Two Hulks Both Alike In Dignity...: The Incredible Hulk, More Or Less
[This was initially to be one post, but is now Part One of a projected Two.]
Hey, here's my impression of the film The Incredible Hulk:
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Ahem.
Seriously, though. I haven't particularly read any Hulk comics so I don't know if that's really true to the source material, but if it is, it really didn't work on film; each time the Hulk took advantage of a lull in the action to unleash a lengthy roar in the direction of an antagonist (or, occasionally, the sky), I got a little more bored and the movie got a little more ridiculous.
Assuming you've seen both movies, it's impossible to watch the new Edward Norton / Louis Leterrier The Incredible Hulk without thinking a lot about the pre-owned Eric Bana / Ang Lee Hulk. The fact that I'm sitting there in the theater thinking about it is already a failure of the movie, in a sense; not to be harsh, but I judge a movie based on how successfully (in my estimation) it achieves its own goals, and one of the goals of The Incredible Hulk was to pretend that Hulk didn't exist. It didn't have to be that way; according to the unimpeachable source that is Wikipedia, Marvel intially intended to present The Incredible Hulk as a straightforward sequel that maybe asked you not to think too hard about its predecessor; supposedly Bana was offered another crack at the role and he declined. Once you're heavily (and then entirely) recasting the film ties get more tenuous, and when you bring a guy like Edward Norton on board, whose talents are equalled if not outweighed by his own estimation of same, he's gonna be inclined to do things like rewrite the script. Norton's rewrite was the difference between a sequel and a reboot, and the origin story which is (quite artfully) presented in the credits sequence is much simpler, much different, and much more true to the comics than what we saw in Hulk.
Cutting to the chase, I think both of these movies are failures; Hulk had the distinction of being a very interesting failure, and The Incredible Hulk is a reasonably entertaining failure. They're distinct, opposed takes on the idea of how one should undertake the making of a comic book movie, and neither really gets it right.
(Cards on the table: here's my rank ordering, in my opinion, of the movies I've seen [no Fantastic Four or Superman yet] in the recent Major Comic Character Movie boom:
Batman Begins
Iron Man
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Spider-Man
Spider-Man 3
Hulk
The Incredible Hulk
X-Men
That's approximate, not absolute, although there's a big gap for me between the Batman and Iron Man films.)
So. The Incredible Hulk is by far the less ambitious of the two HulkFlicks. It wants to be a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride, Celluloid Fun, etc. It's serviceable for that purpose, but it's not remotely up to the standards of Iron Man in this regard. Look, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions.
(Important point here: Iron Man asks interesting questions of himself, and the movie passively suggests those questions. Which is to say that you can deposit onto the film a discussion of the ethics of violence and the corporatized manufacture of same and the role exporting such violence plays in promoting world peace. Tony Stark pithily presents his latest weapon design by modifying the bon mot that "the best weapon is the one you never need use" to his own ends: the best weapon [the Jericho missile] is the one you need fire only once. Stark seems to genuinely believe and defend the position that making weapons to strengthen the US military is, via the mechanism of deterrence, a positive contribution to the cause of peace. His experience in Afghanistan and the revelations about what his corporation has been doing behind his back profoundly alter Stark's ethic in this regard, but the result of his ethical realignment is to narrow his creative focus and turn it inward: now Stark designs and engineers himself as a weapon and exports himself as a violent solution to the problem of violence, up to and including the destruction of his own company's weapons. So something's changed, but what? And to what end? These are things you can discuss in light of Iron Man, and I'll roll my eyes at someone who thinks we shouldn't have these thoughts because "it's just a movie," but the movie itself isn't trying to investigate these issues, it's using these issues - with some care, I believe - as a jumping-off point for Celluloid Fun, a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride. There's a legitimate difference, and faulting Iron Man for not being more philosophically curious is like faulting Remains of the Day for not having superpowered exo-skeleton fighting suits.)
