Seasons greetings and welcome back Stay Tooners! I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season and that you found time to sit back and relax a bit with family and friends. As for me, I have been catching up on episodes of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. If you haven’t seen this show over on Disney XD yet, I highly recommend it because it’s super cool. The series is already more then half way through the first season and I will likely be doing a review on it after it concludes. In the meantime, since I’m now on this Avengers kick, I thought it was time I checked out another Avengers animated project from a few years back.
Title: Ultimate Avengers: The Movie
Written by: Greg Johnson, Boyd Kirkland, Craig Kyle, Mark Millar (graphic novel), Bryan Hitch (graphic novel)
Director: Curt Geda, Steven E. Gordon
Company: Marvel Studios
Distributed by: Lions Gate Home Entertainment
US Release Date: February 21, 2006
Length: 71 min.
MPAA: Rated PG-13
Ultimate Avengers: The Movie is a direct to DVD animated film based on the comic book series The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. The story is a modern take on the origin of the Avengers. In this version, Nick Fury is responsible for “resurrecting” Captain America after his apparent death during World War II. Captain America and a group of soldiers attacked a secret German facility where it is discovered that the Nazis had received advance weapons and technology from a group of shape shifting aliens. Cap stops the aliens from launching a nuclear attack, but is believed dead after an explosion sends him deep into the ocean where he gets frozen in a glacier. In the present, Nick Fury retrieves Cap’s body from the glacier so he can have his people examine it in hopes of uncovering the secret of the Super Soldier Serum.
Just as Fury gets his top scientist, Dr. Bruce Banner, to go check out the body, Cap surprisingly regains consciousness. Once Cap gets up to speed on what’s happened to him, the government forces Fury to gather together a group of super-humans to help fight off an alien invasion. The aliens in question just happen to be the same ones that Captain America had fought during WWII. Fury, together with Cap and Black Widow, goes about enlisting the help of Wasp, Giant Man, Iron Man, and Thor to help deal with this matter. Thor and Iron Man both decline, but Iron Man ends up showing up at the team meeting anyway. Under the leadership of Captain America the Avengers set off on their first mission to stop one of the aliens from escaping a S.H.I.E.L.D. base with a download of all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files. The mission is a huge failure, due to the fact that none of the heroes follows Cap’s orders, and the Alien escapes with the complete download of all the S.H.I.E.L.D. files. Fury quickly fires Giant Man and Wasp, Iron Man decides to stay solo, and Cap ends up quiting the team.
Meanwhile, Banner finally is able to duplicate the Super Soldier Serum using a blood sample he took from Captain America. With the failure of the Avengers on his back, Fury tells Banner to begin using the serum on the candidates that he was suppose to be specializing the serum for, but we soon discovers that Banner had only been experimenting with the serum on his own blood as a way of controlling the Hulk. Before Fury can take any action, Banner uses the serum on himself just as the aliens begin their attack of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. The alien attack ends up drawing all of the heroes back, including Thor and a Banner controlled Hulk. The heroes fight off the aliens, but before they have time to celebrate, the Hulk once again loses control and starts attacking everyone. Can this team “assemble” together in time to take down one of the strongest beings on the Earth?
I’ve never read The Ultimates, so I can’t really say how well they did adapting that story for this movie, but I can say that I found this film to be lacking. The story is very slow moving and doesn’t have the amount of superhero action that one would expect from an Avengers movie. The only good action sequence in the movie is in the last 15 mins. or so with the fight between the Avengers and Hulk. In fact, the Hulk is down right vicious in that battle, especially with some of the things he does to Giant Man. Another issue I had with this film was that Thor and Iron Man were portrayed as weaklings and were taken down way too easily in battle. I also found this story of individual superheroes coming together and forming a team to stop shape-shifting aliens from taking over the Earth way too similar to that of the Justice League animated series (JL did it better, by the way). So if you are looking for a great Avengers fix, watch the new animated series on Disney XD instead of this. If you do decide to watch this, I suggest skipping ahead to the good part (the Hulk/Avengers showdown), or there is a good chance you might fall asleep before you get there.
Nick Zamora
nickz@comicattack.net
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As an adaptation I found that it was pretty good though the books obviously give you a bit more and since it’s Millar you know it’s a lot more visceral as well. I also liked the artwork and how most of the characters were portrayed throughout the movie though I’ve never been a Pym fan I’m always happy to him get his ass handed to him 🙂
I see what you mean about parts of it being just down right slow but I think that was made up for in the sequal.
This was so much fun to watch drunk with friends.