June 19, 2003
By D.K. Holm
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Beast-in-the-Man Anger Management
HULK
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
Hulk mad. Hulk smash. Hulk come to big screen in swirl of controversy.
Always quick to anger, the Hulk appears in the first big summer movie true to his form, on a rampage that is apparently viral, as the film is mired in a matrix of contentious issues which have raged on the internet.
First there was the "faithfulness to the comic" controversy. Would HULK the movie fare well in the hands of unlikely director Ang Lee and his perpetual writing partner James Schamus? Then there was the minor "HULK show versus HULK movie" controversy. Could it be that there were people out there who liked the Bill Bixby series and would view the film as a desecration of that franchise, or were using the show as the standard by which to judge the film?
That controversy, such as it was, petered out quickly, superseded by the next one, the "Mychael Danna" controversy. Danna, a regular composer for filmmakers Atom Egoyan and Ang Lee, and who did MONSOON WEDDING, provided the original music for HULK, reportedly a beautiful, Eastern-inflected chart filled with wailing voices and other unexpected sounds. But the studio threw out his work in favor of a score by Danny Elfman, perhaps to evoke the BATMAN-Tim Burton juju.
Finally, there was the Ain't It Cool News controversy. To recap that tempest, which raged across the internet a couple of weekends ago, Moriarty of AICN posted an indictment of geeks who were downloading a pirated version of HULK from a website. He decried their violation of the owner's or artists' copyright — and for sending him poorly written reviews about what they saw. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you — except that the hand's possessor seems to have changed over time, from the geek constituency to the studios and their flacks. The fanboys and geeks raged at Moriarty, both in the AICN talkback, and elsewhere, the most comprehensive message board thread appearing at Chud. David Poland almost instantly entered the fray, first in one column and then in a follow up. Moriarty later apologized for his outburst, first at CHUD, then at AICN, so essentially the matter is closed, though I think the imbroglio will have some lasting effects that have more to do with the site than the movie per se. I would only add that the whole point of sites like AICN is to feed the movie geek impulse to acquire early tidbits about movies they are interested in: get the news first, see the film first, and then brag about it, an impulse I certainly share. In fact I would argue that the whole concept of spoiler alerts is antithetical to the concept of AICN and other news sites. If you don't want to know what the movie is about or what happens in it, what the fuck are you doing reading the site in the first place? The introduction of spoiler alerts (like the one at the start of this column, voluntarily added out of craven conformity) marked the decline of the Internet. Spoiler obsession introduced a weird disconnect between the grasping fanboy impulse and the pious disdain of ethicists for such base behavior.
All that being said, I think it's clear now that the posters of those "horrible" reviews of the pirated HULK had a point: the movie is pretty damn bad. It's long, talky, repetitious, and uninvolving. It has too few action scenes and a climactic fight scene that is overly ambiguous.
Surprisingly, HULK draws closely from elements in the very early comics, as Scott Tipton's excellent research in his COMICS 101 column about the character's history reveals, including the occasionally stated premise that the Hulk gets bigger and stronger as his anger increases. The movie also borrows the "bad dad" theme from a later iteration of the comic.
The movie's bad dad is David Banner (Nick Nolte, looking a lot like his mug shot). In a lengthy backstory, we see Banner working at a military base working on some vague gamma ray project, not getting along with the military officials over him, and doing research on human subjects—himself— in defiance of orders coming from the base commander, the future General Ross. Later, David Banner and his wife have a kid, and the child inherits certain qualities that frighten the increasingly irrational dad.
Jump to "today," and we learn the confusing information that the child Bruce Banner has grown up to be the adult Bruce Kretchmar or something like that (it appears that Banner was adopted for reasons that go unexplained until near the end). Adult Bruce (Eric Bana) is a nerdy scientist who has just broken up with his colleague, fellow scientist Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly, the perfect American girl).
The problems with HULK start here. Simply put, Bana is not Banner. Though Jack Kirby is justifiably famous for his bulky superheroes, no one drew nebbishes like Kirby. Banner was the optimum nebbish, like the mild mannered man who found a stick in a cave and became Thor. Banner is a slight, thin figure, a normal looking guy with bumps on his neck where shoulders should be. Bana, on the other hand, is all and muscular and fit; he already looks like the Hulk.
The other problem is the already evident talkiness of the movie. The boring chat starts here, with the first encounter between Banner and Ross. While navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of Exposition, she chides him for being emotionally distant. He doesn't seem to "get" her complaints, or at least he doesn't show any emotion about them, being emotionally distant and all. It's the common conflict between men and women in bars and bedrooms across the land, and the scene offers a clue as to what is wrong with HULK — and Ang Lee's movies in general. But more about that later.
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Banner gets zapped with gamma rays in a contrived and obvious sequence that is only slightly similar to the origin sequence in the comic. Waking up, Banner feels great, but soon learns that anger sparks a radical change in his body: he grows taller, turns green, and has anger management problems. He acts like he suffers from Rage, the plague-like disease that infects everyone in 28 DAYS LATER. His mood ring is always glowing green.
From this point on, the delightful Oscar winner Connelly has little to do as the film descends into a repetitious pattern in which the Hulk is trapped somewhere, escapes, makes his way to Betty Ross, who offers succor and then betrays him, at which point the Hulk escapes again, makes his way to Betty, who comforts him and then betrays him, leading to the Hulk's incarceration again, only to escape … This water treading gets boring fast.
