Ultimate Avengers

Submitted by corwin on Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:21pm

Late last night, Dustin and I ran out of things to watch. Jessika had long since gone to bed, giving in to the defense mechanism that saved her from the full suck that was Battle Royale 2: Requiem. It's not that we didn't have anything saved on his DVR, or any videos lying around. But the things on the DVR either deserved more attention than we could give at that late hour, like Brokeback Mountain, or were saved for Jess to watch later. We scanned through the cable offerings, and found nothing interesting, and the only thing on the On Demand options was Spiderman 1 and 2, enacted in 30 seconds, by bunnies. Hilarious, but much too short.

Finally, we cast out gaze on the presents Dustin bought his daughter for her first birthday earlier in the month, and decided to try out Ultimate Avengers. It's apparently the first feature length animated movie from Marvel. We didn't know much about it going in, but figured it would be better than X-Men: The Last Stand.

Ultimate Avengers is based on the events in The Ultimates comic, and Dustin said they did a pretty good job adapting the story, though it's not quite as dark as the comic was. Captain America crashed into the North Atlantic during World War II, after disabling a German secret weapon. Sixty years later, General Nick Fury, of S.H.I.E.L.D. locates his corpse and brings him back to HQ to run tests as part of restarting the Super Soldier program. But Cap wakes up from apparent hibernation, very much alive and reasonably well. With the original American hero at his command, Fury immediately forms a team of super heroes with Cap at its head, the Avengers. Captain America, along with Iron Man, Wasp, Giant Man, and Thor, must come to terms with being teammates and battle a terrible threat from the past, as well as one from within their own organization.

I'm not going to spoil this one for you with plot details or anything else. It's good enough you should go out and rent it yourself to see what happens. They did a great job capturing the personalities of the various heroes. Captain America, of course, is all about his duty, though he doesn't feel qualified to lead a team so soon after his emergence into the 21st century. Tony Stark is the womanizer billionaire we've all come to know and love (before he became a fascist in the Marvel Civil War). Thor's crazy, believing himself to really be the God of Thunder, and hangs out with Greenpeace, drinking beer and striking fear in the hearts of whalers. Hank Pym's a brilliant, though unimaginative (come on, Giant Man?) jerk, and we spent much of the movie waiting for him to smack Wasp around. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s pretty much hated by everyone. It made for a lot of fun interactions among the various heroes. It was also a darker tale than I expected from an animated adaptation. From the very beginning, it doesn't pull punches as far as people dying. Several soldiers are killed in the initial assault at the beginning of the movie, not graphically, but it's clear that's what happens. The movie doesn't shy away from Dr. Banner's willingness to do anything at all in the hopes of finding a way to control the Hulk, and shows us the way the Hulk has destroyed every facet of his life. Captain America has to come face to face with the fact that his olf flame has been married to a good friend for the last 60 years, and that most of the people he once knew are dead and buried. Though the story has been lightened up a bit from what Dustin tells me of the comic, it still has some complex themes running through it. It's certainly not the fluff I was expecting, and I'm very happy about that indeed. Despite the late hour, Ultimate Avengers kept us interested and entertained the whole time it was on. It was good enough, in fact, that I went in search of the trade paperbacks of the comics this afternoon, and asked my friendly local comics shop to go ahead and order the hardback for me. I've been out of the world of comics for a very long time, and am looking forward to getting back into it. I will also be getting the movie myself so I can share it with my daughter and expand her knowledge of and love for the super hero genre. For giving us some quality entertainment, and for being the perfect end to a day of movie watching, Ultimate Avengers earns itself a negative 0.8 Bolls.