HULK REVIEW!!!
Huzzah, thedeadlyhook and I finally caught The Incredible Hulk yesterday. Lowbrow monster buff that I am, I enjoyed the heck out of it. It may not have lived up to the extremely high standard set by Iron Man, but there was an awful lot about it I really liked, and as a Hulk partisan I feel my guy was very well served.
A Thematic Digression: As it happens, I just read through the first volume of Marvel's Essential Hulk reprint series, which reprints a bunch of his earliest adventures from the mid-sixties. Like Iron Man, the character started out with an obvious topical hook: Bruce Banner is America's leading nuclear scientist, a brilliant creator of superweapons for use against the Red Menace. When he's accidentally caught in the detonation of one of his own weapons, Banner becomes a kind of living atomic bomb. I'm reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the real-world "father of the atomic bomb," who reacted to the test detonation of his creation by quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose that's a bit more intellectual than "OPPENHEIMER SMASH!"
You might think that this ironically literal comeuppance would come as wake-up call for Bruce Banner, as it was for Oppenheimer. But instead, he goes right back to work building a series of newer and better superweapons for his hawkish boss General Ross. Likewise, Banner remains in denial about his little personal problem, continually experimenting and tinkering to try and get his rampaging alter ego under control. Given the fairly square politics of early Marvel, I really doubt that Stan Lee and his collaborators were trying to make a deliberate point about the bestiality of the military-industrial complex and the insanity of the arms race, but the metaphor's there if you want it.
In the context of the original comics, Bruce Banner himself is a rather unsympathetic character. He inflicted this problem on himself, and rather than changing his ways, he keeps right on building the same kind of doomsday weapons that created the Hulk in the first place. The new movie, taking its cues from the old television series, posits Bruce as more of an innocent victim. Although he became a monster by using himself as a test subject for his own gamma-enhancement process, he had no idea that his project was a front for a military "Super-Soldier" program. What's more, unlike some recent interpretations of the character, the raging Hulk persona is utterly alien to mild-mannered Bruce, not an expression of his own sublimated rage or a reaction to childhood abuse. By relieving Bruce Banner of any real responsibility for either the Hulk's creation or the Hulk's bad attitude, the movie turns away from models like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and heads into a more straightforward monster-movie zone.
Creature Features: But the monster movie is a rich genre, and the new Hulk does a great job of borrowing from it. Does the green-skinned, roaring Hulk remind you of Godzilla? Then here he is, smashing cars and battling maser tanks! Doesn't his slablike face remind you of Frankenstein's monster? Let's play up the empathy! If you're going to have him leap and scale buildings like King Kong, then why not set up a Fay Wray scene with love interest Betty Ross? And after that, why not have the characters play out the tearful finale of a classic Wolfman movie? (Like the Hook says, "He's not just a monster, he's every monster!") There were moments when I almost expected the Hulk to start wrestling dinosaurs on Skull Island or throwing down with King Ghidora and Mecha-Godzilla, and I think that does credit to the creators for planting the action so thoroughly in monster-movie territory.
But as the movie continues, a Deeper Theme slowly comes into view. I think it's signposted most clearly around the middle of the story, when Bruce and Betty are on the run from the military and seeking help from a mysterious scientist pen-pal. Betty holds out the hope that Bruce will be able to control his destructive alter ego, and he snaps "I don't want to control it! I want to get rid of it!" And indeed, all of his actions up until this point have been aimed at suppressing his curse - avoiding conflict, regulating his pulse and stress levels, seeking out a series of dubious cures. His Hulk self is so alien and repulsive to him that he can barely admit it exists, let alone that it retains any of his own consciousness and identity, but as a result he's made no effort to take control of it.
Much like Iron Man, the movie ends with a little scene that neatly upends the status quo familiar to comics readers. Here, for the first time, we see Bruce meditating not to suppress his Hulk self, but to trigger it. The last image we see of Edward Norton, with glowing green eyes and a grin on his face, suggests that he's finally taking responsibility for his Hulk self and making an effort to master it. After years of seeing shows like Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer dance around this kind of problem, it's refreshing to see a treatment of the Hulk that comes right out and tackles it head-on, in the process moving the character's development ahead of where the comics have usually gone.
