The All About Comic Book Movies Thread

Planet-man

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2005
Messages
11,645
Location
Toronto, Ontario(by way of the Kepler Verge)
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.
 
I liked Hulk, I didn't love it or anything, but I thought it was quite decent.

but I'm one of those guys who tries to look at the good in movies, instead of overblowing the bad.

also I just watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, and it was still quite terrible, but it still had alot of good character moments, and Casey was in it! I completely forgot about that

Casey Jones rocks

he should get his own movie.
 
I rewatched part of TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze. It used to be my favorite one, now I'm disillusioned.
 
I rewatched part of TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze. It used to be my favorite one, now I'm disillusioned.

I still like that movie, not as good as the first but it was enjoyable

and I can't help but piss myself laughing at this

Shredder "Babies, They're Babies!!",
Doctor "Well what did you expect they'd come out quoting shakespeare?",
Shredder "They are stupid"
Doctor "No they're infants"
Rahzahr "Bam" *hits Tokka over the head with a pipe*
Tokka "Ow!"
Doctor "Okay they're stupid infants"

but it really fell apart at the end, with Super-Shredder and Vanilla Ice (even though I like the ninja rap Don't Judge me!)

and Keno is no subsitute for Casey Jones

Casey Jones!
 
Hulk is bad because of how good it could have been.

The cast is amazing, the effects are awesome, and yet it fails on a few key levels which leave a bad taste in your mouth.

The first area is, yeah, Banner is no character. And Betty is for a little bit but then she becomes a weak daddy's girl and then her character completely evaporates under the heat of the audience's glare.

Nick's amazing, but the character's death is so ****ing stupid that when it happens instead of missing him, glad to see him leave, or happy to see Hulk defeat him...you sit there thinking, 'That was retarded!' And when the villain's death does that, you've failed.

With a better script, or direction because the comic panels were a stupid idea. Yeah, it comes from a comic book...but the Godfather didn't end each scene with a big hand turning the page to the next scene because it was a book first.

It really could have been great and I will forever lament that we didn't get more Sam Elliot as Thunderbolt Ross because of this movie.
 
Yeah, it comes from a comic book...but the Godfather didn't end each scene with a big hand turning the page to the next scene because it was a book first.
I don't see any big problem with cut-panel multi-angle comic book style shots per se, but that's the best argument EVER.

Simply put, it's okay to do it, but there's no need to do it, just because you can, and there's no need to do it, just because of the source.
 
I don't see any big problem with cut-panel multi-angle comic book style shots per se, but that's the best argument EVER.

Indeed. This is exactly what I said using the Harry Potter books when HULK came out.

But no problem with it? The beauty of a comic book is that you have the time to look at each panel for as long as you like, separately or together. In the movie, you actually were forced to miss shots because two of them were going on at opposite corners of the screen and you couldn't look at both of them. That's terrible filmmaking.
 
I've never thought Hulk was a bad movie, merely a mediocre movie with a bad ending.

The bastardization of The Absorbing Man was much more infuriating than the Hulk Dogs.
 
The dogs could have been cooler if they didn't use a damn poodle. And because Houde has swayed me, dare I say honey badgers?
 
I've never thought Hulk was a bad movie, merely a mediocre movie with a bad ending.

The bastardization of The Absorbing Man was much more infuriating than the Hulk Dogs.

It was the mundane, convoluted, stretched-out origin that annoyed me to no end. I always preferred the science of Hulk's origin to be simplistic, fantasy comic-book science, with the psychological side of the origin having no relation to it. It fits with Stan Lee's ironic, dramatic style of plotting, rather than everything being pre-destined.

Imagine if Peter Parker's Dad made the super-spider specifically so that it would bite him and he would become a hero. It's just not dramatic.
 
I still can't stand Ang Lee's hulk film. To me it's one of the worst comic book movies ever. I say the worst are (in no order) :

  • Ang Lee's Hulk
  • Catwoman
  • Batman and Robin
  • Superman Returns
  • Steel
  • Howard the Duck
  • Blade Trinity
  • Punisher [original] (though I like it , I still admit it sucks)
  • Tank Girl
  • Fantastic four : Rise of the silver surfer
 
It was the mundane, convoluted, stretched-out origin that annoyed me to no end. I always preferred the science of Hulk's origin to be simplistic, fantasy comic-book science, with the psychological side of the origin having no relation to it. It fits with Stan Lee's ironic, dramatic style of plotting, rather than everything being pre-destined.

Imagine if Peter Parker's Dad made the super-spider specifically so that it would bite him and he would become a hero. It's just not dramatic.

That's pretty much what JMS did with the Spider Totem.
 
I actually thought the psychology was handled very well.

I just think the pacing was mercilessly dragging and Eric Bana was kind of playing an empty character that was totally shut down - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you - but is just really difficult to pull off without looking ****ing boring or like bad acting.

Also, the denoument was just inane. Whose idea was it to have a hard to follow CGI battle with Absorbing Man as the final battle?
 
The Absorbing Man plot actually works pretty well once you watched it a couple times, but expecting comic, let alone mainstream, audiences to follow, like or care about it on the first viewing was laughable.

Also, I prefer the name Bass' gave him in some thread a while ago - The Partaking Man.
 
Also, I prefer the name Bass' gave him in some thread a while ago - The Partaking Man.

I've heard that name used in loads of places other than here, so I can't credit Bass for it. It is great, though.

Superman III might just be the oddest comic book movie ever made. It's not like Superman IV where a great concept went wrong or Batman & Robin where many, many people just didn't like what was essentially a fine film in its own terrible context. Superman III is just the kookiest concept for a Superman film to begin with.

Ilya Salkind: "Right, so we want to make a third Superman movie, only this time, there's no Lex Luthor. There's THREE (count 'em) three evil capitalists, aided by (wait for it)...Richard Pryor! Plus, Superman turns evil and fights himself. Oh and there'll be a giant computer that can turn people into cyborgs. Lana's in it and not Lois. How can we lose?"
 

Latest posts

Back
Top