Something for everyone

Rating: 8/10 (23 September 2013)

As a kid, I collected some comics, mostly ADVENTURE from DC about the Legion of Super Heroes, some Superman, and from Marvel, some Fantastic Four.
DC was known as better heroes, while Marvel was known as "better characters".
In those days, those were about the only two real choices. The India Ink artistry was unbeatable. And it was the days before hacks began drawing pictures which had every hero with a 90 inch chest.
So, I'm not a die-hard comic fan, but I'm not a completely free agent, either. I see this film from both sides, roughly, but mostly from the middle.
This super hero film has something for everyone, I believe. It seems to stay fairly true to the comics, as I recall, certainly to the emphasis on characters.
For non comic fans, it has good characters.
The directing, I think, helps a lot. There really seems to be an emphasis on only two characters, with a brief attempt to show glimpses of three other characters, and a very small hint at four other characters at the very most. The others may as well be called "Extra Number One, Two, and so forth".
Really, it is about two characters. They aren't brothers, but they behave as brothers. They are in the founding father days of a super hero group.
Charles is the charismatic one, the one you would expect to be the older brother if they were brothers. He is mature and composed. He even reminds me of my older brother.
Alex is the more emotional one. He has a good heart, and has good intentions, but one could say he has a "dark side". He isn't evil, but he isn't "good". There is one time when I believe he crosses the line. They are teaching a young man how to use his power of vocalization to fly, and Alex pushes him to a certain doom if he doesn't use his voice correctly. In the comic world, it's acceptable as "sink or swim", but in "sink or swim", you can always toss a line to a drowning man. I suppose here that Alex had a back up plan to use his power to somehow save the poor boy if he "sank".
At the climax, Alex has a bout with Humanity, in which he seems to want to kill a beautiful young woman for a bullet that hits someone he cares for. He obviously never intends to really kill her, but to coax another character to stop him, as he takes his time. Many of us have been in this "someone stop me" situation before.
What I think is best is the work done on the five characters they explore. However, I think that's laziness for a full length film to only explore five characters to this degree. Even many of the "heroes" and "villains" are just fillers, basic extras.
What I didn't care for were the action scenes. Again, a film has to have something for everyone. And special effects are needed for the geeks. I did like the simplicity of some of them, however. This made it more of a good balance of action and character.
The weakest moments were the action moments. At one point, the villains wipe out the self important CIA team and the guards. It wasn't badly done. It was overly done, though. It seems to have been a case of "lets give the dorks in the audience some more silly bloodthirsty killing scenes". Fortunately, this was a small part of the film, and looked to be just an effort to appease the dorks.
The direction for establishing the two central characters was outstanding, no doubt about it. We get Alex and Charles in reaction to almost everything, sometimes in unison, sometimes in differences.