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Ultimate Avengers – The Movie
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To confront an alien menace, Nick Fury assembles a group of superheroes lead by a recently resuscitated Captain America. It’s a new world for Cap, but a world under siege from a familiar enemy. With the help of Iron Man, Thor, Giant Man, Wasp and a few other familiar faces, Captain America rises with the mighty team known as the Avengers.
This movie was way overdue in my opinion.
I’ve always loved the Avengers and was relieved to see Marvel actually invest a worthy amount of time and effort into their first full-length feature.
Visually, it’s an impressive film. The animation allows a freedom to achieve a level of action that simply wouldn’t have been possible or convincing if it had been executed through live-action based effects. Additionally, it’s the now nostalgic style of 2-D animation lends itself to the title’s inherited history more appropriately than would today’s more popular computer animated features.
But the film’s story was a huge disappointment. It wasted a lot of time trying to develop a plot that condensed several years’ worth of comics (which were told from 2002 thru 2006). At times the movie comes dangerously close to pinching the Justice League’s 2001 pilot episode. Which is a shame, but at the same time it gives us the opportunity to see how Marvel’s greatest heroes would react to a similar situation. The emphasis, here, is on outstanding action sequences set against a drama that occasionally dips into the melodramatic. That’s Marvel for ya.
In the end, this is nothing we haven’t seen before, but it is still worth watching.
When I was a kid, I didn’t read the X-Men… I read the Avengers. This film reminded me of why I found them to be the more exciting of the two. Once I got a little older I chose to read the innovative Justice League of America instead of the Avengers. This film reminded me of why I made that decision as well.
Best Bonus Feature: Avengers Trivia Track… a pop-up video style feature that displays the occasional trivial fact about the historic events that are referenced through Captain America, the back-stories of the Avengers and to a lesser degree, the decision and inspirations that went into the making of the film.
Who should own: Collectors and anyone that grew up reading the Avengers.
