Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: "John Carter" Review

Short review: a good old fashioned swashbuckler movie with a lot of humor, but one that's dragged down by giving testosterone hero John Carter a "sad" backstory. Stay for Woola's cuteness, Dejah Thoris kicking butt, John Carter leaping, the flight scenes in 3-D, and the surprisingly warm father-daughter subplot. As far as a Burroughs adaptation goes it's very good but not perfect, but it's got everything your inner eleven year old wants: the coolest dog in the world, a four armed best buddy, and winning the hand of a gorgeous princess with swordfighting.

After a whole century without an adaptation...am I the only one bugged by how they chose to pronounce things? I always pronounced Issus as Aye-sus (same as Isis), and Dejah Thoris as DEE-juh Thor-Us.

Long review:

The movie's take on Dejah Thoris, the original work's greatest dragging liability, is a success. She had to be changed somehow and what they did worked.

Not only is the leggy, muscular, exotic, bronzed Lynn Collins a twelve year old boy's dream girl, she's also a scientist and a warrior, heroic and intelligent. She's a princess, but her princess persona is a put on she can slip on and off to cover her personal anxieties. Unlike other newly upgraded martial heroines, the story actually commits to her being a great fighter, and she plays a role in the end of the story and doesn't lose her martial skills when they're inconvenient to the plot (unlike Maid Marian in Prince of Thieves), and she actually wins fights (unlike Kate Beckinsale's fake action girl in Van Helsing).

She actually uses her great intelligence in several scenes to figure out Thern technology and translate inscriptions. She's less a movie girlfriend and more a Spock-like smart sidekick.

She's also a scientist and…well, ask yourself this. When was the last time in comics or pop culture you saw a FEMALE inventor or supergenius?

Making Dejah Thoris a supergenius is actually a pretty good substitution in the story. Previously, Dejah Thoris was captured all the time because she was the world's most beautiful woman and often did things that were self-destructive or moronically out of character, like suddenly insist she was going to marry Sab Than out of nowhere. If Dejah Thoris was a scientist on the verge of a great discovery, it makes sense villains trying to stifle that discovery would try to have her killed or captured.


By the way, when I first heard Dejah was going to be a scientist in the movie version, I was totally shocked because she was so useless. But actually, Dejah being a scientist is a pretty legit interpretation of what she was actually doing. Take this selection from Chapter X of "A Princess of Mars."

“What is your name?” asked Lorquas Ptomel, addressing the prisoner. 

“Dejah Thoris, daughter of Mors Kajak of Helium.” 

“And the nature of your expedition?” he continued. 

“It was a purely scientific research party sent out by my father’s father, the Jeddak of Helium, to rechart the air currents, and to take atmospheric density tests,” replied the fair prisoner, in a low, well-modulated voice. 

“We were unprepared for battle,” she continued, “as we were on a peaceful mission, as our banners and the colors of our craft denoted. The work we were doing was as much in your interests as in ours, for you know full well that were it not for our labors and the fruits of our scientific operations there would not be enough air or water on Mars to support a single human life. For ages we have maintained the air and water supply at practically the same point without an appreciable loss, and we have done this in the face of the brutal and ignorant interference of your green men."

The idea she might be a scientist is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of these events, although most people figure Dejah was just there as a royal administrator.

Taylor Kitsch, surprisingly, did a good job as John Carter. He brought to the character a kind of Eastwood-esque serious manliness, and a very Southern chivalry that's the core of the character. He politely refers to everyone as either "sir" or "ma'am." Even the bad guys.

The scenes where John Carter jumps around like a rubber ball under low Martian gravity were really effective and infectiously exhilarating and fun.

