Planet-man
Well-Known Member
Since we need one sometimes.
So I re-watched Ang Lee's HULK in part of my Hulk-psyching for the new one. I realized I'd only seen in the whole way through once, in theatres the weekend it opened. I've tried to watch it since then, sure, and I've played the Hulk vs the military scene a dozen times, but after that first awful viewing, I've never bothered to rewatch it despite owning the DVD since it came out(my dad kind of liked it and is a completionist when it comes to this one branch of pop-culture).
Anyway, I realized that I barely even remembered any of the actual human scenes in the movie so I felt it deserved a re-view.
It's definitely not as bad as I've retroactively built it up to be(I've thought of it as one of the bottom-five movies I've ever seen for years). The acting is for the most part good(Nolte is brilliant), and as always the CGI Hulk is still the most realistic organic creature movies have shown us to date. I can't get over how real and solid the skin looks in some shots. Why the one in the new movie looks so much faker despite five years of technology improvements is a mystery.
The direction, namely the whole comic-panels thing, is still just... mind-rapingly awful. It pulls me right out of the film, it wastes huge chunks of screen space, it makes me have to rapidly choose which I want to look at - Bruce's eye turn green or his arm burst a handcuff - rather than savouring each shot and worst of all, it screams to audiences everywhere that this is nothing more than a living comic book, when that shouldn't be important at all, let alone lit up and pointed at. There's also stupid **** like a great, ten-second shot of the Hulk falling straight down, where you feel like you're falling with him, until a second before he hits the water the shot pointlessly changes to a generic wideshot, wasting the build-up and killing the effect.
The main reason I think people never connected with this movie, though, is Banner's character. He almost doesn't exist. Lee's take on the character was that instead of being a fascinating, nervous and non-violent man who transforms into a rampaging beast, he's a completely apathetic nothing of a man who then becomes the emotion of anger for a while. Why should we care? Betty is pretty much made the protagonist here, but sadly that falls apart when she sells Bruce out.
The ending.... I don't know how that got past the planning stages, let alone even storyboarding.
All in all.... it's not the black hole of bland, amaturish, unwatchable nonsense I once thought it was, in fact parts of it are quite good, but on the whole it's still a very weak movie with veins of unforgivable badness running throughout. Never the less I up my ranking of it from a 1/10 to a 5.
So I re-watched Ang Lee's HULK in part of my Hulk-psyching for the new one. I realized I'd only seen in the whole way through once, in theatres the weekend it opened. I've tried to watch it since then, sure, and I've played the Hulk vs the military scene a dozen times, but after that first awful viewing, I've never bothered to rewatch it despite owning the DVD since it came out(my dad kind of liked it and is a completionist when it comes to this one branch of pop-culture).
Anyway, I realized that I barely even remembered any of the actual human scenes in the movie so I felt it deserved a re-view.
It's definitely not as bad as I've retroactively built it up to be(I've thought of it as one of the bottom-five movies I've ever seen for years). The acting is for the most part good(Nolte is brilliant), and as always the CGI Hulk is still the most realistic organic creature movies have shown us to date. I can't get over how real and solid the skin looks in some shots. Why the one in the new movie looks so much faker despite five years of technology improvements is a mystery.
The direction, namely the whole comic-panels thing, is still just... mind-rapingly awful. It pulls me right out of the film, it wastes huge chunks of screen space, it makes me have to rapidly choose which I want to look at - Bruce's eye turn green or his arm burst a handcuff - rather than savouring each shot and worst of all, it screams to audiences everywhere that this is nothing more than a living comic book, when that shouldn't be important at all, let alone lit up and pointed at. There's also stupid **** like a great, ten-second shot of the Hulk falling straight down, where you feel like you're falling with him, until a second before he hits the water the shot pointlessly changes to a generic wideshot, wasting the build-up and killing the effect.
The main reason I think people never connected with this movie, though, is Banner's character. He almost doesn't exist. Lee's take on the character was that instead of being a fascinating, nervous and non-violent man who transforms into a rampaging beast, he's a completely apathetic nothing of a man who then becomes the emotion of anger for a while. Why should we care? Betty is pretty much made the protagonist here, but sadly that falls apart when she sells Bruce out.
The ending.... I don't know how that got past the planning stages, let alone even storyboarding.
All in all.... it's not the black hole of bland, amaturish, unwatchable nonsense I once thought it was, in fact parts of it are quite good, but on the whole it's still a very weak movie with veins of unforgivable badness running throughout. Never the less I up my ranking of it from a 1/10 to a 5.
