Anyone who has read Mark Millar’s and Brian Hitch’s Ultimates will tell you that it is a great title that is tightly written, self contained and beautifully drawn. The book does a good job updating the classic Avenger’s plot and reinventing it for the twenty-first century.
There are a few changes from Stan Lee’s original team, Hulk is a mass murdering, testosterone driven beast, the WASP is a self loathing mutant of Asian descent, Henry Pym is unstable and abusive. Iron Man’s identity is publically known and he lives with his gay butler. While Thor is a potentially insane political activist, and Captain America actually acts like he came out of the 1940's. Out of all of the changes, the biggest one is that the team is run and owned by SHIELD and the American government.
Nick Fury, who was white and not involved with the Avengers in the original comics, is now Samuel L. Jackson and heads the team. Since after this change was made, they got Samuel L. Jackson to play the role in the Iron Man movie. Sadly he does not do the voice on this DVD movie.
If you look at the credits of the DVD movie, there are actually no celebrities that are featured on it. In fact you’d be hard pressed to recognize any of the voice talent in this project. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not being distracted by who is doing what voice lets the casual viewer focus more on the story and animation. Plus Dragon Lance has taught us all that just casting known TV actors in the voice roles does not guarantee success or quality of the finished product. The voice actors in this all do a decent job fulfilling their lines, but there are no outstanding performances like the ones you’ll see in the Batman animated projects.
The next major factor I think is worth looking at is the animation. The animation is adequate but not up to the quality that you would expect to see in the theatres or on Japanese television. For a non-Disney American production, I think it is probably the best 2-D animation that you will see before the quality jumps up to being worthy of a theatrical release. The best way to describe the style is an upgraded and polished version of the mid-90's Spider-man TV show. If you appreciate those models and shading, chances are you will love this.
Just for the sake of being thorough, I’ll mention the sound. The sound on this is average, it’s not outstanding, it’s not good on surround and there’s nothing that I can hold against it. The sound neither works for or against the DVD, it’s there, it does its job and nothing more.
But where a product like this succeeds or fails is with the story. If it is good enough to entertain, challenge the viewers intellect or accurately adapt a comic series into the small screen, that it will do it’s job. Of course, being the Ultimate Avengers, the DVD’s main goal is to retell the story that Miller and Hitch made; so the big question is, does it succeed?
Well, yes, and no. The movie succeeds in being faithful to many of the points of the series, combining the first and second story arcs into one 70 minute film. The problem with this is when you collect a 13 issue series into 70 minutes, there is a lot that gets cut. The result is a watered down version of the first story arc with the villains of the second arc making the main threat.
One of the factors that made Miller’s work on the title so interesting was his alterations to make the characters less heroic and more flawed. Almost all of those aspects get cut from the film, resulting in the characters seeming very bland. The Wasp (Janet Pym) still Asian (I think, it’s kind of hard to tell with the animation model) but she is not self-loathing. Henry Pym is an arrogant jerk, but he does nothing to hint that he is unstable or abusive like he is in the book. The Hulk goes berserk but it’s never said that he kills anyone and he causes next to no property damage. Nick Fury acts more like a cheer leader who gives them their information, instead of being the manipulative bastard that he is in the series. Iron Man and Thor are just more playful versions of themselves but otherwise little has changed about them. Sadly, for a PG-13 movie, Marvel seemed scared to hint that the butler, Jarvis, was flamboyant or homosexual, instead he just seems uptight and proper and has only a few seconds of screen time.
The story itself is what you would expect from a direct to DVD movie. It plays it by the numbers and creates a solid little narrative, but does nothing to go beyond the required steps. As a result it is rather forgettable. And despite being rated PG-13 (PG in Canada) is comes across as one of those moral providing cartoons that were shoved down children’s throats in the 1980's. The message of this episode was; try hard, work as a team and you’ll be better for it.
For fans of the comics, one or two shots on the DVD are directly taken out of the books, but I couldn’t count anymore than that, so they are little more than Easter eggs to keep the hardcore nerds busy. The highlight of the movie is the Ultimate Avengers’ battle against the Hulk. It seems to be the sole reason why the stuck the Black Widow (Natasha Rominoff) in the movie, so she could get the finishing blow against the brute. It’s also fun to see Hank Pym get knocked down about four times and be completely useless in a crisis.
For those interested in the special features, the DVD is equipt with an trivia track that pops up during the movie and tells you nothing that you don’t already know. It also has a nice little Avenger’s documentary that mainly focuses on two major runs of the title, those of Michael Bendis and George Perez. It is a nice tribute that becomes a borderline commercial for the comics they were putting out at the time this DVD was released.