One of the things I always thought was unique about John Carter of Mars is, John Carter goes native and adapts to Barsoom really fast, and because Mars is so darn cool, prefers to stay there rather than go back to boring old earth. I never understood why Dorothy Gale wanted to go back to drab, black and white Kansas when she was a universally beloved heroine in the much cooler fantasy world of Oz. To its credit, the movie gets this totally right: when John Carter is forced to leave Mars and the girl he loved we feel the wrenching pain as he returns to Earth a million miles away, never knowing if he'll ever return. The painful removal from Mars, something that later became the emotional core of the Adam Strange series, was perfectly captured here.

Unfortunately, Kitsch's solid performance is undercut somewhat by the fact the script  "fixes" a problem: John Carter doesn't have an arc as a character. This "problem" is solved in the most hackneyed way possible: instead of making John Carter the testosterone-personified, energetic he-man hero we know he was, he's saddled with a "sad hero" backstory. Would I shock you if I told you there were lots of flashbacks to a lost family?

The idea John Carter was a bitter, cynical veteran who constantly insisted he shouldn't get involved and didn't want to go back to Earth chews up and wastes the movie's time, and doesn't play to Taylor Kitsch's strengths.

The movie's strongest and surprisingly emotional subplot is Tars Tarkas's father-daughter relationship with Sola, the only Martian female to know her real father and family. Tars Tarkas is protective of her, and love for her motivates everything he does. Since Sola knew love and family among otherwise loveless and unsentimental creatures like the Tharks, Sola stands out as a screwup who doesn't fit into society perfectly. This is the only time the otherwise drab "sad hero" backstory for John Carter is actually used to really good effect. Because he recognizes something of himself in the big Thark.

Woola of course, was downright perfect and steals every scene he's in…but that's obvious. You can tell the guy who did this movie also did Wall-E, because its best character is a silent little monster.

There was one moment in John Carter of Mars that got an ERB-fanboy charge of excitement out of me.

While in the wilderness, gentleman John Carter and his friends were chased by the hordes of Warhoon, a type of Green Martian more savage and ferocious than others of their kind. The creators of the movie totally nailed it. They looked the part: feral, cruel, covered in bones, scarred and fearsome. It was something I'd waited to see brought to life since I read the books as a Tarzan-loving kid. The presence of the hordes of Warhoon was an indulgence that, according to an interview, Andrew Stanton fought for, to the point he "traded off" an appearance by banths, saving the fierce, distinctive Martian lions for a sequel.

Strictly speaking, the presence of the hordes of Warhoon wasn't entirely necessary to the story, but it showed a fannish gusto to bring Barsoom to screen. I wish there had been more moments like that because there were so few. This was also why Green Lantern and Percy Jackson were such empty movies despite coming from such innovative source material: they saved everything interesting for the sequels, assuming they had all the time in the world.

The lesson here for future film-makers is, even when doing movies intended to be franchise starters, treat every movie like it was the last one. Because there's a heartbreaking chance it just might be.

It feels like a dick move to criticize a movie by mentioning all the things it didn't have, but was it impossible to show some people in the background playing Jetan? No reference to even the merest hints of the existence of the First Born, Kaldanes and the Okarians? No ulsios or soraks scuttling around in the background? A huge chunk of the movie was set around Zodanga. So, no background appearance by someone who is undisguisably Rapas the Ulsio, Zat Arras or Fal Sivas? Nobody swearing "by their first ancestor?" No shots of mastodon-like zitidars? (Thoats are the only beasts of burden used in the movie version of Barsoom.) No one person in the background in a diamond harness who might be a Gatholian? No dropped hints of a lost Ptarthian princess who would later be revealed as Thuvia in the next movie?

All this sounds fannish and nitpicky and I understand that. But I was under the impression from all the press materials I was going to get a movie by lifelong Barsoom fans bringing Barsoom to screen for the first time after literally an entire century of waiting, given gobs of money and freedom. I was expecting the Martian equivalent of the fan friendly, easter egg filled Marvel movies or Peter Jackson's accurate Lord of the Rings. I was led to believe, somewhat deceptively, I was going to get continuity porn instead of a sanitized Hollywood adaptation. If Stanton and Chabon and the rest really were the Barsoom aficionados they say they are, wouldn't they have known Helium's defining skyline and physical characteristic is it's defined by twin mile-high towers? If Barsoom is a world of eternal youth, why is it Dejah Thoris's grandfather Tardos Mors looked so visibly older than she did?

