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I’ve voraciously eaten up each and every single one of the direct-to-DVD DC animated films, and I’ve generally never bothered with the Marvel ones. Perhaps it’s the bias that’s inherent because the DC films come off of an entire, singular universe that began with Batman and ended with Justice League Unlimited. While Marvel’s forays into animation brought out varied results. For the very great series like Spider-Man or X-Men, there was an Avengers: United They Stand or Iron Man. But I finally decided to give these a shot, and started with their first release: Ultimate Avengers.
I really wish that next year’s live action foray for this superhero team possesses a script as interesting, characters as dynamic, and action sequences as exciting as this one. Growing up, I loved comic books. X-Men, Batman, the Avengers – those were my favorites. I’ve suffered through good and bad video games, movies, cartoons, and I can safely say that this is a very good incarnation of the heroes. While it mostly sticks to the Ultimate Marvel franchise, certain characters have been given the traditional Marvel polish to smooth out some of the rougher edges and nasty streaks that they were given. And this animated film has the live action one beat in a very specific area: it’s got a better, more dynamic and interesting core group of characters. Sure, the live action one has a better group of actors portraying most of these characters; this one has founding members Ant-Man and Wasp in addition to Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow and Nick Fury. It’s not a terribly big difference, but the team feels better-rounded and more complete this way.
I also appreciated how the film so closely focused on Captain America and his journey through reawakening in a world that has marched on without him and how he tries to reevaluate and discover his place within it. There are several small, quiet, intimate moments that don’t forcefully move the overall plot along, but they had depth to his character and flesh him out as a person to care about. Perhaps if it had been longer the pacing problems with the last half of the film could have been easily avoided by maintaining a healthy mixture of character development and explosives.
Like many superhero movies, the last few minutes of the film descends into non-stop action sequences seemingly as an apology for all those scenes of talking that we’ve been forced to sit through. I always prefer the scenes of the characters interacting to the loud-busy action scenes. And Ultimate Avengers has to wrap up the Hulk storyline and the alien invasion storyline in quick succession. The resolution to this problem is two scenes: one action sequence in which the Avengers take down the alien invaders and another one where the Avengers reunite to take down the Hulk. It gets a little busy, cluttered and noisy, which is in direct opposition to the languid and perfectly paced first two-thirds.
But Ultimate Avengers is better than the first DC animated film (the just-average Superman: Doomsday). The animation is gorgeous, the voice acting is nice, and it features a storyline that’s engaging and appropriately large to summon together Earth’s mightiest heroes. Here’s hoping the live action one tops this. I have faith.