But despite all these shortcomings, I liked this film. It should have been released as a PG film (and was in Canada) or been edgier. But some scenes taken right out of the comic work really well, there are some great action shots during the two climatic battles, and the darker tones of the comic book are constantly hinted at in every other scene. Samuel L. Jackson should have voiced Fury since the character is obviously based off of him and for the $20+ dollars that was asked of the customer on its initial release, the movie should have given the its viewers more than an hour and ten minutes worth of animation. Fair warning to fans of the Robin Hood-ripoff character, Hawkeye, the character never appears or is even mentioned in this.
So unless you are a huge Ultimates fan, you should probably skip on buying this DVD, but if your bored and find the film playing on TV one night, you could do worse than to sit down and watch it.
Like so many things in Animation, this was a missed opportunity more than anything else. It didn’t strive to keep up the level of quality that its source material had; dumbing down the tale for a wider audience and creating a more economical animation style rather than one that could stand the test of time.
To show that the project leaders originally were gunning for something better, I found this teaser trailer (available on the DVD) which shows two types of animation for the Ultimate Avengers. The first 21 seconds of this trailer show the style of animation that is used for the DVD. The rest of the trailer shows darker more detailed models re-enacting scenes right out of the comic book panel for panel. Watch it and ask yourself which style you prefer.
Teasers like this are kind of like the late 80's/early 90's cartoon openings. Where so much care and work went into the opening themes that there was almost no way that the regular episode could hold up the quality. In fact, if the animation used in the second half of the trailer was used for the DVD, the work might have stood a good chance at being a hit at the box office.
Now on another topic I briefly mentioned earlier in my review, I would love to see the kind of animation used on this DVD as a bi-monthly TV series. The film did a good job hiding if some of the weapons were lasers or guns and started to move away from the political correctness that bogged down marvels cartoons since the 1980's. Marvel has a lot of great stories that are constantly mentioned in its continuity that the average person has no clue about. I suggest that Marvel do a high quality made for TV two hour (2-D) animated movie every other month about one of its great stories.
This move would be a logical step up from the panel per panel cartoons that they released in the 1960's to promote their books. The plan I am proposing would to be to get high quality animators to do a movie or two on one title telling the properties’ best stories so that the average person would know what are always being referred to in current continuity and highlighting what great. The narrative would try and be as faithful as possible without copying the thing panel per panel. After one or two great stories are told, the movie focuses on another Marvel character/group and tells their stories.
Some of there ideas that would be great to see are:
Marvel Origins: Where the Watcher looks at most of Stan Lee’s classic creations and their original origin stories.
X-Men: Night of the Sentinals where public fear of mutants causes the government to unleash their giant robots to track the “freaks” down. It would star the original X-men
Namor: Exile: Where Namor, king of Atlantis is thrown out by a coup and walks among the land before taking back his kingdom.
Fantastic 4: Coming of Galactus: The fast paced masterpiece where the Fantastic Four meet the Silver Surfer and save the world without ever leaving their city block.
Fantastic 4: Night of Doom Where Dr. Doom gets the Silver Surfer’s powers and tries to take down the Reed Richards before conquering the world.
Iron Man Demon in A bottle: Where Iron Man deals with his Alcoholism after Shield tries to take his company.
The Avengers Showing how the Avengers were formed and how they rescued Captain America.
Spiderman: Mysterious Planner Saga Where Spiderman’s blood makes his Aunt sick and he has to overcome every obstacle imaginable to save her.
Captain America A retelling of Sterenko’s three issue run on Captain America.
The Inhumans Shows how the Fantastic Four first make contact with the powerful colony of outcasts.
The Avengers: The Kree Skrull War A simplified telling of the Kree Skrull War
Spiderman: Death of Gwen StacyThe story where Spiderman’s love dies at the hands of the Green Goblin and Spiderman promises to kill the man.
The New X-men Telling how Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm and others joined the X-men to save the old students. Go on to tell the Proteus Saga, where a teenager can warp reality in Ireland.
X-Men: Dark Pheonix Saga The Ultimate X-men story.
Daredevil: The Elektra Saga Tells Daredevil’s tragic romance with his ex-lover turned assassin.
Daredevil: Born Again Shows what happens when an arch-villain learns of a heros secret identity.
If Marvel did this, or something like it, chances are it would make reading the current books more accessible to the general public, and get the company a ton of money from the season box sets. It’d also move up the average rating of an episode to PG-13 so that they could show that cartoons don’t have to be vulgar to be a bit more mature and tell an amazing story. These could be made in the style of Ultimate Avengers.
Maybe that’s why I liked Ultimate Avengers more than I should have, it gave me hope of what regular cartoons could be capable of.
Well, that is my review and suggestions for the Ultimate Avengers and what should be done in the future. If you have any thoughts, opinions, support, or criticism about anything mentioned in this article, don’t be afraid to let me know.
Wow, it looks Marvel is actually making this happen.
They've got a World War Hulk movie coming out that looks really accurate to the source material. It's coming out on DVD, but that is a first step to making this happen.
