).First off I haven't read any of 'The Ultimates' yet but I get that its an alternate take on the Marvel continuity so I accept the updates/changes they've made. The characterizations, then, I found interesting and reasonably well laid out. I thought a lot of the dialogue was good but overall the think the story suffered.
*** possible spoilers ***
My main gripe with the story was the alien bad guys. Uh... ok maybe I can accept super soldiers and growth formulas and all that hero jazz but... Nazis working with aliens and allied forces essentially just acting like its no big deal? Then in the present- just what the hell was the whole point of the aliens? I mean who were they? What were they after? How were they going to do whatever they were after? Etc, etc, etc. There was no purpose to the story of the whole film. The aliens were introduced and then after being pummeled for a bit disappeared completely to make way for the Hulk story with only a 'well we beat them and saved the day' line dropped in. Much too disjointed.
My other gripe which I had alluded to in another thread was the animation. Please PLEase PLEASE Marvel... get some REAL animators and a NEW character designer. I swear to whichever deity fits the bill that Marvel has let the same one guy, locked in a closet somewhere, design EVERY bloody character's animated look since G.I. Joe hit the air in the 80s!!!! They all look the same! All the background characters are the same! Yo Joe! And the animation itself is mostly horrid IMHO- as usual in Marvel animation there are horrible gaffs in drawn perspective. The backgrounds never flow with the character movement nor does the art ever match. That's not to say that the character animation is always bad- some of the Hulk vs heros fights were really sharp and looked like they were laid out by completely different artists. And whereas I thought the voices were generally well cast I would be hard pressed to believe that the voices were recorded *prior* to animation- the lips just don't match. I've seen dubbed anime that matched up better than some of the scenes in this movie.
One of the things that I think makes much of the DC animated series stand out is very consistant art design. Even if its totally different from the comics, their creators pick a style and stick with it... which makes the viewer focus more on the *story* than the animation.
To end on a positive note (not something I'm known for in reviews!
) I thought they could have done the whole film JUST on Captain America. They really did his character well and was worlds more interesting than most of the others. Also as DAYV pointed out the extras with the fan auditions are mostly hilarious and well worth a watch!My vote is rent it but do check it out. Hopefully they'll keep improving from here.