I recently watched Iron Man: Extremis the motion comic, on Netflix. Extremis was a great Warren Ellis six issue story that brought a lot of depth and character to Tony Stark, focused on the state of technology in today's world, and served as a pretty decent reboot for the series. The motion comic is... well, it's still a motion comic and has all the limitations inherent in such a venture. They're working off of just the comic pages and it doesn't look anywhere near as good as a normal animated film or series. A lot of parts just seem like someone's twisting and flexing portions of the image, like in a Flash editor. Probably cause that's what's actually happening. But Adi Granov's beautiful artwork from the series helps with the presentation, even though you're getting very static scenes most of the time.

For some of the fast moving action scenes though, they actually went completely digital and used real 3D models and environments. While this allows for an actual sense of speed and fluidity, the quality of the models is rather lackluster and feels slapped together quickly, which is to be expected given the sort of low budget that these motion comics have to work with. It doesn't look great, but it gets the job done.

Thankfully, the voice acting is quite good and makes up for the lack of overall motion. Unlike the Watchmen Motion Comic, they actually got female voice actors to voice the female characters in this, which you'd think would be a no brainer. But if you watched the Watchmen one, it felt incredibly bizarre hearing this one voice actor voicing both Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, just slightly changing his pitch between the two. It's not something I'd wish on anyone, it's uhhh, it's really quite cringeworthy. Here, all the voices feel right and give the proper delivery that you'd expect after reading the comic. It's definitely the best aspect of the production.

The Extremis motion comic is still bound by the myriad of limitations that all these motion comics have, and I wouldn't suggest that anyone go out and buy the DVD, but for netflix instant streaming, it's worth a watch. Anything to get this marvelously crafted story about, how did Warren Ellis put it, "test piloting the future"... anything to get that story more exposure and attention from a wider audience is a good thing in my opinion. Iron Man's never soared higher or appeared more heroic then he has here.

7/10