Especially when the plot has to pause after every meager action scene to express its feelings.
It turns out that Betty, her "emotionally distant" dad General Ross (an excellent Sam Elliott, whose gray mustache has bristles as strong as a toilet brush), Banner and his family, and practically every one else in the film, all lived at the same military base in the desert at the same time, where secret experiments were conducted. This X-FILES style twist to the plot adds nothing to the weight of the story, but at least gives everyone something to talk about.
HULK is a tale of two Lees: Stan Lee, the Jewish Shakespeare of the 20th Century, as someone on the Internet called him, and Ang Lee, the most overrated director working in Hollywood. What Lee does is take conventionally male-oriented genres — HK action films, civil war epics, comic book adventures — and feminize them. With the help of his screenwriter the narratives become sensitive, they become more meaningful, feelings are fretted over. What was CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON really but a chick flick tricked up as a kung fu movie? The girls face off, fight like cats, and then … share their feelings. No fight scene can occur without extension quorums about what just happened. This chick flick element goes a long way to explain why CROUCHING TIGER was so financially successful. It crossed action film barriers by appealing to women as well as men. HULK may have similar success. The girls won't feel left out because they will identify with Betty's problems with her man and her need to share them.
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Women with an addiction to self-help books will also find something to like in the film's bogus premise, mired as it is in the world of repressed memory (a Freudian hue is also added by having Banner's real mom look like Connelly). There is no scientific basis for the concept of buried or repressed memories, forged as it is from faulty Freudian premises, but that hasn't stopped this harmful concept from sweeping the nation and causing havoc. The most popular self-help books are all about repressed memories. Lee is attracted to bad memories, as the lengthy flashback in CROUCHING TIGER suggested, but here he is straying into disputatious territory. Also like CROUCHING TIGER, HULK has a fight among the tree tops, although this one is between the Hulk and three rabid, genetically altered dogs.
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The material in HULK is of a kind that can only be played as tragedy. The film does end on an anguished note about the impossibility of love between people who are deemed right for each other, just like in CROUCHING TIGER. But Lee also tries to embrace what he takes to be the comic book aesthetic, first by inserting a little wry humor here and there (he really shouldn't), and then by undermining the tragic end by immediately setting up a sequel.
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Some of Lee's comic book strategies just don't work. For example, to replicate the feel of reading a comic Lee uses several split screens. But these fake comic panels don’t work cinematically for a simple reason. They show the same action from different angles, like a Norman Jewison film, rather than providing s succession of panels that advance the narrative. Not knowing this shows a fundamental lack of understanding of comic books that is at the heart of why Lee was the wrong choice for this movie. Personally, on the basis of ROBOCOP, I would have nominated Paul Verhoeven for the job.
So bereft of style and ideas is Lee that he even uses the tired old trick of having someone look out a window at something, pausing, then looking again, only to have the object "disappear." This is as hoary as the person who walks up behind friends in horror movies and grabs their shoulder, something no one does in real life.
Lee also uses attention-grabbing and distracting transitions, confusing flashbacks within flashbacks, and too many close-ups. You don't complain about this to much when the subject is Jennifer Connelly, until you notice that she has a problem with chapped lips.
Sometimes Lee's editing style is pleasing and interesting. There's a scene in a restaurant in which Betty meets her dad. Lee's technique is to cut within the same scene to similar but different camera positions. For example, the camera will be on Connelly at the left three-quarter. Then he cuts to the right three-quarter on her. This creates an uneasiness and tension in an otherwise static scene. And boy, is this scene static; the dialogue itself is almost entirely pointless. In the script as a whole, Nolte has a few good lines later ("How dangerous your ignorance has become"), but for the most part this is not a quotable movie.
What little life the film contains comes almost solely from Nolte. Unfortunately, the writers didn't know how to fully integrate him into the plot. After a while it dawns on you that, yeah, this guy is the villain. But it's rarely clear why he is doing the things he does, such as setting vicious dogs on Betty. It occurs to you that maybe he is manipulating Bruce in order to have him destroy General Ross. But then Dad Banner learns that with some helpful gamma infusions, he can become a hulk. So what's the point of the earlier machinations? At the end there is an odd scene between David Banner and his chained up son, that when you think about it later makes no sense (except the sense of screenwriter convenience). Yet Nolte manages to make something of it with loose-limbed improvisations that in a sense mock the static nature of the film as a whole.
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And the effects? That seems to be all that anyone is interested in. Well, here is my take on CGI. This is their job. This is what they are suppose to do. So they damn well better be good. Excessive fawning over CGI in films is like Oscar night fawnings over actors who play drunks or cripples, its undue excitement over something obvious. Yeah, it's fun to watch the Hulk spin tanks around like baseball bats during his Desert Storm. But I'll get ecstatic over CGI when it is truly exceptional.
When the HULK relapses once again into dry dialogue scenes, one can always pass the time by looking at Connelly. With that in mind, I leave the reader with these views of the perfect American girl:
Not that any of this grousing will matter. In a cinematic climate like this, it's easy being green. HULK will be a hit. Hulk smash critics.
NEXT TIME:28 DAYS LATER ….
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