changes. 

The dynamic within the group, for example, still works. Michelangelo gets all the best lines, Raphael gets to grunt and moan, Donatello brings the nerd factor, and Leonardo is as boring as ever (despite being voiced by Johnny Knoxville). Megan Fox is also a fine April O’Neill, and Will Arnett providing comic relief as a cameraman doesn’t ruin anything.

What does ruin things, however, is the ultra-lame Amazing Spider-Man everyone-is-involved-in-the-conspiracy plotline. Not that it’s inherently a bad idea to make April’s dad a scientist who worked on the ooze that mutated the turtles (and April once treating them like pets), but to tack on the reporter-who-stumbles-on-the-story gimmick is one coincidence too far. And by amping-up the turtles to superhero status, making them invincible to bullets and moving at unintelligible speeds, the action sequences are just more incoherent Bayhem tripe—even if Michael Bay was only a producer.

Jonathan Liebsman tries every trick in the book to crowd the frame with lens flares, colliding axes, Dutch-angle dolly-shots and shaky-cam nonsense. His editing goes for a bare minimum average shot length, and the whole frantic effort feels strangely dated— you know, from a time before Marvel proved the benefits of making action comprehensible again. Even the evil Shredder goes full Transformers in this film, for reasons they don’t even pretend to explain.

A line about the turtles not, in fact, being “aliens” was the only moment of self-awareness the filmmakers allowed. Had that ridiculous change been applied to this franchise’s already ridiculous premise, your job on this film might not even have existed. 

Though maybe that would have freed up your time to work on more films like Inside Llewyn Davis.

Speaking of which—your turn to write back, Dawn!

Feeling trapped,

Christopher 

Status: Standard Delivery (2.5/5)

Guardians of the Galaxy

Dear Stan Lee, Cameo Appearance Maker,

As a non-comic book reader, I’m only familiar with the world you’ve created through the unending series of superhero films that have taken over my summer movie schedule for the past six years. Like you and your token cameos, I show up dutifully for each, because that’s just what us guys do (as film reviewers or franchise founders, I mean). I usually enjoy myself too, though without the nostalgic nerdgasm of your more faithful devotees. 

Then a relatively new property like Guardians of the Galaxy comes along. It’s the tale of intergalactic outsiders, and promises to be cut from a different cloth (leather!). However, instead it just feels a little cut and paste.

This is both good and bad news for a film that’s hoping to uphold one of the most successful studio runs in history. And I’m sure it will. It’s got strong character moments (casting Chris Pratt in the lead is pure genius) and enough bang-bang zap-zap action to fill whatever quota these films must meet. But for all the talk about bringing in B-movie favourite James Gunn to co-write and direct, the edginess that was anticipated doesn’t amount to much more than the odd dirty word and middle finger gag. Oh, and a clever Jackson Pollock joke that is too layered to earn the X-rating it deserves. Still, it’s pretty anti-climactic for everyone who is starting to see through the familiar beats of these super-franchises.

The lonely outsider with a dying parent. The mischievous fun with the new powers. The sassy hero and humourless love interest. The world-ending MacGuffin. The destruction of a major city. It’s a tough line to walk between giving the audience what they want and going through the motions. And while the small moments are the ones that work best in the film, the big ones end up defining the overall experience.

You, of course, can separate yourself from this band of misfits. In fact, you tried to. You have a creator credit on Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Avengers, Spider-Man and the X-Men, but only a tangential relationship with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet when the fanboy community lamented your non-participation, you made the (wise) choice to show up for your Where’s Waldo moment; in this particular case, hitting on some young alien women. It wasn’t your most inspired cameo appearance (especially after your scene-stealer in Captain America: Winter Soldier), but your presence nonetheless meant something to fans—even tangential ones, like me. These are the good Marvel moments.  

But there are others, which Guardians relies on, that are beginning to reveal the studio’s Mad-Lib method of story construction. This includes the characters themselves. You’ve got Star-Lord and Rocket Racoon vying for who can out-Hans Solo one other, leaving all the straight-man work to the bored looking (green) woman. You also have Drax, whose only real contribution to the group is his Vulcan’s sense of humour. Then there’s the single-sentence speaking Groot (voiced, hilariously and pointlessly, by Vin Diesel), who might be the clearest attempt at a Star Wars-meets-Avengers mash-up by playing a sort of Chewbacca/Hulk character, complete with a rag-doll-the-enemy moment. It’s all people and moments we’ve seen dozens of times before, which provides only requisite and temporary pleasure.