And Finally: A few other random observations. For starters, the first act of the movie, which was filmed on location in a sprawling favela in Rio de Janeiro, is just spectacular.
I thought the direction was pretty good throughout, actually. Given that the cast is equally solid, the only thing that really holds the movie back from living up to the Iron Man standard is the clunky and uninspired dialogue. As much as I liked the overall story, the script doesn't have IM's giddy wit. Perhaps that's the difference between having your script worked over by Robert Downey versus Edward Norton.
Speaking of the script, I note that the credited author is Zak Penn, who also worked on the second and third X-Men movies. The new Hulk seems to reflect a lot of the same concerns about the dangers and attractions of power, and the need to master it rather than either denying it or letting it loose without constraint. I think it does so with a lot fewer of the muddled messages of X-Men 3, and the handling of its sole female lead - plucky Betty Ross - is a lot better than the shoddy treatment doled out to the distaff cast of that movie. In fact, this is one of the rare cases in which the heroine is never kidnapped or held hostage by the bad guys, an example I hope more action and superhero movies will follow.
Kudos also for the ambiguous depiction of the secondary characters. General Ross has an opportunity to mend his warmongering ways, the career soldier who ends up becoming the hideous Abomination manages to remain sympathetic for quite a ways into the movie, and the mysterious scientist who offers Bruce Banner his help turns out to be finely poised on the line between idealistic curiosity and reckless Mad Science (although those who recognize his name from the comics will have some idea which side of that line he's destined to fall on).
Last, but never least for a monster movie, the action sequences were pretty swell. I wish the Abomination had been a little scalier, so we could tell his wobbling CG flesh apart from the Hulk's during their close-up grappling scenes, but any reservations I had in that department were swept aside by the sheer delight of seeing our hero use two halves of a police car as improvised Hulk Hands and trying to kill Tim Roth with a forklift. Could it be that somebody in Hollywood remembers the "Fugitive Alien" song from Mystery Science Theater 3000...?
A Thematic Digression: As it happens, I just read through the first volume of Marvel's Essential Hulk reprint series, which reprints a bunch of his earliest adventures from the mid-sixties. Like Iron Man, the character started out with an obvious topical hook: Bruce Banner is America's leading nuclear scientist, a brilliant creator of superweapons for use against the Red Menace. When he's accidentally caught in the detonation of one of his own weapons, Banner becomes a kind of living atomic bomb. I'm reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the real-world "father of the atomic bomb," who reacted to the test detonation of his creation by quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose that's a bit more intellectual than "OPPENHEIMER SMASH!"
You might think that this ironically literal comeuppance would come as wake-up call for Bruce Banner, as it was for Oppenheimer. But instead, he goes right back to work building a series of newer and better superweapons for his hawkish boss General Ross. Likewise, Banner remains in denial about his little personal problem, continually experimenting and tinkering to try and get his rampaging alter ego under control. Given the fairly square politics of early Marvel, I really doubt that Stan Lee and his collaborators were trying to make a deliberate point about the bestiality of the military-industrial complex and the insanity of the arms race, but the metaphor's there if you want it.
In the context of the original comics, Bruce Banner himself is a rather unsympathetic character. He inflicted this problem on himself, and rather than changing his ways, he keeps right on building the same kind of doomsday weapons that created the Hulk in the first place. The new movie, taking its cues from the old television series, posits Bruce as more of an innocent victim. Although he became a monster by using himself as a test subject for his own gamma-enhancement process, he had no idea that his project was a front for a military "Super-Soldier" program. What's more, unlike some recent interpretations of the character, the raging Hulk persona is utterly alien to mild-mannered Bruce, not an expression of his own sublimated rage or a reaction to childhood abuse. By relieving Bruce Banner of any real responsibility for either the Hulk's creation or the Hulk's bad attitude, the movie turns away from models like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and heads into a more straightforward monster-movie zone.