There was a scene in world-traveler John Carter's study filled with parts and objects from around the world…and they couldn't have crammed in a reference to Tarzan, La, Opar, or Caprona? At least the army situation room in Captain America has a map of Wakanda.

At least they used the Martian standards of measurements: xats, karads, and so on...and remembered Kaor, the Martian greeting, and that Earth and Venus were respectively called Jasoom and Cosoom.  That was something!

The 2009 Star Trek had references to the Klingons, Rura Penthe, Cardassians (…surprisingly, since the Cardies were unknown in the original series era), Sulu fencing, the Vulcan mind-meld, an in-joke about redshirts dying, heck, there was even a tribble if you look hard enough – all of which was done without hampering the momentum of the movie. The Lord of the Rings movies were both simultaneously accessible and beloved by the couch potato idiots of the world, and by Tolkien fans for their accuracy and fan-friendly details (anyone else notice Galadriel wearing the ring Nenya?). When the android Human Torch showed up in Captain America, it drew gasps from the audience I watched the movie with.

The notion that something is either for the hardcore fans OR for a general audience is a false, nonexistent dilemma, and a sign of a limited thinker. A characteristic of the successful adaptation is how "full" they feel.

Maybe I'm spoiled rotten by the Marvel movies and by Lord of the Rings and so I expected something unfair from this movie. After all, the norm for adaptations of beloved geek properties is for them to be visibly made by people that just don't care.

There were some changes to the material in adaptation from the book to the movie, but like all the changes in the recent Star Trek movie, they were ones I saw happening when the movie was announced: there were three evil Green Martian chieftains, and so economy insisted they be reduced to just one, played wonderfully by Thomas Hayden Church.

A lot of people said that the new early appearance and prominence of the Therns was rewriting Burroughs's Mars mythology. It all made perfect sense to me, though. We learn in Warlord of Mars that the Therns, as a result of their false religion, come and go as they please on Barsoom, and after the destruction of their culture, Matai Shang, Hekkador and Father of the Therns, hid in the city of Kaol where their cult still had power.

The idea of the Holy Therns as a behind the scenes power cynically exploiting people and present at the beginning of the John Carter story was totally in character with the Therns' modus operandi. On the other hand it's unlikely there is going to be a race of Black Pirates (or the First Born), because Barsoom doesn't need two races of false gods.

At the same time, the Therns are able to shapeshift and have advanced science, something I wish they didn't have. The whole point of the Therns is that despite their claims of godhood, they are just a bunch of liars running a hustle and dodge on the entire rest of Barsoom; giving them superpowers kind of negates that idea.

The Therns here are totally bald, just like in the books. I missed the humanizing touch of vanity they had where they wore elaborate blonde wigs to disguise their baldness.

Making the Therns major baddies gives the movie a strong central villain, something not in the original novel, and more closely ties the Edgar Rice Burroughs finds the journal frame story into the rest of it. I'd count that as a success.

Zodanga is now a "predator city" on legs able to move around. I have to give the writers credit for this. It's the most Burroughs-esque idea Burroughs never had a colorful, exotic and improbable locale. And it led to a great flying scene that was the most successful use of 3-D in the movie.

I wish all I could do is just talk about the John Carter of Mars movie, but unfortunately movies don't happen in a vacuum.

A lot of Paleolithic movie critics and entertainment reporters raised in the days before nerds took over the world deeply resent the sudden dominance of genre fiction in pop culture and hate writing about science fiction, comic books, pulp novels and video games. Even so, the sheer disproportionate, fanged viciousness directed toward "John Carter" is shocking.

