Turtley Awesome Extras – “In Your Face! The Turtles in 3D”

Most of the extras on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Blu-Ray have been less than spectacular, mostly due to the actual length of the featurette, which created a situation where no particular extra devoted the time and energy one would have expected to these interesting facets of the movie.  As a final look at the disc, the extra “In Your Face!  The Turtles in 3D” proves to be no exception to that rule.

This particular feature presents a look at how the movie was done in 3D, and the techniques used to make sure that the audience felt as if they were a part of everything.  “There are a number of shots that are going to be all 3D, so when you’re shooting you have to factor in that type of considerations as to how things are going to be coming at the lens,” said visual effects supervisor Robert Weaver.  Most of the discussion throughout the extra is centered around particular shots that were given a 3D rendering to help engage the audience more fully in the film experience.  For instance, when Splinter taunts Michelangelo with the slice of pizza, the pizza is positioned in a way that the audience feels like it could be eaten.

The problem with this extra, however, is very much the one stated above.  There’s no information about anything of merit related to the process, and the feature is too short to actually get into anything meaningful.  Either the editor didn’t feel that the audience would care how the actual 3D process works, or they wouldn’t understand it in a way that would make for a good extra feature.  Either way, there’s no sense in walking away from watching the extra that any real information was gained, or that one should care about the effort that supposedly went in to rendering the movie in 3D.

Since is this the final extra to be covered on this film, a few final words on the collection as a whole, while not necessarily needed, should be considered.  It’s always meritorious when distributors try to add extra features to releases.  Some of them are very good, and provide real insight into the process.  Some of them are just fun, and give the consumer something unique and interesting to go along with their movie experience.  However, some are simply terrible, giving no new information, providing nothing interesting, and being utterly devoid of merit.  Unfortunately for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film (one that has already been plagued by very mixed press, more on the negative than the positive), most of the extras included are of the terrible variety, offering nothing to the audience.  It’s very sad, because there seemed like there were real areas that could have been fun to explore deeper in this film.

The new turtles have been with us for almost a year now, and the second film is only a year away.  When that movie ends up on DVD, we can only hope that there’s more to the release than this one.  Hopefully someone includes an extra worth watching, and gives fans something more than they received with the first film.