Assembled At Last — ‘Avengers: Damage Control’ Brings The MCU to Life (Review)
The VOID recruits you for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
Listen up True Believers!
While the Invincible Iron Man, Tony Stark, may have proven to be not so invincible his legacy still shapes the world. For good, and not so good.
Take the good: in Wakanda, under the guidance of the world’s most fashionable genius and member of the royal family, Shuri, the designs of Tony Stark have been updated — and given a makeover. That’s right. The latest in Wakandan technology and Stark Industries state-of-the-art are about to be yours to test drive.
Then take the bad: what was going to be a simple shakedown cruise gets turned into a life or death battle as the unconscionable Ultron has returned from the brink of oblivion to menace first Los Angeles and then the world!
Suit up, recruits, there’s no time for learning the ropes. It’s just the four of you and — every last living Avenger — against one of the deadliest of their foes!
And that, my friends, is the plot of Avengers: Damage Control, the first collaboration between Marvel Studios and the ILMxLAB, that also happens to be the longest adventure yet to hit The VOID. Clocking in at around 18 minutes, all sense of space and time gets distorted as the story jumps from Wakanda to Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum to a technology graveyard where the past comes back to haunt the heroes of the MCU.
Marvel Studios really opens up the toybox for the ILMxLAB, with cameos from more characters that you can count and lead performances from Letitia Wright (Shuri), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man) and Evangeline Lilly (The Wasp).
While this feels like it could be one of the short films that accompanied the home video releases of the major Marvel films, this is a hyper reality experience, which stands alongside the work the ILMxLAB has done with The VOID in the past. Thankfully, what had started to feel a little rote gets switched up with the gifts from the Marvel toybox.
For starters, The VOID’s blasters stay holstered, relying instead on gesture controls. Strike a superhero pose to blast drones out of the sky or block incoming laser blasts. While we’re still in a shooting gallery at times, it genuinely feels different — and awesome — to be getting your Tony Stark on.
The best new features come with the traversal elements. With Stephen Strange in the mix we’re now playing with portals, and the usual “you’re in a building doing X” scenario gets tossed aside for a globe spanning quest. One of the most memorable moments comes from just walking through the twisty halls of the Sanctum, where the floor looks like it’s ramped down, but because you’re on a flat surface it feels like you’re being pulled backward the entire time. And when you finally reach your destination you discover you’ve been walking UP the entire time.
Magick! It’s weird, man.
There’s another great thing about the twisted nature of the halls and the portal jumps from set piece to set piece: I had no idea where I was on the stage. After having run through everything The VOID has but Nicodemus, I’d started to recognize the layout of the stage. They’ve rearranged the virtual map and added some physical details that make the space feel radically different, which is a testament to the underlying theory of The VOID: that a virtual skin can be layered on top of a modular set to create an infinite number of worlds.
It’s working.
Avengers remains the most beloved film franchise at the moment, and there’s enough “oh, cool” moments packed into Damage Control that we’re bound to see MCU fans headed to The VOID to see what the fuss is about. The good news for them — and those of us holding a torch for immersive entertainment — is that Avengers: Damage Control makes the best case yet for what this kind of experience can be. I envy those who get to have this as their introduction to VR.
For those who have been devouring all things VR, the most interesting things here are the traversal tricks. Redirected walking remains a trip, and there’s some perceptual shenanigans that use The VOID’s set tech to great effect. We might still be running all this in a game engine, as opposed to doing full volumetric capture of performers, but overlooking the ways in which The VOID activates touch, smell, and kinesthetics would be a mistake. Not to mention that the whole thing is designed so that four teams of four can be using the stage simultaneously. That’s an incredible feat of engineering in and of itself.
It’s also encouraging to see the ILMxLAB play in longer formats. They’re already setting the gold standard for storytelling in at-home VR with the Vader Immortal series, and here they get to deliver a blockbuster’s measure of action in a tidy three act short.
Avengers: Damage Control opens on October 18th, 2019 for a limited run at The VOID centers worldwide. Tickets are on sale now. Price varies by location.
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