Because they hate writing about nerd stuff, many entertainment reporters take a jeering, cowardly, jackal-like glee in tearing down a member of the herd that looks weak and limping. Nobody can be crueler than the cowardly, thwarted, and passive-aggressive.

This is why I don't listen to people who say science fiction or the superhero movie "is dead." They write that not because they think it's true, but because they desperately wish it was.

The effect of all the rooting for John Carter to fail and pronouncing it a dead on arrival bomb leaves me angry, hurt and heartsick. Imagine there's this book series you've loved for a lifetime. Imagine there's a movie version coming out, and before it's even released, it's proclaimed a derivative waste nobody will like, with source material forgotten by time nobody remembers or cares about anymore. Taking a risk on believing in something you love is seen as a laughably foolhardy misstep that the studio in question will be punished for doing.

How do you respond to the jeering masses who think of something you love and believe in, as an irresponsible disaster bigger than Ishtar and Dune put together, one that the people of the world will reject? All of which are independent of the quality of the movie itself. It makes me angry just thinking about the injustice of it.

As for the quality of the movie? Definitely worth seeing. After all, John Carter of Mars adaptations don't come along every year  - or every hundred years.

Julian Perez At the Movies: Thor

It's weird to say, but Thor is a smaller personal story than you'd expect. Compared to how "big" Iron Man 2 was, for instance, it had relatively fewer battles and special effects scenes and worked at a smaller scale than one would expect for someone like Mighty Thor. I was surprised at how short and tight the movie was.

The Thor movie is a lot like the first Iron Man in that it is about a guy who changes from the start of the movie to the end because he gets put through the wringer and realizes he made mistakes. Thor starts off as a hero with a lot of flaws: he's a bolsterous guy with a big personality but he likes to fight way too much, which is a problem for a guy who might be King, because a wise king shouldn't look for trouble.

He's proud and easily offended and haughty, and like a lot of proud people he gets revenge for insults a wise person might just ignore. At the end of the movie, Thor shows how he's changed because he actually fights to save some former enemies because he figures over the top retaliation isn't right!

The Science Fiction Elements

One dirty little secret about Mighty Thor that even comic book fans don't get at times is that Mighty Thor was never, ever entirely Tolkien or Gaiman esque mythic fantasy, but was kept off-balance and interesting because it had unusual and incongruous science fiction and a cosmic element to it that felt more science fiction than fantasy. Thor was never "Lord of the Rings," it was something weirder and cooler than that because it had alien invasions, giant unstoppable robots, and science fiction villains like Ego the Living Planet, Zarrko the Tomorrow Man, and the High Evolutionary and his Dr. Moreau beastman city.

It was almost Joseph Campbell mindblowing, with moments like a guy on a horse galloping through space. Jack Kirby always drew shining Asgard less as a giant Viking town than as yet another secret society future city, just like the Inhumans' Attilan.

Though Thor started out as based on Ancient Pagan stories, it was always something altogether different and it says something that the most interesting characters even in Thor's world of Asgard were totally without precedent in folklore: Beta Ray Bill – an alien with the power of Thor, the Enchantress and the Executioner, the Warriors Three, and so on. Even when something was taken from folklore, it was juxstaposed with either modern New York (like that Walt Simonson story where Thor chased the indestructible dragon Fafnir through the subway system and then fought him on the Empire State Building) or outer space (like that one where Thor, the Lady Sif and Beta Ray Bill fought Surtur the Fire-Giant, but he was leading an invasion of an alien planet).

After Stan Lee and Jolly Jack left Might Thor, super-literate English lit major Roy Thomas tried slipping in some classic references to pagan stories, like how Mighty Thor actually had a chariot pulled by goats – a detail most other writers "forgot" about mostly because it looked pretty stupid. The more folkloric a character is in Thor, the more likely they are to be dull in the comics. Balder the Brave, who in Pagan belief was a sort of Jesus-figure who died and came back to life, had no real personality in the comics apart from being a loyal friend.

