This is sarcasm, right? If so, you forgot the <irony> tags. Without them I haven't a clue how to read this.

No, I’m serious. The beginning was interesting, the end (I presume because a bunch of dialogue was cut) didn’t make any sense, and the middle was dull.

Not to say I don’t think I got my money’s worth. If a director like Ang Lee’s going to make a spec-fic film, what I’m looking for is something like what Johnson said of Shakespeare:

The event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed.

And forty-five minutes of that is about as much as you can expect for your nine bucks these days.

I think part of the problem might have been that the character drama in Hulk was aimed at adults, but the action scenes were aimed at fairly young children — there wasn’t any tension in them, and I had trouble sustaining my disbelief.

It probably doesn’t help that with their stealthy profiles and pop-up weaponry the Comanche and the F-22 look like toys anyway. :)

Interesting. I've not seen it myself, but all the reviews I'd read said there was too much talking, not enough Hulking.

On the other hand, Greg called it a "big ball of suck," but didn't really elaborate why.

Depends on what you go in looking for, I suppose, and I’m sure what I went in looking for wasn’t what 95% of the audience went in looking for.

It probably helps that I was never big into comic books, and that even in my vague childhood memories of the TV show what I mostly remember are the Bill Bixby parts rather than the Lou Ferrigno parts.

Okay, I'll elaborate on my "big ball of suck" comment.

1. Story -- This was not a story about Bruce Banner. It was a story about David Banner. It should have been a story about Bruce Banner, he being the protagonist, but in many ways, his actions and decisions and personal journey were not critical to the story. Bill Bixby played a tragic hero. Eric Bana played a poor, hapless bastard.

2. Eye candy -- Never believed for a second (not even a little second) that the Hulk was a real thing. The visuals were interesting only in a Roger Rabbit kind of way.

3. Action -- Interesting only in a Roger Rabbit kind of way. Hulk vs. Hulk-dogs went on about five minutes too long, IMHO.

4. Performances -- Yes, Bruce Banner was contained. I can't watch contained for two hours. David Banner was a raving lunatic. I can't watch a raving lunatic for two hours. Betty Ross was beautiful and looked sad. I *can* watch that for two hours, so Jennifer Connelly gets some points with me.

5. Camera jazz -- The split-screen thing really got on my nerves, and though it was supposed to suggest the comic book idiom, it really didn't. Comic book panels progress sequentially, but most often, Ang Lee's "panels" were used to show the same action from multiple angles and achieved more of a cheesy early 70's vibe than a comic book vibe.

It just didn't work for me, alas.

I thought it was entertaining mindless fantasy. As soon as my brain tried to engage the story felt stupid, though. (I was particularly offended at the notion that a graduate student could live in a victorian in san francisco.) The CGI was better than I expected but still not believable in the way that, say, gollum was (in particular hulk's movement seemed to suffer from the same problems that the cave troll's did).

The big problem for me was that the screenwriter completely failed to write a story which used even a fraction of the potential of the Hulk story to be interesting. It took an interesting story and made it banal and boring, and that was disappointing ... but as long as I turned my brain off and just watched it as i would if i were a pre-teen boy who liked watching things blow up, then it was cool.

I was just always more of a fan of The Thing than the Hulk - the Thing had more character and more ennui, which appealed to the pre-pubescent that I was.

SO, I'm not really planning on seeing the Hulk, alas. Maybe I'll just send Ang Lee a $9 check to show continued support.

I think the story was about Bruce right up to about the dog scene, but yeah, after that David is the only one who actually has any choices to make — Bruce / the Hulk is on rails. At the time I just read it as the ending not making any sense, but now I understand why it didn’t work even if I mentally filled in the huge gaps in the storyline.

To fix it, I would have started with more scenes between Bruce and Betty, and between Bruce and David — if David is the real villain of the piece, then Bruce has to understand who David is and make a decision to oppose him, which he never does.

