Ultimate Avengers: The Movie

Being a fan of the original Comic Book, I was waiting pretty impatiently for this movie. The result is not bad at all, The drama is still there (see the cemetery scene, Banner fighting his inner-beast, the flash-back). The action is really good and the animation well done. I just wish the movie was longer. The realistic violence and the drama of the original comic book is far from the movie. Marvel probably wanted the movie to be a family feature but I still hope to get a more adult version... maybe a live movie? The plot starts really nicely with the disapearence of Cap America during the War. I wish Red Skull would have made an appearance. The Alien story was not the best way to go but it is just an excuse to throw a twist we all were waiting for... The most dangerous ennemy was inside the group. The characters are all interesting except from Thor (I never liked him anyway but he is just a guest as a Beer drinker lol). Cap America is lost in this new world he discovers. Nostalgia and flashback: He is the most interesting hero in this story. Watch closely for some character's habits. -Tony Stark is still running after women and still dinking. The armor looks good. - Giant man is a smart ass and still jealous. - Nick Fury still looks like Samuel Jackson (too bad Samuel didn't play the voice). - Black Widow doesn't do much but She is still very Sexy. - Thor is useless... - Hulk/Banner is very interesting as He is very ambiguous in his motives. We never know what he truly looks for... Well, not bad for a first one, What's next? If the live movie gets made, I'm up for a part!!!!! francois90210@yahoo.com

What a strange beast this is. Clearly - and explicitly - based on the brilliant Millar and Hitch comic 'The Ultimates', this cartoon refuses to shake off its mainstream Marvel heritage. The Ultimate Universe has been the best thing to happen to Marvel for many a year, being a fresh imprint re-imagining all their characters back to 'day one' to hook new readers who might have been put off by the encyclopedic background knowledge needed to keep up to speed with events in the original comics. The Ultimates were the new incarnation of The Avengers, Marvel's mightiest superhero group since the 1960s. Mark Millar took a much tougher, more 'realistic' and mature approach to the idea of a team of supersoldiers - treating them as 'weapons of mass destruction' - rather than just masked crimefighters and alien invader repellents. The Ultimate Avengers movie - which could have been mind-blowing done live action in the style of Spider-Man or The X-Men - is a strange mix of the two universes, dumbing down Millar's story and making it more child friendly, but still keeping the characters of new Ultimate universe, with their cocky natures, bickering and inter-party feuds... although The Hulk doesn't get to eat anyone, which is a shame! The animation is pretty good, but not a patch on Bryan Hitch's artwork, which again gives the cartoon a very run-of-the-mill, sub-anime feel in the wake of its high calibre source material. The story and dialogue are also above-average for American cartoons, but could have been so much better ... the problem arises from trying to turn an adult comic back into a kiddy cartoon. That being said, it still makes good viewing - even if it runs the risk of leaving both Avengers and Ultimates fans cold and disappointed - and a sequel is due out in July, taking the Ultimate Avengers to Wakanda, the home of The Black Panther.

Being that I've read "the ultimates" beforehand and heard rumors that they were working on this movie at least 2 yrs ago; I was surprised when i actually got to see it. The story revolves around Captain America, not entirely how he was made but during his times in World War II and his frozen "Demise". suddenly waking up in the 21st century with everything changing around him and an old alien threat looming in the mist an old school hero must call upon help from a new school team with the help of Nick fury (which i felt the person playing the voice of him was a bit bland but good all together). call upon Iron man, Wasp, Giant man, Thor, and Black widow to take down the opposing forces and from within as well. The animation is evolved but not enough to satisfy most people but i will give them credit for bringing the team that did the ultimates to come in to work with the animation. the voice overs aren't up to standards but they will suffice to make the pace of the movie fast and furious right up to the climax...the story alone is taken out of the Ultimates and "Ultimate Nightmare" which is a side comic of the Ultimates during the time of an alien threat just bits and pieces though so don't expect too much. All in all the movie is good to match wits with a typical Saturday morning cartoon and I wouldn't be surprised if they do continue it to Saturday mornings but the movie is fast at times, the fights are pretty damn good but its not just a kids movie there are some scenes of violence that even i thought either can make or break this movie trust me someone will be bloodied up or broken...the story is typically straight from the ultimate series, and the voice acting could be better but this still a movie to watch...check it out!

