MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
Almost a dozen of these short LEGO adaptations of Marvel properties have been floating around for about ten years, and I've tended to put off looking at any of them. Maybe the shortness of the features prejudiced me against them, because I have watched most of the available LEGO transformations of DC Comics and have even given some of them fairly positive reviews, for all that I'm no LEGO fan. But then, the very fact that a fair number of the DC ventures are an hour and a half indicates that someone in their production expended some effort. I suppose I thought Marvel wasn't that invested in working with LEGO to produce anything that captured the appeal of Marvel properties.
I don't think REASSEMBLED fails to do so utterly, but it's not very memorable either, even judged as simple kids' entertainment. We meet the Avengers-- mostly the standard roll call from the four live-action movies, though The Vision get a bit more exposure here than he did in the features. The heroes are making silly preparations for a party when the evil robot intelligence Ultron takes control of the Iron Man armor, with Tony Stark still inside. This at least satisfies the almost requisite "heroes forced to fight each other," and when Ultron commands Iron Man to fly off, the others must find a way to free their friend. They eventually learn that Ultron's taking control of the Iron Man armor is just a prelude to mobilizing Stark's flying squadron of armored robots, the Iron Legion, for purposes of world conquest. Frankly, since the idea of the Iron Legion debuted in IRON MAN 2, I always thought it sounded more like the conception of a supervillain than of a superhero.
This would seem to be a sufficient plot for a short of about 22 minutes. But for reasons that might have to do with marketing, the script squeezed in two extra villains, Baron Strucker and Yellowjacket (apparently an enemy of Ant Man in this world), and guest-shots for both Spider-Man and the Iron Spider. There are a lot of jokey lines, and a couple were a little diverting, but I'm not surprised that the LEGO aesthetic doesn't fit Marvel characters very well. After all, Marvel gained fame for being hip, and that's why LEGO is a better match with DC-- for DC's the company famous for showing "it's hip to be square."
No comments:
Post a Comment