Hulk

A number of extremely talented people worked to try to make this the best movie possible.  It’s hugely ambitious and has a complex, elaborate editing scheme.  I liked it a lot better than I did when I saw it in the theater. 

I wish I had a better understanding of exactly what the hell is going on in it.

This paragraph from A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times sums up my feelings regarding the plot:

“I’m far from an expert in such matters, but I would have thought that a combination of nanomeds and gamma radiation would be sufficient to make a nerdy researcher burst out of his clothes, turn green and start smashing things. I have now learned that this will occur only if there is a pre-existing genetic anomaly compounded by a history of parental abuse and repressed memories. This would be a fascinating paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, but it makes a supremely irritating — and borderline nonsensical — premise for a movie.”

And I also agree with this paragraph:

“All of this takes a very long time to explain, usually in choked-up, half-whispered dialogue or by means of flashbacks inside flashbacks. Themes and emotions that should stand out in relief are muddied and cancel one another out, so that no central crisis or relationship emerges.”

The tone sways wildly from ponderous to outrageously campy, sometimes in the same scene.  At one moment a father and daughter discuss the unpredictability of the human heart, at the next moment the daughter is attacked by a giant mutated poodle.  At one moment the Hulk is smashing tanks and swatting down helicopters, the next moment he’s lounging on a hillside contemplating lichens with a misty, faraway look in his eyes.  At one moment a father and son have a colloquy on matters of identity and social order, the next moment Nick Nolte is gnawing on an electrical cable.

There are three bad guys, and none of their plots seem to make any sense.  The biggest of them, which gets a very late start at an hour and eighteen minutes into the movie, involves Nick Nolte turning on some kind of machine and huffing on some sort of hose, then turning into some kind of super-being with some kind of super-powers which are visually impressive but which also seem tacked on, forced and incoherent.

There seems to be some kind of battle going on between the creative team and the genre they’re working in.  They’ve chosen to make a movie about an enraged green smashing guy, but they also want the movie to be about “deep” themes and ideas.  They’ve given their protagonist an inward journey (“Who am I?”) instead of an outward problem (“I’ve got to stop the bad guys”) and so the narrative seems choked, static and listless at just the points where it should be fleet, extravagant and larger-than-life.

Then there’s some problems with the plot.  I’ve seen the movie twice now and there’s things I just don’t follow.  I think I know why Hulk’s dad tries to kill him but I don’t know why he set off whatever green bomb thing he set off, or what the consequences of the blast were.  I know in the comic book, it’s the “gamma blast” that created the Hulk, but here the script takes great pains to explain that the blast had nothing to do with it.  Then why is it in the movie?

Then there’s the matter of the General’s daughter.  This is a movie about, among other things, intergenerational conflicts, and so in addition to a scientist who has problems with his scientist father, there is a daughter who has problems with her general father.  And the plot has to bend itself into a pretzel in order to keep those conflicts afloat, which is too bad because there isn’t much interesting going on in them. 

But for the record, here goes:  A Long Time Ago, there was this army base, see?  And there was this general.  And the general had a daughter.  And the general was tussling with this scientist, who blew up the base with the Gamma bomb and then ran home to try to murder his son.  And then many years later, the son grew up, forgot all about his murderous father, and then became a scientist, where he, by sheer coincidence, began studying in the exact same field as his murderous father, alongside the general’s now-grown-up daughter!  This is a plot to make The Comedy of Errors seem like the acme of observational behavioralism.

Then there’s whatever Nick Nolte turns into.  It’s pitched as the big battle that the narrative has been leading up to all this time, but it comes off as a late attempt to kick the movie into gear.  Nick Nolte argues with his son, bites into an electrical cable, becomes a Big Weird Thing, then flies off, somehow, with The Hulk, to Some Place Far Away where the two of them fight as Nick turns into rocks and water and lightning and ice.  Then a jet comes by and drops some kind of Large Bomb on them and somehow that takes care of Nick but also leaves Hulk alive.  If anyone has any idea what any of that is supposed to mean, please let me know.

Then there are the special effects, which never quite take off.  There are moments of great visual flair and compelling action, although the titular Hulk never really seems to be part of the scene he’s in.  That’s okay, I don’t quite buy the special effects in the Spider-Man movies either.  The difference, I think, is that the Spider-Man movies are pulp, understand they are pulp and function well as pulp, carrying their cliched truths lightly and with grace, while this movie slows down so often to think about “serious ideas” that it gives you too much time to realize how silly all of it is.