I liked The Hulk. I think I probably liked it quite a bit.
The fight against the military was wonderful, a near-perfect envisioning of any of the five hundred similar set-tos in the comics. The fight against the dogs was, except for being shot in Murkyvision^TM, a fine example of the other great Hulk fight, Hulk against monsters.
I'll reserve my comments about one other fight for the extended entry.
Jennifer Connelly is more beautiful than she has been since Labyrinth, and there she had the virtue of being sixteen. There's always a smile quirking up at the corner of her mouth, which amplifies her cuteness by a big factor.
There are interesting emotional relationships--Betty and Bruce, Betty and Thunderbolt Ross, even David and everyone else--and Lee has the actors underplay them in the fashion of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which really works for me. It's the difference between acting and emoting. Eric Bana, by the way, is severely outclassed in talent by Connelly, Nolte, and Elliot, like you'd have to be told.
There are a few dull relationships--Glenn and Bruce--which are characterized mostly by standard histrionic acting.
The origin obviously originated in the original comic book origin story (and man, did I like writing that sentence). It tosses in quite a bit of the Bill Mantlo parental child abuse that Peter David advanced, a bit of the TV series origin, and then applies a conservation law so that the origin relates to everything else in the movie. It's OK. It's the origin you get when you decide that the origin has to relate to everything else in the movie. As a comic book reader, that's not the kind of thematic unity I have to have.
Spoilers in the extended entry.
One very pleasant surprise for me was the appearance of the Absorbing Man. I had no idea he was going to be in the film. Sure, it's not Crusher Creel, but, hey, it's the Absorbing Man. And there was a brief moment right after the gamma burst that turned [the character] into the Absorbing Man that it looked like he was going to be the Abomination.
The actual fight with the Absorbing Man was, unfortunately, murky and allegorical and implausible and ended with little explanation. Plus it got started by the military acting like idiots.
Keeping in mind that I hated The Ice Storm, one of the things I like about Ang Lee is that he's content to let you notice how people act toward each other. He doesn't have to draw your attention to it. A lot of the film is about Betty Ross and her father, but he lets what's going on behind the faces of Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliot carry the weight of the story; what they're saying isn't where the story is.
Posted by Greg at June 23, 2003 1:08 PM