So, long parenthetical concluded, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions, but it does give you compelling acting, witty dialogue, humor, mild suspense, and pretty cool action sequences in a tightly wrapped package that's a lot of fun and had me grinning on my way out of the theater. I think it's a great movie because (a) I like that sort of movie, and (b) it executes its own goals to near perfection. The Incredible Hulk has the same outline but pales in execution; it offers fine acting, passable dialogue, disappointing humor (one scene excepted), no suspense, and serviceable action sequences. Essentially there are three separate failures (aside from having to cope with the unwanted specter of Hulk): of ambition, of tonal execution, and of technical capacity.
The ambition one is the easiest to plow through; The Incredible Hulk reads, inevitably, as a reaction to the so-called commercial and possibly aesthetic failure of its red-headed step-predecessor, a retrenchment where the powers that be said "Let's just make a fun movie." That "just" is everything: it doesn't define the boundaries of your goals so much as it limits the distance to which you will stretch yourself in pursuit of them. The most evident creative ambition in The Incredible Hulk is an aspiration to the adept deployment of bombast in its action sequences, but bombast is a suspect quailty of entertainment, and the film suffers from limited expectations of its characters and its plot.
Those same limitations are what hamper what I called the film's "tonal execution" - its ability to be funny and moving when it wants to be funny and moving. With two exceptions I'll list below, there's like one truly funny moment in the film: like Hulk, The Incredible Hulk doesn't want to just give us the character's great immortal catchphrase. The prior movie gave it as the last line (or started to?), in Spanish, while this one has Norton's Bruce Banner trying to say it in Portuguese but ineptly swapping "hungry" for "angry." Other moments of potential humor, like Norton's quest for pants that fit both him and his Hulk, are too muted to really work. I smiled, but I didn't laugh, because the film is too constrained to really go there. This is best exemplified by the abortive sex scene. Banner cuts off activities when he notices his heart rate escalating into dangerous territory, and fears that if he keeps going he'll turn into the Hulk. I can't stand Armond White, and I can't stand his review of the movie, but he's right that in its complete failure to try and get anything interesting out of the moment, the scene fails to add anything to "The Simpsons' Paul Bunyan episode where Marge cautioned, 'Just let me do a few more yoga lessons.'" I smiled in the theater because it's a funny idea, but what I saw onscreen wasn't pushed for laughs despite the rich comic possibilities. (And if you haven't read Larry Niven's immortal "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", DO IT NOW.) The same idea in Ang Lee's movie (actually in Lee's movie, the transformation is triggered purely by anger, so Banner would've been fine as long as he didn't get into roleplaying and BDSM) probably would've been played for a pathos this movie equally won't let itself access. Instead the moment just lies there flat and limp. Ahem.
(This is the Listed Below: There are two scenes, one long and one brief, that are really funny and have a completely different energy, because they feel like they're actually from a somewhat different movie, powered by the performances of actors behaving like they're in a different movie. In the case of the film's last scene, a Robert Downey, Jr. cameo in character as Tony Stark, it feels that way because he literally is from another movie, and he's here to help set up yet another movie or five, and half the excitement and energy of the scene comes from the perpetuation of Marvel's ground-laying for the eventual Avengers movie. His performance also casts unfavorable light on Norton; I probably prefer Downey, Jr. as an actor anyway, but part of the charm of Iron Man is that they let a supremely talented actor completely absorb and commandeer the role, providing an honest to God interpretation that makes actual choices and charges the movie with Downey's own nervy energy. Tony Stark doesn't have to be played that way to be successful as a movie character, but the act of committing to really playing it (and Downey, Jr.'s particular bent helps) makes Stark pop off the screen with vitality. Norton's own script didn't really give him anything to do but competently execute the motions and dialogue required of him, and he doesn't invest the character with any of the life he brought even to such a bland cipher as his role in Fight Club. I don't rate Eric Bana as highly as Edward Norton, but his Banner is the more interesting and more accomplished performance. The longer scene-from-another-film is the set-piece with Tim Blake Nelson, who decides to completely gun for the humor of his situation, and becomes the movie's primary breath of fresh air amidst lot of dull reciting and occasional RRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRRing.)
And, finally, the Hulk just doesn't look that good, but I'm going to save that for another day, when I resume this mammoth overlong posting and wrap it around to a consideration of Hulk.