This is a pathetic attempt to dumb down a terrific comic series. Being a fan of "The Ultimates" comic series myself, I was sorely disappointed by this DVD. Then again, when they named it "Ultimate Avengers" instead of "The Ultimates," I should have known. Where do I start? 1. The voice acting. Either hire people who actually speak with the accent you're looking for, or don't bother. Also, when Bruce Banner has a deeper, more manly voice than Captain America, you're in trouble. 2. The art. It looks like the team that did every cheesy Saturday morning episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was in on this one. But they added shadows! Oooo... 3. The CGI. With the cel art as bad as it is, they should have left CGI completely out of it. It only serves to highlight how bad the rest of the film is. 4. The story. I'm not going to give anything away here, but they dumbed the plot down to where an 8-yr-old would say, "This is dumb." And then got it rated PG-13. Not swift, Marvel. They took subtle elements and threw them in our faces. Overall, this was the most disappointing movie from Marvel I've seen yet. And I'm including Elektra when I say that.

This project offered a golden opportunity to produce something very special and quite unique. A literal animated adaptation of the excellent Ultimates comic--literal because the book is already tailor-made for film treatment--would have made for a very special cinematic experience indeed. Unfortunately, Marvel, while making enormous strides in live-action cinema in recent years (after decades of atrocities), is still stuck in the increasingly distant past with animation; still dedicated to the notion of grinding out Saturday morning kiddie cartoons in the mold of the mid-to-late '80s/early '90s, and pretending as though "Batman The Animated Series" and its successors never happened. Every aspect of "Ultimate Avengers" is, in fact, identical to animated product of that earlier era--incredibly cheap animation, horrible "G.I. Joe"-style music, voice "actors" who can't act, reading embarrassingly awful dialogue from writers who can't write. The film is a mess, and, frankly, an inexcusable one. More than that, it's a tragedy for the utterly wasted opportunity it represents. Instead of the classic it should have been, we get just another Saturday morning cartoon aimed at 8-year-olds, but with a PG-13 rating. VERY disappointing. The PG-13 rating slapped on this clinker is a joke. It smacks of a marketing campaign, and one suspects it may have been the result of a bribe somewhere along the way. The movie does literally nothing to earn that rating, and is actually far less mature, in every way, than the prominent WB animated television productions of the past decade; it could, in all likelihood, be run on Saturday morning television without altering a frame (In a more reasonable era, it would have gotten a G rating). The fact that the filmmakers were willing to accept a PG-13 only makes the movie that much more of a tragedy, as the comic could have been literally adapted under that very same rating. It should also be noted that the pre-release ad campaign, which promised a more literal adaptation of the book, amounted to a colossal lie. The teaser trailer released late last year was made up mostly of the battle with the Hulk from the first story-arc of the comic. It showed entire sequences recreated directly from the book, and rendered in fantastic animation. That, combined with the announced rating, created much anticipation among those of us hoping for a faithful adaptation, but, as it turns out, not a single frame of that material, shown in the teaser, is actually in the movie.

The story is completely generic, like one of the 500 Marvel episodes you've forgotten, not like the 50 or so that were great. There are some mildly clever twists here and there on the original Marvel stories -- which I won't give away -- but they are only *mildly* clever. The animation looks expensive, but is bland. The best Saturday morning cartoons get more mileage out of lower frame-rates and fewer lines by being artistic instead of merely detailed. The characters are flat and there isn't any witty dialog. I gave it a 3 because they did at least try to do something interesting with the Hulk.

Being that I am only 18, I arrived after the era in which X-Men, The Avengers and other Marvel classics made their debuts. I picked some up here and there, but only when the Ultimate Marvel remakes arrived on the scene a couple of years ago did I become a dedicated Marvel fan. Most of the new Marvel products available these days are generally Ultimate Marvel associated, those including Games and even the live-action movies. But of course, when converting a graphic novel to the screen, nothing better captivates a character than merely a moving comic - that being a cartoon! I was ecstatic when I found only a few days ago that this film had been made without my knowledge, so I immediately got hold of it and watched it - and I was NOT disappointed! The film is basically the first Season (comprising of I believe 13 comics) of The Ultimates, which was the "Ultimate Marvel" version of Marvel's original Avengers comic. All the characters (bar, unfortunately, Hawkeye for unknown reasons) appear in this comic, and not only do they bear as close a resemblance as a cartoon-film can to carefully drawn captions of a graphic novel, but the also wear the costumes found in the Ultimates comics. Too often do you find details missing in film adaptations, but despite the changes that were made to compress 13 comics into an hour and ten minutes of film time, I noticed nothing significant to annoy me. So, as I said earlier, if you are one of the Ultimate Marvel fans, you have nothing to lose from watching this - if you find it too different from the original, then who cares? There are so many different versions of all the Marvel comics around these days, what's one more to the total on the off-chance some don't like it? I give it eight out of ten merely because the animation was good, but just not the best – there are some better quality cartoons out there, but there always will be. It is certainly better quality than the Saturday morning cartoons that we have all come to love, and if we can watch them, we sure can watch this! So, I hope my opinions have helped you. Now go watch and enjoy!

