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Ultimate Avengers: The Movie

It was nice to finally see this film (in fact, I have already seen the sequel before viewing this), especially as it is more or less based on the first ‘season’ of The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch (with a few tweaks here and there). In this respect, it was more enjoyable than the Invincible Iron Man and Doctor Strange animated DVDs, which played around with the classic origins for no particularly good reason. Which made it slightly irking that it was so short – less than 70 minutes of action. I guess that’s a good thing, if I wanted to see more.

The film starts with the flashback to Captain America’s last mission, where he first meets the Chitauri (the Ultimates equivalent of the Skrulls). The existence of these aliens are the reasons Nick Fury locates Cap’s frozen body to recreate the super-soldier serum, in order to fight the Chitauri. He then has to create a superhero team to act as a first line of defence – bring on Iron Man, the Wasp, Giant Man, Thor and Black Widow, under the lead of Captain America. The Chitauri are shown as a credible threat in the story, but in the end fight, they are killed off in a few minutes, which seems rather pointless build-up. The climactic and larger fight scene is the team versus the Hulk, who goes crazy and starts attacking everyone because there are no more aliens to kill (thus getting both parts of the original story from the comic book into the film in one go). This is a bit odd, but it does allow for more classic hero-on-hero fighting. Quite enjoyable, if not perfect, with nice use of slow motion for when Thor hammers the Hulk (although it cuts away so it doesn’t give kids the idea of hitting someone in the head with their dad’s hammer).

There is an interesting documentary on the DVD about the Avengers. This consists of talking heads: Tom Breevort, Kurt Busiek, Joe Quesada, Mark Millar, who are all informative and entertaining and interesting. However, there is also George Perez, who is the bizarrest aspect of the whole thing: what an ego. Everyone else talks about the strength of the original stories and the characters and the abilities of other creators. Perez, in his grating and slightly annoying whine, just talks about himself all the time. He talks about how great he is, how dedicated he is to drawing comic books, about what he added to the Avengers and makes the stories even better than what the writer created. It was so embarrassing; didn’t anyone tell him they were talking about the Avengers and not him? I know that Perez is an accomplished artist (I don’t particularly like his style, but I am aware of his abilities) but obviously his brain has been warped by everyone telling him how great he is. They really should have edited the footage better and cut down on how much Perez there was.

Rating: VID

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