All that brings me to this movie. They went in exactly the right direction with Thor, which astounded me: I figured they'd "play it safe" and do Thor like "Lord of the Rings" or "Narnia." Here, they made Thor even more science fiction than before: the other dimensions are now planets (apparently the Frost Giants now have their own planet), and the Rainbow Bridge of Bifrost is now a wormhole gadget that looks like the Asgardians borrowed it from Doctor Who.

Loki is described as a "wizard," but that must mean something different to Asgardians than to us because his "magic" is mostly tricks like the hologram gadget from "Total Recall."

In the comics, though Thor often battled science fiction menaces, Thor was unambiguously exactly what he said he was: an immortal deity. Fighting him was more like taking on a force of nature than a person. Here, he's more like a superpowerful alien mistaken for a god by primitive humans.

Make no mistake: the science fiction elements were a theme of Mighty Thor that this movie just made more explicit than usual, a case of a movie "getting it." They pushed that angle front and center in the trailers, which is weird. I think it might have been to say, "I know he's based on paganism, but look! It's really science fiction! So, please, please, please don't skip out on our movie, people from the South!"

The Bad Guys: Loki and the Destroyer

The villain of the movie – Loki - is fascinating because he's so totally different from any other bad guy in superhero movies.

All the major twists and turns of the movie are due to him, which is why, despite the fact he's so great it's hard to talk about him without spoilers. Just when you think you've figured out his motivation, there's another level to his scheme in operation; you don't even really "get" the character until one last line he gives that explains everything.

In the end Loki comes off as strangely tragic because he wasn't evil so much as someone that went wrong somewhere. Loki is sympathetic because his motive is he has something to prove to everyone, despite the fact people accept and like him; he's insecure and sees distrust and hate where there just isn't any.

The costume was great, too: there was one shot that was just a shadow of Loki on a wall; with that curved horn helmet of his, Loki was immediately recognizable just by silhouette.

Loki must be Norwegian for liar, because that's exactly what he does, and everyone believes him. In fact, he's so good at lying and pulling strings, so subtle, that the first scene he manipulates other people it's possible to not even realize he did it. Loki wins fights by sneaking and cheating and playing on other people's emotions. In one scene he looks like he's about to fall to his death and asks his brother Thor to save his life. Surprise! It was a hologram trick that lets Loki stab Thor.

Loki lying can be more crushing and destroying than any proton beam: one of the worst, crushing scenes in the movie was one where Loki goes to Thor and tells him their mother doesn't want Thor to ever come back to Asgard.

The Destroyer was just about perfect in this movie. He was huge and unstoppable and totally silent and intimidating and reminded me of Gort, the robot from "The Day the Earth Stood Still." I saw someone at the premiere with a 7-11 Destroyer cup, which makes perfect sense: opening night of Thor is the only place in the world you can possibly be comfortable drinking out of a plastic robot in public. I totally expect that in the future, statues of the Destroyer will be sold at science fiction conventions next to busts of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Comedy

One thing the trailers probably didn't tell you about Mighty Thor: it's funny. Just as funny as Iron Man, in fact, which is really a relief because if it didn't have a sense of humor it'd be insufferable. Thor bonds with a scientist because the pair of them drink heavily (and competitively!), and the pair come back stumbling drunk. The human characters help Thor become a decent person because he sincerely wants to help Jane Foster, as Thor knows she's right.

I was super-nervous about Kenneth Brannaugh because I thought it might be the Ang Lee "Hulk" all over again: another case of a "highbrow" director who makes a bad movie because he looks down on the material. This didn't happen here at all, and I'm delighted. Still, Brannaugh is a classy guy and he brought a lot of polish: notice that in all of his scenes all the actors are doing something instead of just staring blankly, and because of his direction he made some jokes work that should be unfunny on paper.