Hey, here's my impression of the film The Incredible Hulk:
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Ahem.
Seriously, though. I haven't particularly read any Hulk comics so I don't know if that's really true to the source material, but if it is, it really didn't work on film; each time the Hulk took advantage of a lull in the action to unleash a lengthy roar in the direction of an antagonist (or, occasionally, the sky), I got a little more bored and the movie got a little more ridiculous.
Assuming you've seen both movies, it's impossible to watch the new Edward Norton / Louis Leterrier The Incredible Hulk without thinking a lot about the pre-owned Eric Bana / Ang Lee Hulk. The fact that I'm sitting there in the theater thinking about it is already a failure of the movie, in a sense; not to be harsh, but I judge a movie based on how successfully (in my estimation) it achieves its own goals, and one of the goals of The Incredible Hulk was to pretend that Hulk didn't exist. It didn't have to be that way; according to the unimpeachable source that is Wikipedia, Marvel intially intended to present The Incredible Hulk as a straightforward sequel that maybe asked you not to think too hard about its predecessor; supposedly Bana was offered another crack at the role and he declined. Once you're heavily (and then entirely) recasting the film ties get more tenuous, and when you bring a guy like Edward Norton on board, whose talents are equalled if not outweighed by his own estimation of same, he's gonna be inclined to do things like rewrite the script. Norton's rewrite was the difference between a sequel and a reboot, and the origin story which is (quite artfully) presented in the credits sequence is much simpler, much different, and much more true to the comics than what we saw in Hulk.
Cutting to the chase, I think both of these movies are failures; Hulk had the distinction of being a very interesting failure, and The Incredible Hulk is a reasonably entertaining failure. They're distinct, opposed takes on the idea of how one should undertake the making of a comic book movie, and neither really gets it right.
(Cards on the table: here's my rank ordering, in my opinion, of the movies I've seen [no Fantastic Four or Superman yet] in the recent Major Comic Character Movie boom:
Batman Begins
Iron Man
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Spider-Man
Spider-Man 3
Hulk
The Incredible Hulk
X-Men
That's approximate, not absolute, although there's a big gap for me between the Batman and Iron Man films.)
So. The Incredible Hulk is by far the less ambitious of the two HulkFlicks. It wants to be a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride, Celluloid Fun, etc. It's serviceable for that purpose, but it's not remotely up to the standards of Iron Man in this regard. Look, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions.
(Important point here: Iron Man asks interesting questions of himself, and the movie passively suggests those questions. Which is to say that you can deposit onto the film a discussion of the ethics of violence and the corporatized manufacture of same and the role exporting such violence plays in promoting world peace. Tony Stark pithily presents his latest weapon design by modifying the bon mot that "the best weapon is the one you never need use" to his own ends: the best weapon [the Jericho missile] is the one you need fire only once. Stark seems to genuinely believe and defend the position that making weapons to strengthen the US military is, via the mechanism of deterrence, a positive contribution to the cause of peace. His experience in Afghanistan and the revelations about what his corporation has been doing behind his back profoundly alter Stark's ethic in this regard, but the result of his ethical realignment is to narrow his creative focus and turn it inward: now Stark designs and engineers himself as a weapon and exports himself as a violent solution to the problem of violence, up to and including the destruction of his own company's weapons. So something's changed, but what? And to what end? These are things you can discuss in light of Iron Man, and I'll roll my eyes at someone who thinks we shouldn't have these thoughts because "it's just a movie," but the movie itself isn't trying to investigate these issues, it's using these issues - with some care, I believe - as a jumping-off point for Celluloid Fun, a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride. There's a legitimate difference, and faulting Iron Man for not being more philosophically curious is like faulting Remains of the Day for not having superpowered exo-skeleton fighting suits.)
