Comic Book to a Movie: The Results May Surprise You

So here we go again, or at least that’s what I thought as I placed the Ultimate Avengers: The Movie into my DVD player. As some of you have read, I am not thrilled about the idea of taking a comic and making a movie. What I didn’t tell you is that I did like Sin City, X-Men and even Batman. Anyways, I was surprised that I have no complaints about the adaptation; and more surprising, no complaints about the film either.  This film is in many ways what I want to see in a comic book movie, at least an animated one. I really can’t imagine watching this as a live action feature. I really don’t have that much to say about Ultimate Avengers because it was just fun to watch. The animation style is nothing to write home about but it does the job. It does mimic the comic well while not being horrible, but it could have been better.

The strength of the film is also its major shortcoming: character development. I think everyone is so familiar with the backgrounds of many of the characters that we have a sense of who these heroes should be, but Marvel takes things a step further with the Ultimates line and gives us the mature version of each hero. One thing that I was waiting to see develop was the relationship between Giant Man/Hank Pym and Janet Pym/The Wasp, which in the comic was very mature ending in a great little scene of Captain America taking Hank to task for what he did to Janet. Although this did not appear in the film, they hint at future problems and even give us a hint at tackling this interaction in a preview to Ultimate Avengers 2. If you know the characters already, you really are only looking for the mature tweaks in their handling. But if you have never encountered these particular heroes, you will probably find yourself wanting more character development.

The plot is very stripped down compared to the comic (of course), but still held my interest. It does move fairly fast with tons of action, which means that we have the typical back story straight into alien throw downs. I was hoping for more, but their was enough nuance to the story (the relationship between Betty and Bruce, Caps visit to Bucky) that I could see that they were trying to give me more but were somewhat restrained by the shortness of the film. At least they tried.

After I was finished watching this, I immediately began thinking about the next one, just like if I had just finished a comic. I think that speaks volumes for the potential of the Marvel animated film. If you are a comic book fan, this film will at least be tolerable. Perhaps not good, but at least it feels like an effort was made (cough cough…Ben Affleck as Daredevil). If you are new to the Ultimate line, you may find yourself very lost, just take your time and don’t dwell on the lack of character development. The next film should at least fill in some of the gaps and perhaps cement the possibilities of the mature line of animation from Marvel.