While I was in picking up my Evangelion 2.22 Blu-Ray (which is next on my watch list), I noticed my local MovieStop was selling quite a few Blu-Rays for $10. I ended up walking out with the Blu-Ray Skynet Edition of Terminator 2 (which I now read has video issues. Joy.) and the Blu-Ray of the two animated Ultimate Avengers movies.
I actually saw the two Avengers animated movies years ago when they first released. At the time, I had never heard of the Avengers, let alone their Ultimates counterparts. At the time, I couldn't really get into the movies, as I was and am a big Spider-man fan and I couldn't understand why I should care about a team that has superficially lame members like Giant Man and The Wasp when you could have ass-kickers like Spider-man. I also remember finding the animation and villains pretty underwhelming.
Well, it's been quite a few years later and I am much more knowledgeable about these characters (and have actually read a good 6 or so issues of the Ultimates comic book). Watching these movies now, I do enjoy them more now for what they are, but objectively they are pretty weak. The main villains of both movies are Nazi aliens (yes, seriously), and as Film Brain would say "when you need to add substance to your ****ty movie, just add Nazis!" Their motivations are weak and nonsensical (why do they need vibranium when their entire race seems to be made of it?), and the parts of the original comic changed to accommodate them are nowhere near as strong or interesting as in the original comics. So yeah...no attempted superhero manslaughter or sex-crazed Hulk now. I can't say I miss the latter, but the conflict introduced by the former was interesting in the original story.
It doesn't help as well that the animation is very weak. Marvel in general seems to have a problem in these direct-to-DVD "movies" where the animation is drawn extremely flat, with very little shading or shadows to add depth to a shot. This animation is poor even by 2006 standards, looking like low-budget Korean-drawn television animation. The Blu-Ray transfer looks decent enough, but this animation is so flat I don't really see a noticeable quality increase over the original DVD transfer.
Still, for its flaws, the movies are enjoyable enough in having some respectable action sequences and decent characterization. Pity Marvel never continued down this path and actually did more Ultimates movies that go into how severely messed-up that book is. Oh well, at least we got the pretty-good Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes TV series, which blow these out of the water quite easily.
So...yeah. On to Evangelion 2.22. I've been really looking forward to that movie since I was pretty blown-away by the surprisingly awesome 1.11 movie.