The animation was good, like most Japanese animes. The voices were OK, without them being neither great nor grating to the ears. I didn't even consider the film having a soundtrack until the time of this review, so if it was, it was completely ignorable. What else is there? Oh, yes, the story. And the story is pretty much crap.
I see a pattern here: somewhere between the releases of big Hollywood productions, some low budget animation features appear, usually straight to video, and usually made by the Japanese. Is it an attempt to squeeze more money out of fans or one to bring more American productions to Asian markets? Probably both.
The problem with this idea is that the difference in quality between the big budget movies and the animated features is huge, and not always in a predictable direction. Look at the Resident Evil animated movies; some of them were way more enjoyable than the live acting ones.
So, what am I to think of Rise of the Technovore when the Stark hero is way off the image that Robert Downey Jr. created (let's face it, he pretty much carries the films by himself), the villain is practically copy-pasted from Japanese animes (bad ones) and, as many reviewers observed, the dialogue is boring and pretentious.
So I have to mark it as a failure. Not a big failure, mind you, we are talking about comic book heroes, so the expectations were low to begin with. However, I was kind of hoping for an interesting story that somehow escaped the censure of the Hollywood politburo. Alas, they had an American write the plot and that sealed its fate.
I see a pattern here: somewhere between the releases of big Hollywood productions, some low budget animation features appear, usually straight to video, and usually made by the Japanese. Is it an attempt to squeeze more money out of fans or one to bring more American productions to Asian markets? Probably both.
The problem with this idea is that the difference in quality between the big budget movies and the animated features is huge, and not always in a predictable direction. Look at the Resident Evil animated movies; some of them were way more enjoyable than the live acting ones.
So, what am I to think of Rise of the Technovore when the Stark hero is way off the image that Robert Downey Jr. created (let's face it, he pretty much carries the films by himself), the villain is practically copy-pasted from Japanese animes (bad ones) and, as many reviewers observed, the dialogue is boring and pretentious.
So I have to mark it as a failure. Not a big failure, mind you, we are talking about comic book heroes, so the expectations were low to begin with. However, I was kind of hoping for an interesting story that somehow escaped the censure of the Hollywood politburo. Alas, they had an American write the plot and that sealed its fate.