Nobody that really appreciates or understands Shakespeare could possibly be a snob. As genius as the guy was, Shakespeare wrote his plays like the better Hollywood blockbusters; there was plenty of stuff for the literate but his target audience was the lowest common denominator so there was always plenty of attention-getting sex, violence and functions comedy (farts and midgets). If Shakespeare lived today he'd be perfectly at home doing surprisingly high-quality stuff in the studio system.

The Casting

Kenneth Brannaugh is a color-blind casting guy; in "As You Like It" he made Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington brothers.

A lot of people wondered about the Asian Hogun the Grim, which bugs me because that critique is actually downright comics-illiterate; even in the comics he was not from Asgard but was a bitter outcast from a country to the South, a sort of Mongol type pan-Asian place with genies and flying carpets. Hogun was the first of the Warriors Three to get a solo story because he was so popular: he had a lot of cool mystique as a quiet, antisocial guy who thought his life was cheap.

If I have a critique of that movie it's that the minor characters went underdeveloped. Surely some cute character bit, even if it was one line, could have been given to Volstagg (who seemed curiously thin in this movie), Fandral the Dashing was just there, as was someone as cool as Hogun.

Idris Elba did just fine. He got the best costume in the entire movie, bronze-gold space armor that looks like something Darth Vader would wear if he was a good guy. He has a great growly voice and accent, and together with oddball hazel-gold contacts, he let his voice and the costume do all the work. He doesn't look Asgardian but he sounds like it. I guess if you want an explanation for his un-Asgardian looks, Heimdall might have been a "naturalized citizen" to Asgard, originally from someplace else, like Hogun the Grim.

The Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu - 2007's TMNT Movie

One thing about my viewing of the 2007 TMNT movie kept me from enjoying it fully. I used to think I'm not the type to get misty-eyed over dead famous people I never knew personally, but it was extremely difficult to hear the voice of powerful veteran character-actor Mako.

I had to turn the movie off and come back to it after a while because it was difficult to watch. The movie must have been his final performance, since it came out in 2007 and he died in 2006 (after a quick look at IMDB, apparently it was).

Anyone who pretends they aren't moved when actors they love die are lying. Through art you feel a connection to others.

In any case, I was surprised and delighted to see the new movie "got it." They knew what made the Ninja Turtles tick. Lots of teams like the Fantastic Four are described as a family, but with the Turtles that's literally true: all four of them are brothers, and they have the same camaraderie and competitiveness of brothers with strong personalities. Splinter, the wise old rat that trained them in Martial Arts, is even called Father by the turtles. When he isn't called Master or Sensei because he's that, too. Mako even used different tones of voice when Splinter was their Sensei and when he was their parent.

If the Ninja Turtles are a family like the Fantastic Four, like the Avengers, all the emotional stories and conflict is based around an axis of two characters: one is a leader-type that is responsible and principled, and the other is a wild, brash, proud and ferociously independent guy that bucks at being led. With the Avengers it's Hawkeye and Captain America and with the Turtles it's Leonardo and the angry, tempermental Rafael. Just like Boba Fett was based on Clint Eastwood, Rafael was based on the screen persona of James Cagney. Amazing how much screen time Rafael gets in the Turtles movies: he's not everyone's favorite but he's obviously the writers' favorite, just like Hawkeye was consistently every Avengers writers' pet character.

The movie feels like an actual Ninja Turtles movie, as opposed to what I was afraid it would be: a movie that shamelessly uses the fondness people my age have for the Ninja Turtles to knock off a cheap and fast flick. Yeah, sure, it's animated, but now that I think about it, I'm surprised none of the original Ninja Turtle movies were animated. Like Tarzan, the Ninja Turtles have an athleticism and physicality that only animation can actually bring to screen.

