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.
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.