Teenage ALIEN Ninja Turtles. Bastard.

edit. Bay is the bastard. Just to clarify.

It worked pretty well for Hellboy...but Del Toro isn't directing the TMNT movie.

I think that's precisely the problem. I've said it on many occasions that he seemed to relay way too much on technology to make the films work, without putting the sort of care that he did in his earlier films.

I think he really should have gotten Joss Whedon to help out, I mean it is basically just cowboys in space with fairytales on top of it.

I think it could work really well, and you could also use modern technology to "smooth things out a bit". You can clearly see that the people in the turtles movies are just people in suits, but if you give it a light "CGI touch", you could probably enhance the result quite a bit, while still retaining all the advantages of using a guy in a rubber suit.

I have to wonder though, would any of the old fans really be able to appreciate a brand new movie made in the style of the old TMNT, or would people just criticize it for not being as entertaining to an adult as the old movies (well, the first and second one at least) was to a kid?

To throw a bit of a wrench into the discussion: what about entirely CGI movies?

I agree with all the previous posters, that the over reliance on CGI, technology, and the like can make things like acting worse and overall "love" put into the movie less, but how about movies that are entirely built around computers? I'm thinking about stuff like Dreamworks and Pixar movies where, I think, the story is conveyed beautifully without physical actors (of course voice actors become increasingly important - though the case of Wall-e provides a quick counter to that).

A Pixar Ninja Turtles movie would be good, but is impossible now due to rights issues.

They can be glorious, but they have one of the same issue that cel-animated films have, in that everything is always planned ahead. There's no spontaneity to them, because everything was storyboarded months earlier. While that level of planning can lead to good movies, you can also miss out on stuff like Indiana Jones shooting the swordsman, or any number of incredible shots of transient light in the sky in Westerns. (And you don't get bloopers, either, unless they're made on purpose like in A Bug's Life.) CGI has its own technical limitations as well... for one shot in the Incredibles they practically had to rewrite the rendering software because it couldn't handle a character putting an arm through a hole in a shirtsleeve. Hair is also very difficult to animate, which is why it's normally in an up-do, very stylized, or under a hat. Sully's hair in Monster's Inc too AGES to animate even just for the dailies. They're also pretty damn expensive to make.

They're great because you're unbound by physical limitations, but I don't see them conquering live action any time soon.

Michael Bay... Alien Ninja Turtles... Its gonna be...a big pile of Devastators "Wrecking Balls"

Off Topic: RoboCop looks stupid too

Like Biker Mice from Mars, but with turtles instead of mice and ninjas instead of bikers? We've come full-circle.

Michael Bay Turtles!?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO :(
If only....

Nostalgia's called "something" nowadays? :-P But yeah, I can see why you'd think that if you only watch hollywood flicks.

Nostalgia is overrated.

That being said, movies (everything, really) tend to use the most recent technology for maximum marketability. My definition of a masterpiece is a work that uses the limitations of the media to its advantage. Now, I'm not a cinephile, but I'm sure there are silent movies that won't just work with spoken dialogue and black and white movies that won't work in "glorious technicolor". When a technique goes out of fashion, the number of movies that uses it decreases, and the number of *good* movies that uses it decreases correspondingly. As of now, CGI animation is the new obvious costumes.