Paramount kicked off the proceedings in Las Vegas tonight for CinemaCon -- the annual convention for theater owners -- and among the trailers screened was the highly anticipated first glimpse of our new live-action
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Apparently the teaser was quite short, but showed plenty of shots of the Turtles as they slid around snow-capped mountains etc. Here's a good description from Badass Digest.
At first the trailer hides the turtles - there's voice over from William Fichtner's Shredder explaining the city has gone to shit. We see criminals with automatic weapons and buildings exploding and maybe - just maybe! - it seems like this could be a Hobo With A Shotgun version of a city in decline. It turns out that this version of Shredder hates that crime and violence, and so he started a program to create heroes. That's juxtaposed with TCRI ooze canisters and experiments. You know, the ooze that created the turtles. The ooze that Shredder made... with April's dad. Yes, the VO is Shredder telling April he and her dad made the turtles. There's flash footage of the Turtles fighting guys in the subway and April films on her phone. Then the turtles are revealed... and they're kind of bad? Meredith Woerner of io9 was sitting next to me and said they looked like babies with penis heads, and she's right. They're not turtle-y enough and they're not anthropomorphized enough. They're a terrible middle ground. They do crack wise, though. We see the turtles sliding down a mountain and one yells "Batter up!" and is thrown into a Hummer, shell first, crushing the door of the vehicle.
The tagline for the trailer is: "Heroes are not born, they're created". Hmmm. Other reports state that these new Turtles are indeed VERY big -- much larger than a human; though we'd pretty much already figured that from those early set pics. Reactions from those in attendance were mixed..at best. Nobody outright blasted what they saw, but we haven't come across any particularly enthusiastic responses either. The overall vibe from this first short teaser is that it comes across as very much a "Michael Bay movie" anyway -- you're opinion of the man's other flicks will obviously inform your excitement levels upon hearing that. The general consensus seems to be that we'll need to see more footage before minds can be made up completely, but we may not have too long to wait for that as this teaser is expected to hit the net soon enough.
UPDATE: Soon enough is Thursday morning! The trailer will be online 3 days from now.