There ought be something wrong with the split frames, the panning cuts, the jigsaw-like dissolves and all the tricks Ang Lee uses to keep reminding us that his film was based on a comic book. Bad ideas in principle, no? This may have been a comic book once, but it's a film now; these devices make no more sense than the old Hollywood convention of opening films like "Jane Eyre" with a shot of a big leather book being opened to the first page.
Yet we might as well drop whatever theoretical objections we may have and admit that (Ang) Lee's comic book fixation works for the film, and works well. There's a sense that every frame and every shot neatly and gracefully interlocks with its neighbours. It suits the kind of nothing-but-the-story storytelling that Lee's aiming for and somehow suits the material as well. And, much as I was prepared to hate it, it looks great. There are not only some stunning shots in this movie but they were laid out so as to enable me to best admire them.
A pity the film doesn't get over its main hurdle: the fact that Lee is a gifted, multi-talented director capable of taking almost any subject whatever and making it insipid and boring. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" IN PRINCPLE a thrilling, magical ride used the beauty of its individual shots to make us pretend (it even made me pretend, for a while) that it wasn't completely unengaging and forgettable so much tasteless rice pudding and "Ride with the Devil" managed to be, not just the dullest United States Civil War film ever made, but the dullest it's POSSIBLE to make. If "Hulk" is a better film than either of these it's not because Lee has learned how to make scenes come to life. Performances are somehow flat and pitched poorly against one another, none of the material sings, and if Lee had any idea why all this stuff interested him he didn't succeed in conveying it to me. Much of the film is so much finger-tapping while we wait for the inevitable to happen. When the Hulk REALLY goes berserk it's obvious enough what the solution is: do nothing and wait for him to calm down. This solution not only leaps to the mind of a child of three but it's already been employed in the film by the very members of the military, boneheads though they may be, who are in charge of what to do now so however much fun it might be to watch (FINALLY, after so much exposition!) the Hulk leap around a smash things to bits, it doesn't do much for us, knowing that we're just waiting for the characters to start doing nothing. It's not that this lapse of military intelligence is implausible, you understand. The generals did, after all, have their brains amputated years ago, when they became soldiers. But why should Lee insult us by asking us to think and feel at their level? A really skilled director, like Kubrick, would know that the way to make this extended farce exciting would be to distance us from it, to show it to us from the viewpoint of a god.
But if Lee knew how to make films exciting "Hulk" would be very different in many ways.
And yes, state-of-the-art CGI is still bad. We even get a shot of the Hulk's magically stretchable blue pants during a transformation scene in bright sunlight (somehow devoid of true shadows for anything computer animated), just to rub our noses in them.
Yet we might as well drop whatever theoretical objections we may have and admit that (Ang) Lee's comic book fixation works for the film, and works well. There's a sense that every frame and every shot neatly and gracefully interlocks with its neighbours. It suits the kind of nothing-but-the-story storytelling that Lee's aiming for and somehow suits the material as well. And, much as I was prepared to hate it, it looks great. There are not only some stunning shots in this movie but they were laid out so as to enable me to best admire them.
A pity the film doesn't get over its main hurdle: the fact that Lee is a gifted, multi-talented director capable of taking almost any subject whatever and making it insipid and boring. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" IN PRINCPLE a thrilling, magical ride used the beauty of its individual shots to make us pretend (it even made me pretend, for a while) that it wasn't completely unengaging and forgettable so much tasteless rice pudding and "Ride with the Devil" managed to be, not just the dullest United States Civil War film ever made, but the dullest it's POSSIBLE to make. If "Hulk" is a better film than either of these it's not because Lee has learned how to make scenes come to life. Performances are somehow flat and pitched poorly against one another, none of the material sings, and if Lee had any idea why all this stuff interested him he didn't succeed in conveying it to me. Much of the film is so much finger-tapping while we wait for the inevitable to happen. When the Hulk REALLY goes berserk it's obvious enough what the solution is: do nothing and wait for him to calm down. This solution not only leaps to the mind of a child of three but it's already been employed in the film by the very members of the military, boneheads though they may be, who are in charge of what to do now so however much fun it might be to watch (FINALLY, after so much exposition!) the Hulk leap around a smash things to bits, it doesn't do much for us, knowing that we're just waiting for the characters to start doing nothing. It's not that this lapse of military intelligence is implausible, you understand. The generals did, after all, have their brains amputated years ago, when they became soldiers. But why should Lee insult us by asking us to think and feel at their level? A really skilled director, like Kubrick, would know that the way to make this extended farce exciting would be to distance us from it, to show it to us from the viewpoint of a god.
But if Lee knew how to make films exciting "Hulk" would be very different in many ways.
And yes, state-of-the-art CGI is still bad. We even get a shot of the Hulk's magically stretchable blue pants during a transformation scene in bright sunlight (somehow devoid of true shadows for anything computer animated), just to rub our noses in them.