The latest big-screen incarnations of the heroes in a half shell is Michael Bay-produced.
The trailer opens with a montage of destruction scenes seemingly set in New York City (between the Avengers, Spider-Man, and this the city is destryoed), while actor William Fichtner narrates, “Crime, violence and fear have run rampant. Our great city is being destroyed. People want justice restored to this world.”
The original TMNT opened with a series of montages that establish the scene in New York City, as newscaster April O’Neil reads on TV, “Much more than just a series of small, isolated incidents, it’s now apparent that an organized, criminal element is at work and at the moment business is good – so good in fact that there appears to be no eyewitnesses to these crimes; with complaints ranging from purse snatching to breaking and entering.”
In the reboot, Megan Fox plays April O’Neil, who is eventually the turtles’ ally.
Fichtner’s character, listed on IMDB as the villain Shredder, establishes the origin story for the turtles.
“People want heroes, Miss O’Neil,” Fichtner tells her in the trailer. “But heroes are not born; they’re created. That’s what your father and I were trying to do — create heroes.”
Throughout all different incarnations of the TMNT stories, the common denominator is the Ooze –the mutagen — that turned them from regular turtles into mean, green, fighting machines. In the live-action movie, sensei Splinter was also transformed by the radioactive material in which he spotted the turtles crawling (and their first word was “pizza”).
Fans freaked out when Michael Bay previously said the turtles would be aliens.
The trailer doesn’t reveal much, but the mutagen –the green catalyst – is shown.
So there’s that, and the some action sequences with slow motion in which the turtles take out some unsavory types in the subway and snowboard on their backs down a snowy mountain.
For those who may question the chronology of the mutants, first there were the gritty characters of the original comics, created as a parody of popular comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in the early 1980s.
Then their goofier counterparts were made famous in an animated TV series that ran from 1987 to 1996. A live-action feature film was released in 1990, and two sequels followed.
The release date for the reboot is August 8, 2014.
Read more on the Los Angeles Times website: LA Times