Animation was the best decision ever for this movie because it was filled with monsters and black magic like animated rock golems. Though the movie is a direct sequel to the original live action movies, it combines their New York street-toughness with the Ray Harryhausen weirdness that defined the lighter and softer animated TV incarnation, which had traditional superhero stuff like Dimension X and a scientist that turned himself into a fly monster.

Like Batman, there are several different tones the Turtles take over the years (and like Batman, the sillier things got the more science fiction there was), but this version the Turtles' goofier elements are more subdued and subtle. For instance, there is some pizza-eating, but it's in the background and the Turtles don't go too crazy, and some of their catch-phrases are alluded to but never outright said, like the Turtles have a license plate that says "DUDE-1." Michaelangelo in particular was like his late eighties/early nineties contemporary, Bart Simpson, in that he was pretty much a catch-phrase machine. Michaelangelo still likes to skateboard, which dates the Turtles a lot - but I'm not complaining because it made for some neat stunt scenes and is character-appropriate for a fun-loving, keep it hangin' dude like him.

There was no Turtle Van, Turtle Blimp or Turtle Communicators. The movie borrowed a lot of things from the 90s cartoon (which was to the Turtles what Adam West is to Batman), but apparently the idea of the cash-strapped turtles that live in a sewer having their own friggin' blimp was too over the top to believe. The height of Ninja Turtle high tech in this movie is smoke bombs, plastique and hang gliders. They don't even use that most comic book of all pieces of technology, the grappling hook gun! I guess they're too old school for even that.

The turtles are guys that love what they do: they like adventure and beating up evil Ninjas and it's hard not to like them back when you see them wiseass their way through fights. Why couldn't the relatively humorless Spider-Man movies be more like that?

Thank God (aka Frank Miller, in this universe) this movie wasn't a reboot or origin story. It's a straight up sequel, and it's great to see a movie that doesn't go through the motions and tries to legitimately continue the story. It reminds me of Superman Returns, in that TMNT straight up ignores the bad movies. Unlike Superman Returns we get an honestly new story.

For one thing, Shredder isn't the bad guy again, the way you'd expect of a cheap and easy movie that uses the familiar elements. Shredder is to the Turtles what Lex Luthor is to Superman: he's great but we're all sick of him. Get another villain, already!

Thank goodness they didn't use the villains from the animated cartoon, two borderline-retarded Dr. Moreau animal men named Bebop and Rocksteady with Brooklyn accents that were about as legitimately menacing as Bulk and Skull were.

The main villain is basically a straight lift of the DC Comics baddie, Vandal Savage. An immortal ancient Chinese warlord who uses his immortality to become a super-rich, influential tycoon. Did I mention he was played by Patrick Stewart?

They also did the single most obvious villain to do, but it's such a cool idea it deserves to be mentioned. The Foot Clan are now led by some evil Asian Dragon Lady mastermind, basically a lady Shredder.

This should come as no surprise. Every single Asian mastermind supervillain has a hot, evil daughter that knows karate and wears a catsuit, ever since Dr. Fu Manchu had his evil daughter Fa Lo Suee. Remember Ra's al-Ghul's daughter, Talia? It was downright criminal that the Batman movie with Ra's in it left Talia out since she was the single most memorable element about Ra's other than the Lazarus Pit. First Christopher Nolan mispronounced Ra's's name (it's said Raysh, damn it!), mangled his origin...and now this!

Other than their catsuit-wearing leader, the Foot clan follow the Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu: the more Ninjas there are, the less awesome they are, until a good guy can cut through a crowd of bad guy Ninja henchmen like butter.

The setting is New York. Where else would it be, right? The turtles are street-tough vigilantes, illegitimate children of Batman and Daredevil. The turtles even leave in the middle of conversations, just like Batman does, and they leave criminals tied up to lamp posts like Spider-Man. The comic started off as a parody of Frank Miller, who was so big he created a subgenre unto himself, full of bat-wielding vigilantes, street punks on every corner with colored spike hair, narration box overuse, Sais, Nunchaku, and ninjas, ninjas, ninjas.

