In Defense of Hulk (Yes, the Ang Lee Hulk)

Erik Sofge expresses what I've felt all along about Ang Lee's Hulk (thank god! I'm not alone!). Yes, the movie was messy, and the comic book frame editing was one of the biggest mistakes in movie editing history, but there's a lot of green gold in this movie, you just have to put aside your expectations of what a movie based on a comic book character (and a pretty unconventional one at that) should be about. I plan on seeing the new Hulk movie soon, so I'll try and post my thoughts on that one too.

http://www.slate.com/id/2193478/

"The new Hulk movie took in $54.5 million this weekend, enough to put it at the top of the box office and likely enough to confirm Hollywood's suspicion that the problem wasn't the Hulk, it was Ang Lee. But was Lee's movie really that bad? Or was it just not what audiences were expecting? There's a familiar rhythm to comic-book movies, from the moment the hero embraces his newfound potential to the inevitable confrontation with his arch-enemy. But Lee wasn't interested in going through the motions, and instead of adhering to the usual conventions of the genre, he subverted them. Hulk doesn't really look or feel like a superhero movie. But that's what's great about it."

"But Lee's movie also incorporated elements rarely seen in a comic-book adaptation, and this is where he really lost viewers. The script presents a series of relationships—between Banner and his ex-girlfriend Betty, between Betty and her estranged father, and between Banner and his own murderous father—that are all strained and ultimately doomed. There are no benevolent nuggets of wisdom from the likes of Spider-Man's saintly Aunt May or Batman's martyred father. In Hulk, family ties are the alpha and omega of emotional trauma."

"Elsewhere in the movie, Lee uses visual effects not to blow up city blocks or show off a spectacular feat of acrobatic fisticuffs, but to find moments of unsettling, alien beauty. Banner dreams of luminescent jelly fish hovering in desert mesas as desolate as the surface of Mars. In the movie's most surreal scene, the Hulk passes out in midair after falling off of an F-16. Lee cuts to a completely domestic moment, a daydream in which Banner is shaving in the bathroom. The Hulk then shows up in the mirror, wrenching Banner back into the present. More polished superhero movies like Iron Man or Spider-Man don't waste frames on scenes so full of raw, haunting emotion, and ones that don't advance the plot."

However, I found it a bit overlong, and the daddy issues were greatly overplayed. I haven't read the comic in about 20 years, and I don't know how many times they've retold the Hulk's "real" origin, so for all I know Lee was working straight from the current comic canon. But in the end it doesn't matter; it seemed IMO forced and too easy, leading to the ridiculous sequence with the Gammapoodles.

I didn't really care for Bana in the role, but otherwise the casting was quite solid. Also, the effects were surprisingly, well, effective! Even the bright green skin looked okay, because that's how I remember him from the comics, dammit!

Finally, the desert sequence, with the helicopter chase and the fight with the tanks, was incredible. It was, frankly, exactly what I'd always wanted to see the Hulk do on the big screen, and Lee delivered it big time.

On the whole, I'd say that it was pretty good but not great. If I see it on tv, I'll likely watch it, and the next time I spot the DVD in the sale rack, I might pick it up.

Whenever Strange Jr wants to see the Hulk DVD, he always wants to start it at the helicopter scene.

The one thing I didn't like was the nonsense at the end when daddy turns into "WaterMan."

He kind of became a tweaked version of The Absorbing Man, and of Zzzzax, and probably a few others. Not sure where they were trying to go with it, except maybe some kind of gamma-powered Oedipal battle?

After all, it could have been a Michael Bay or Uwe Boll movie (shudder).

This time around, the flashbacks and quasi-dream sequences really seemed heavy-handed to me. I think that they would have been more effective if the characters had simply described their recollections, rather than back-and-forth cuts between past and present. I mean, Connoly and Nolte certainly have the chops to give a good recitation, so I say let them carry the ball a little more.

But damn! The tanks-n-helicopters battle is so cool!


Also, from what I've seen of the new Hulk movie, Lee's Hulk had more realistic facial expressions, even if he looked a little too much like Joe from Blue's Clues.

Ang Lee performed all the motion capture for the CGI Hulk.