So, long parenthetical concluded, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions, but it does give you compelling acting, witty dialogue, humor, mild suspense, and pretty cool action sequences in a tightly wrapped package that's a lot of fun and had me grinning on my way out of the theater. I think it's a great movie because (a) I like that sort of movie, and (b) it executes its own goals to near perfection. The Incredible Hulk has the same outline but pales in execution; it offers fine acting, passable dialogue, disappointing humor (one scene excepted), no suspense, and serviceable action sequences. Essentially there are three separate failures (aside from having to cope with the unwanted specter of Hulk): of ambition, of tonal execution, and of technical capacity.
The ambition one is the easiest to plow through; The Incredible Hulk reads, inevitably, as a reaction to the so-called commercial and possibly aesthetic failure of its red-headed step-predecessor, a retrenchment where the powers that be said "Let's just make a fun movie." That "just" is everything: it doesn't define the boundaries of your goals so much as it limits the distance to which you will stretch yourself in pursuit of them. The most evident creative ambition in The Incredible Hulk is an aspiration to the adept deployment of bombast in its action sequences, but bombast is a suspect quailty of entertainment, and the film suffers from limited expectations of its characters and its plot.
Those same limitations are what hamper what I called the film's "tonal execution" - its ability to be funny and moving when it wants to be funny and moving. With two exceptions I'll list below, there's like one truly funny moment in the film: like Hulk, The Incredible Hulk doesn't want to just give us the character's great immortal catchphrase. The prior movie gave it as the last line (or started to?), in Spanish, while this one has Norton's Bruce Banner trying to say it in Portuguese but ineptly swapping "hungry" for "angry." Other moments of potential humor, like Norton's quest for pants that fit both him and his Hulk, are too muted to really work. I smiled, but I didn't laugh, because the film is too constrained to really go there. This is best exemplified by the abortive sex scene. Banner cuts off activities when he notices his heart rate escalating into dangerous territory, and fears that if he keeps going he'll turn into the Hulk. I can't stand Armond White, and I can't stand his review of the movie, but he's right that in its complete failure to try and get anything interesting out of the moment, the scene fails to add anything to "The Simpsons' Paul Bunyan episode where Marge cautioned, 'Just let me do a few more yoga lessons.'" I smiled in the theater because it's a funny idea, but what I saw onscreen wasn't pushed for laughs despite the rich comic possibilities. (And if you haven't read Larry Niven's immortal "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", DO IT NOW.) The same idea in Ang Lee's movie (actually in Lee's movie, the transformation is triggered purely by anger, so Banner would've been fine as long as he didn't get into roleplaying and BDSM) probably would've been played for a pathos this movie equally won't let itself access. Instead the moment just lies there flat and limp. Ahem.
(This is the Listed Below: There are two scenes, one long and one brief, that are really funny and have a completely different energy, because they feel like they're actually from a somewhat different movie, powered by the performances of actors behaving like they're in a different movie. In the case of the film's last scene, a Robert Downey, Jr. cameo in character as Tony Stark, it feels that way because he literally is from another movie, and he's here to help set up yet another movie or five, and half the excitement and energy of the scene comes from the perpetuation of Marvel's ground-laying for the eventual Avengers movie. His performance also casts unfavorable light on Norton; I probably prefer Downey, Jr. as an actor anyway, but part of the charm of Iron Man is that they let a supremely talented actor completely absorb and commandeer the role, providing an honest to God interpretation that makes actual choices and charges the movie with Downey's own nervy energy. Tony Stark doesn't have to be played that way to be successful as a movie character, but the act of committing to really playing it (and Downey, Jr.'s particular bent helps) makes Stark pop off the screen with vitality. Norton's own script didn't really give him anything to do but competently execute the motions and dialogue required of him, and he doesn't invest the character with any of the life he brought even to such a bland cipher as his role in Fight Club. I don't rate Eric Bana as highly as Edward Norton, but his Banner is the more interesting and more accomplished performance. The longer scene-from-another-film is the set-piece with Tim Blake Nelson, who decides to completely gun for the humor of his situation, and becomes the movie's primary breath of fresh air amidst lot of dull reciting and occasional RRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRRing.)
And, finally, the Hulk just doesn't look that good, but I'm going to save that for another day, when I resume this mammoth overlong posting and wrap it around to a consideration of Hulk.
posted by medrawt at
22:43
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