Not that it matters, I guess. As long as we keep buying tickets, this formula isn’t going to change.

See you soon,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Dear Christine Wilson, Script Supervisor,

You know a little something about continuity, don’t you? It’s kind of your job. For comic books fans, though, continuity is religion. Holy wars have been waged over divergent interpretations of what happened when, to whom, and its repercussions. The study of this foundational doctrine has even spawned its own taxonomy—words like “retcon”, a compound verb (short for “retroactive continuity”) that denotes “the alteration of previously established facts.” 

In the world of four-color superhero stories, continuity represents a consistency in the people and places central to the fictional universe in which they take place. On the set of a film, however, it all occurs on a smaller scale; what matters most is consistency from one scene to the next, one shot to the next. It’s all about slates, axes, and eye-lines.

But in the age of the franchised blockbuster, when sequels are green-lit three at a time, and those sequels are broken into sub-chapters, and all of those films bleed into one another with shared characters and post-credits stingers, the cosmic-scale of continuity common in the funnybooks is becoming increasingly relevant to cinema. And nowhere is that more relevant than in Days of Future Past. After six previous films, the cinematic universe of the X-Men has become broad enough, both in scope and in quality, to enfold upon and cross-reference itself in the exact same way that comic books do. 

“Days of Future Past” is considered a seminal meta-text of X-Men continuity—meta because the narrative itself hinges upon the idea of retroactive continuity. The story here is the sort of prototypical time-travel premise tackled by everything from Star Trek to The Terminator: change a thing in the past to prevent a cataclysmic future. As it occurs in the comics, it’s a surprisingly short chapter of the mutant mythos, taking place over the course of only two issues (though writer Chris Claremont, the man often credited with rescuing the X-Men from obscurity in the mid-70s by dialing up the teenage melodrama, is famously able to cram a whole lot of story into a single issue/page/panel). And while X-Men comics are notorious for their knotty continuity and reliance on time-travel as a corrective device – a current story-arc even has the teenage X-Men from the past living in the present among their grown-up counterparts – “Days of Future Past” remains one of the most beloved comic book stories of all time.

No surprise, then, that as movie studios delve ever deeper into the most obscure corners of a franchise’s mythology, that they should pick out this particular tale. And as a framework for knitting together the sprawling franchise – which has so far seen a trilogy, two spin-offs, and a pre-boot (more taxonomy: “prequel” + “reboot”) – it’s perfect.

The story of the film is built from familiar narrative bits: the aforementioned time-travel trope, a Matrix-like bouncing back-and-forth between the vibrant real world and a blue-tinged dystopia, and a heist film’s get-the-band-back-together recruitment scenes. The great achievement is how director Bryan Singer and his screenwriters (a team-up between the writers of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: First Class) are able to keep the film from becoming choked by its own pretensions. One could theoretically watch this film without any prior knowledge of the characters or previous films and still understand exactly what’s happening (though who’s to say if they’d enjoy it with the same childlike satisfaction that I did).

Credit to the filmmakers, too, that they held true to continuity by not recasting the minor roles: Daniel Cudmore returns as Colossus, Shawn Ashmore as Iceman. Surely there were hipper, younger actors ready and willing to take their places, but instead we get the ubiquity of seeing familiar faces return (even if just in fleeting glimpses, like Kelsey Grammar and Anna Paquin) and the satisfaction of knowing that our time spent getting to know these characters all those years ago was, in this very minor way, worthwhile. 

But this new flick is more than just an opportunity to mash up the cast of the original series with their First Class counterparts. John Ottman returns to score the film, and brings back the themes and motifs he wrote and arranged for X2: X-Men United. Newton Thomas Siegel is back behind the camera, Louise Mingenbach is once again designing the costumes. This continuity in the crew gives the film an aesthetic continuity, too. Days of Future Past looks and feels like an X-Men film in a manner that the other offshoots (including the much-despised third installment) don’t: it’s the difference between following your grandma’s recipe and eating your grandma’s authentic home cooking.

Intermixed with these familiar elements is a fresh sense of what a superhero movie can be. As the gritty reboot becomes de rigeur for comic book flicks – reaching (hopefully) its nadir with last year’s Man of Steel – what makes Marvel Comics properties unique amongst other adaptations is that they embrace the inherent absurdity of costumed heroes running around in the real world. Singer continues the streak here, which seems a particularly notable achievement considering the themes of persecutions and genocide that run just beneath the surface. 

