Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The 1990 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" represents a pre-woke artifact of early nineties pop culture, when films could exist in a state of blissful disinterest toward contemporary social consciousness. This is a straightforward action adventure featuring anthropomorphic reptiles dispatching criminals in New York City. The narrative machinery grinds forward without pause for interrogation of its own assumptions. We are presented with competence and heroism as sufficient justification for action, and villainy as a personal choice rather than a structural condition. Shredder is evil because he chooses to be, not because any system has failed him.

The film's female character, April O'Neill, performs her function as reporter and occasional damsel with professional competence. She is neither objectified beyond the standards of 1990 cinema nor elevated as a figure of particular social consciousness. She exists, works, and participates in the plot. This is presented without irony or commentary, which is perhaps the most honest thing the film does. The cast reflects the demographics of mainstream American action cinema of that era, which is to say predominantly white, with voice acting distributed among recognizable names of the period.

The film's treatment of Asian martial arts traditions and the Japanese-inspired villain occurs without the contemporary anxiety about cultural appropriation or the need to contextualize such borrowing. It simply takes what it needs from the source material and proceeds. For a film made in 1990, this represents no failure of consciousness because consciousness of these particular issues had not yet crystallized into cultural watchwords. The result is an entertainment object largely innocent of the progressive sensibilities that would come to dominate film criticism in subsequent decades. It succeeds as a children's adventure and asks nothing more of itself.