Obscure Movie Review of the Day: The Hulk

Okay, so it's not so obscure.

I don't know quite what went wrong with this film. I really, really want to believe that the problem was that I didn't see it as it was meant to be seen--on a screen 500 miles high, in a theatre full of eight thousand people. I saw it on my little 19 inch TV, and I don't even remember whether I had my glasses on. Yeah. That must be it. Otherwise it would have rocked.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I loved all the ideas of this movie (Okay, all the ideas except the monster poodle. That was a bit of a stretch). I liked the editing, I liked they way they incorporated comic book frames into the scene composition, and I liked how they did the Hulk effects. But somehow, somewhere, something went wrong, and I found myself completely emotionally disconnected at every phase of the movie.

A big part of the problem may have been Nick Nolte, who here reprises his roll as a transient from "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," a movie which I never saw, but did read the MAD Magazine parody of, so I guess I could more accurately say he seems to reprise his roll from the MAD Magazine parody of "Down and out in Beverly Hills." Oh, heck yeah, I believe that thirty years ago he was the world's greatest scientist.

Part of the problem may have been the music. They really try to downplay the music here, maybe trying to get an M. Night sort of feel to the drama, but not quite hitting it. At some points the sound absolutely, positively works. For example, at one part, they make the interesting sound choice of, while a tank is exploding, playing down the sound of the explosion, while we instead hear the sound of Hulk brushing the dust off his hands. Stuff like that should be powerful, really rock. But while I was thinking, "wow, that was a neat sound choice," I wasn't actually feeling anything because of it.

Is this a sign I was overanalyzing the film? Or, more possibly, is it a sign that the movie was maybe overdirected, self-conscious to the point that the style gets in the way of enjoying the movie. Like an author who's so caught up in the "style" of his story that the style is all you notice, and the characters and plot all get swallowed up, a forest you can't see because of the words that, like the proverbial trees, just get in the way.

I hate to say that--especially about Ang Lee, who I think is as much of a genius as anybody who's in Hollywood can claim to be.

I just wish I could have seen it in a theatre. Because I really, really want to like this movie, even after having seen it.