The funniest and most thrilling sequence of the film involves a character who – speaking of continuity issues – is shared between Marvel franchises at different studios: Quicksilver. He’s a speedy teenaged mutant recruited to help bust young Magneto out of prison, and I’m not even sure even the great Joss Whedon will find a way to surpass his joyous, Buster Keaton-esque appearance here. In this age when anything imaginable can be expressed onscreen, I can’t recall the last time that an audience applauded after an action sequence. They clapped long and loud after this one.

In the mid-80s, in order to correct its overlapping and contradictory continuity,

DC Comics famously annihilated much of its golden age history in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Filmmakers, faced with untying the narrative knots left by their predecessors, often to do the same thing. Which is why X-Men: Days of Future Past is so satisfying. You and the rest of the filmmakers took everything that worked and found a way to make it work better. The result: not just the best of all the X-Men films, but one of the best summer blockbusters of the last decade. As you know, it’s just the sort of reward a respect for continuity can grant you.

Sincerely,

Jared Young

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5 )

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Dear Pietro Scalia, Editor,

Congratulations on creating something of a cohesive narrative out of this mess. I can only imagine the footage you sifted through in order to create a film of great imagination (and even greater plot holes). Director Marc Webb clearly set his sights on the tween-market, assuming that a generation raised on tweets and snapchat would appreciate shiny distraction over plot and character development.

Let me see if I can make sense of the story you were trying to piece together:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens with a vague introduction of what happened to Peter Parker’s parents—and with that bit of exposition out of the way, we quickly barrel into proper Spidey hijinks: an Eastern-European loon has a load of nuclear bits and bobs in a truck! Will no one stop the Eastern-European loon! (The real baddie here seems to be the immigration office: I’m surprised at the number of wicked Nazi scientists and mad Russians they let into the country; can’t they tell from the accent, the cackle, and the deranged facial expressions that these guys are up to no good?)

While Spider-Man destroys half of the NYPD’s patrol cars in the process of stopping him, his lovely lady, Gwen, is making a poignant speech at their graduation, which he only just manages to attend.

Gwen isn’t Peter’s lovely lady for long though. Guilt over her dead father’s wishes (to keep her out of harm’s way) leads to the death of their relationship and the beginning of their epic love story.

Will they get back together? Won’t they? Wait; why won’t they again? The movie seems to lose track of this itself, but that’s understandable, see poor Spidey has a lot on his plate. If the city isn’t suffering a major electrical problem, random planes aren’t crashing, an evil corporation isn’t doing evil things, and no one’s after Spider-Man’s blood, then Gwen’s off to Oxford University! Just as one storyline seems to build momentum, another web-stream of plot shoots off in the opposite direction.

Spidey does his best, swinging here and there, helping out where he can—especially little kids who need big hugs and empty remarks. Interspersed with these empty remarks, we’re introduced to the villains…all of the villains. Besides the aforementioned Soviet Block Baddie, there’s Max Dillon, the maligned and ignored electrical engineer, whose finest work is stolen by Oscorp right before he’s involved in a major work accident involving electrical eels. He becomes Octo, a electrical blue phantom, who’s shoved in the basement with a Nazi scientist until the plot requires him later. Then there’s Harry Osborne, heir to the Oscorp conglomerate, who just happens to be Peter Parker’s best friend and is now dying of the same nasty lizard disease that killed his father. (Therefore he needs Spider-Man blood.) If that wasn’t good enough for you there’s that nasty Oscorp corporation prepared to do anything to topple Harry, their newly appointed Chairman, and keep their evil experimenting on the down-low.

While all of this villainous stuff is percolating, Peter  is struggling to figure out why he was abandoned by his parents,  his relationship with Gwen, and—oh, did I forget to mention how Aunt May is studying to become a nurse to help save money for Peter to go to college?

How you were able to cut this all together, I don’t know. The film swings wildly from plotline to plotline like Spider-Man crossing the city on his webs. And when it comes to resolving any of them, it turns out that a baddie’s real identity can be uncovered in a casual chat in the elevator, and the disappearance of your parents can be solved by figuring out that they used the subway.

Logic isn’t this movie’s strong point. Unfortunately, logic – both spatial and narrative – is the cornerstone of your profession.

So kudos, Pietro, for turning it into something that makes any sort of sense whatsoever.

Emily Cracknell

Status: Standard Delivery (2.5/5)