Creature Features: But the monster movie is a rich genre, and the new Hulk does a great job of borrowing from it. Does the green-skinned, roaring Hulk remind you of Godzilla? Then here he is, smashing cars and battling maser tanks! Doesn't his slablike face remind you of Frankenstein's monster? Let's play up the empathy! If you're going to have him leap and scale buildings like King Kong, then why not set up a Fay Wray scene with love interest Betty Ross? And after that, why not have the characters play out the tearful finale of a classic Wolfman movie? (Like the Hook says, "He's not just a monster, he's every monster!") There were moments when I almost expected the Hulk to start wrestling dinosaurs on Skull Island or throwing down with King Ghidora and Mecha-Godzilla, and I think that does credit to the creators for planting the action so thoroughly in monster-movie territory.
But as the movie continues, a Deeper Theme slowly comes into view. I think it's signposted most clearly around the middle of the story, when Bruce and Betty are on the run from the military and seeking help from a mysterious scientist pen-pal. Betty holds out the hope that Bruce will be able to control his destructive alter ego, and he snaps "I don't want to control it! I want to get rid of it!" And indeed, all of his actions up until this point have been aimed at suppressing his curse - avoiding conflict, regulating his pulse and stress levels, seeking out a series of dubious cures. His Hulk self is so alien and repulsive to him that he can barely admit it exists, let alone that it retains any of his own consciousness and identity, but as a result he's made no effort to take control of it.
Much like Iron Man, the movie ends with a little scene that neatly upends the status quo familiar to comics readers. Here, for the first time, we see Bruce meditating not to suppress his Hulk self, but to trigger it. The last image we see of Edward Norton, with glowing green eyes and a grin on his face, suggests that he's finally taking responsibility for his Hulk self and making an effort to master it. After years of seeing shows like Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer dance around this kind of problem, it's refreshing to see a treatment of the Hulk that comes right out and tackles it head-on, in the process moving the character's development ahead of where the comics have usually gone.
And Finally: A few other random observations. For starters, the first act of the movie, which was filmed on location in a sprawling favela in Rio de Janeiro, is just spectacular.
I thought the direction was pretty good throughout, actually. Given that the cast is equally solid, the only thing that really holds the movie back from living up to the Iron Man standard is the clunky and uninspired dialogue. As much as I liked the overall story, the script doesn't have IM's giddy wit. Perhaps that's the difference between having your script worked over by Robert Downey versus Edward Norton.
Speaking of the script, I note that the credited author is Zak Penn, who also worked on the second and third X-Men movies. The new Hulk seems to reflect a lot of the same concerns about the dangers and attractions of power, and the need to master it rather than either denying it or letting it loose without constraint. I think it does so with a lot fewer of the muddled messages of X-Men 3, and the handling of its sole female lead - plucky Betty Ross - is a lot better than the shoddy treatment doled out to the distaff cast of that movie. In fact, this is one of the rare cases in which the heroine is never kidnapped or held hostage by the bad guys, an example I hope more action and superhero movies will follow.
Kudos also for the ambiguous depiction of the secondary characters. General Ross has an opportunity to mend his warmongering ways, the career soldier who ends up becoming the hideous Abomination manages to remain sympathetic for quite a ways into the movie, and the mysterious scientist who offers Bruce Banner his help turns out to be finely poised on the line between idealistic curiosity and reckless Mad Science (although those who recognize his name from the comics will have some idea which side of that line he's destined to fall on).
Last, but never least for a monster movie, the action sequences were pretty swell. I wish the Abomination had been a little scalier, so we could tell his wobbling CG flesh apart from the Hulk's during their close-up grappling scenes, but any reservations I had in that department were swept aside by the sheer delight of seeing our hero use two halves of a police car as improvised Hulk Hands and trying to kill Tim Roth with a forklift. Could it be that somebody in Hollywood remembers the "Fugitive Alien" song from Mystery Science Theater 3000...?