More talk, see? :)

I don’t know what happened to the effects. ILM definitely seemed to be off their game. I went in with very low expectations, based on the previews, so they didn’t bother me too much on a conscious level, but they might have helped take the oomph out of the action scenes. Though even with better effects, I think trying to get any tension out of “invulnerable protagonist fighting in large open space” is setting yourself up for trouble. Especially when not even any of the antagonists seem to be in danger.

I think Nick Nolte’s performance had some of the same flaws as Ian Holm’s in Fellowship of the Ring — when an actor’s too skilled, he can change gears too quickly and end up playing two or three different characters in the same scene instead of one character going through two or three different emotions. It would have been okay, it would even have been good, for him to be an obsessed loony, but instead he was a loony with ADD — too many different core motivations.

Again, my first-pass solution to that would have been more talk. The audience needs to have a clearer idea of who he is and what he’s after and why.

I don’t know why the split-screen thing didn’t bother me, but it didn’t. Kind of like some of the weird shots in Three Kings. Actually I’d like to see more experimentation with that sort of thing — there’s something sad about the fact that we haven’t added much to the grammar of film since D.W. Griffith. But a summer blockbuster may not be the place to do it.

The house could have been worse, Rob. Remember Mike Myers’s loft in So I Married an Axe Murderer?

I remember that. Yes, he's a poet with the coolest loft in the world, and a nice car to boot (maybe that's why so many people write poetry still). I'd thought maybe he was a trust fund kid until he brought her by to meet his parents. Then I was reduced to thinking he won the lottery, and that's never good.

I was under the impression that Bruce Banner was staff or post-doc, given that the slimy guy went to him and Betty about their work. Otherwise, he'd have gone stright to the thesis advisor.

Thumbs up to Ang Lee for either using a real science department or knowing what one should look like. I particularly appreciated the student/faculty posters from conference proceedings in the hallways.

Huh. I think the total lack of a visible means of economic support for Mike Myers is one of the funniest jokes in So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Haven't seen the Hulk. Didn't have any intention of going to see it in the theater, after I saw the previews and found them underwhelming. I'll catch it on DVD sometime.

Yeah — that was one of the things that got me on Ang Lee’s side early on: the Berkeley lab, at least, mostly looked like real scientists doing real science.

(The corporate/military lab, on the other hand, had the smooth chrome unrealism of the tunnels under the mutant school in X2. I wish Hollywould set designers would realize that that stuff doesn’t look cool; it just looks fake.)

I think the total lack of a visible means of economic support for Mike Myers is one of the funniest jokes in So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Tim, that's not a bad way to look at it; the only problem with it as a joke is that so many other Hollywood productions do that to some degree (the giant apartments in Friends, for instance), and they don't seem to be kidding.

Greg & Dave - you have a good point about the lack of dramatic tension and the lack of any real choices on Bruce's part. It explains one of my reactions to the movie, which I had heretofore not understood: I liked the cheesy TV series more.

Lisa - even someone on staff probably couldn't afford a victorian in San Francisco. :(

I saw Charlie's Angels instead. A bit cheesy, _way_ over the top, but very fun. It succeeds because it doesn't take itself seriously.

Rob, maybe he had housemates but they were out of town for the summer. Maybe it was a rent-controlled one-bedroom.

Or maybe he was house-sitting for an economics professor. :)

Quibble: The Hulk didn't need more talk, it needed different talk.

I don’t know about that. I liked most of the talk that was there. I suppose it depends on what sort of movie you’re trying to make.

Tim -- it's obvious that Mike Myers' character made his money as a beat poet! Remember the classic scenes of him performing his poetry after a "large cup of chino"???

Everyone knows that the Big Money is in beat poetry, such as:

Woman
Woman
Woooooooooooman!
She was a thief
You better belief
She stole my heart
And my cat!

Oh hell. Don't get me started.

"Stop this crazy thing... called life."

Classic.