By the way, what ever happened to ninja, anyway? Remember when every Martial Arts school switched to black uniforms for a little while because ninjas were so cool? They were a huge craze in America back in the eighties for a while thanks to two guys: Frank Miller and Orientalist novelist Eric van Lustbader. Van Lustbader wrote Ninja and Jian and other airplane thriller novels that were basically the P.F. Chang's version of Asian culture combined with adventure and espionage porno for men, sort of like a combination of Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Grisham and Memoirs of a Geisha, basically a male version of romance novels.

You know, I've actually thought about Lustbader a lot the past few weeks because the tone of all those BBC articles about the destruction in Japan reminded me of Lustbader: "experts" talking about Orientals and their culture in ways that emphasize their solemnity and stoicism in ways that make them stop seeming like real people and make their suffering no longer real, either.

Believe it or not I'm actually a big fan of Lustbader's thrillers because at least they were different; find a stack of thrillers published in the 1980s aimed at male readers and I guarantee two-thirds will be Tom Clancy imitators. Anyway, Ninja had one of the greatest opening "first victim" scenes ever, instantaneously killed by ninja.

Eventually the ninja craze was supplanted by the kickboxing craze, just like the ninja craze supplanted the first wave Kung Fu craze with Bruce Lee. That's a shame because ninja are incredibly supercool and near-superhuman. They have mystique as stealthy assassins from an exotic culture. I love watching old Samurai movies from the 1950s and 1960s where a typical meeting with a Ninja would go with a Warlord in an empty room, except for a shadow that suddenly appears next to him. The warlord would give his instructions to the shadow...the real person never shown and his voice never heard, ever...and then the shadow would vanish from the wall.

Don't get me wrong, the TMNT movie wasn't perfect. For one thing, there wasn't much of a central villain. The main Vandal Savage bad guy wanted penance for his actions and was ultimately a decent person. The Turtles could have walked away at any time; the story felt like it didn't concern them directly. Towards the end it becomes a "call the cops" movie, a film where the entire premise can be undone if someone just called the cops. Overall, it was tightly plotted and everyone got something to do, even Casey Jones and April, and the Foot Clan received one very interesting character-defining bit that showed they weren't just bad guy hirelings but had something to them.

Splinter in particular was very well used in this movie. He even joined the fighting at the end, which was a surprise. He didn't die at the end or disappear like all mentors and he didn't just show up to deliver expository dialogue.

A few things about the Turtle movie that surprised me:

The movie was a short and tightly plotted 80 minutes long. Compared to bloated, overlong comic book movies, that's practically a blessing and no scene feels useless. There are advantages and disadvantages to skewing your audience young and apparently a short length is one of the benefits.

Why is April O'Neil suddenly an expert in ancient cultures? Wasn't she like, a reporter? Like Chakotay from Voyager, a dull character that never got anything to do, Chakotay got skills as required by the plot so he'd have something to do. Also, in a surprise that left me laughing kept out of the trailers for obvious reasons, she joins the turtles in battle in a banana-yellow Ninja catsuit. Oooh, what a toughie! I don't know any TMNT fans...was this something people really demanded to see?

The opening of the film was identical to an obscure, years too late TMNT knockoff called Warriors of Virtue. In Warriors of Virtue, the leader of the Karate Kangaroo heroes, the guy that had his shit together the most, had to spend years in retirement in the jungle hounded by guilt, and the story was about him returning from retirement. No joke, the guy's color was even blue. Like in TMNT, he's even introduced as a shadowy "guardian angel" presence saving some kid in a jungle.

You can tell this movie company, Imagi, is a far Eastern studio (Korean) because when they have Asian characters, they don't look obviously Asian or different from the Caucasian characters. To Asian people's eyes, they don't look any different from us. Though I'm not sure what I was expecting, something that surprised me about Japanese cartoons was how the Japanese drew themselves looking identical to Americans.