This has to be one of, if not the worst comic book adaptations to movie ever. I am so disappointed and ashamed that Marvel even allowed this to happen. How could they take such a well written series and totally destroy it by butchering the story into a Sunday morning cartoon. And a bad one at that. There is no character development, no back story, no true villain and the hero's are treated more like characters on a cheesy soap opera overacting and more concerned with their looks. Horrible! Spoilers Below! (but trust me I'm doing you a favor by spilling the beans) First off the whole Nazi alien tie in from the book is wasted in this movie. Captain America fights them form the get go. And I don't mean just an alien in human form but I'm talking ID4 type alien with big head green skin and all.. :( Now for Iron man: The big drama with him was changed to nothing more then him trying to hide is identity to the rest of the team? Oh come on give me break. And the hulk.. oh why did they have to do him so wrong..? It broke my heart to see Bruce and the Hulk turned into WWF wannabees? They changed Bruce's story from one of compassion, love, depression, misdirection and suffering to a simple case of him wanting to show off and prove the hulk was more powerful then them all. That was the best part of the movie. It should have been called the Hulk vs the Avengers. That's what this was turned into. And even at that it was horrible. End Spoiler. Nothing more to say on that. Don't waste your money. Get the books instead. Marvel should be ashamed.

Ultimate Avengers is guilty of criminally "kiddy-fying" an extremely mature, graphically violent comic, and thus losing everything that made the comic so great. This should be obvious by the cover alone, on which we see Thor...sans beard. Yes, thats right. In an effort to appease the kiddies, they shaved thor. From there, things just get worse. Captain America came off as both an amazing leader and something of a self righteous jerk in Ultimates comic (kicking banner in the face, humiliating Hank Pym, etc), but in this movie all those things are glossed over, and he's just some Styrofoam, 1 dimensional character whose an all American boy and nothing else. And speaking of Hank Pym, his abuse of his wife is not even mentioned. He just comes off as a jerk and nothing else. And the plot appears to be a mish mash of random tiny bits a pieces from ultimates comics and made up ideas, none of which comes together cohesively. But my main gripe is this: THE ANIMATION QUALITY IS TERRIBLE. The shading is really nice, but the character designs look worse than most Saturday morning cartoons. And the animation is incredibly jerky. I don't know if I've seen a cartoon in the last 10 years where the animation lacked so much fluidity, especially in the movement of the characters. "But the shadows look so neat" someone will surely say, and guess what, it doesn't matter. Great Shadows on top of terribly designed, poorly detailed characters still look terrible. So basically, this movie was extremely unfaithful to its source material, painfully "kiddy-fied" for a younger audience, and just down right looks low quality in terms of animation.

I am going to be fair to Marvel . . . this was their first animated feature film. That's okay, but it is still no excuse for Ultimate Avengers. I don't want anyone to think that I absolutely hated this film, but let it be known that it could have been a billion times better. The first complaint I have is the animation (which was just average.) One could argue the style was just different than, say, good animation, but the key problem was that the actual film animation was just vastly different than the animation promised to me in the teaser trailer. The teaser had things framed like the comic book, but the actual movie had none of those moments in them. What the hell happened to the good animation? Where is my scene of Iron Man crashing the Hulk through Grand Central Station? Let's move away from the animation for a moment though. Let's go to a far more pressing argument of story itself. As a comic book fan and a movie fan and someone who somewhat understands the way Hollywood works, I will not gripe that the comic wasn't 100% accurate to the comic book. I won't even gripe that the comic wasn't 50% accurate to the comic book. In fact, I will even ignore that the movie was only accurate in that the names of the characters were the same. My complaint toward the story was that the movie completely left out any sort of feelings for the characters. Let's take a film that is considered to be the Citizen Kane of animated features. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. This was a fantastic film that gets better with age. As a child, I found it somewhat boring, but still entertaining. As an older child, I have learned to look for the subtext, listen to the fantastic dialog and I have learned to appreciate the motifs used in this film. That movie makes you genuinely feel for the characters. It makes you wonder why Batman does what he does. It makes you cry out in anguish as you realize that Bruce and Andrea lost something they can never hope to get back. In summary, Batman made you feel for the characters. Avengers doesn't come close. It is a Jerry Bruckheimer film, but (because of poor animation) it doesn't even make the action look good. Bruce Banner was a somewhat interesting character, but he wasn't painted as a man tormented by the fact he is a monster, but a man who is addicted to being a monster. he searches for a way to control the monster. It takes away from his tragic figure and makes him more of a mad scientist type. Finally, let's look at voice acting and writing. the dialog was trite and painful to listen to. Cap's voice sounded like a 17 year old asking his dad for the car keys. Geh. It was just terrible all around. I understand that Avengers was a movie for all audiences, but so was batman . . . and look how beautiful that film turned out.