Hulk

Release Date: June 20, 2003

Watch Date: September 24, 2023

“Scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) transforms into a powerful brute after his experiment goes awry.”

---

    This is a movie.

    I, honestly, don’t have a lot more to say about it than that, though I’ll try for the sake of the blog. Having a one sentence entry isn’t going to be a lot of fun.

    I don’t know a lot about the Hulk as a super hero. I’m not sure if he normally has such an extremely tragic backstory. I always thought he experimented on himself and became the Hulk, but in this version he’s got a father who messed with his own DNA causing Bruce to be genetically different, and turn green, from the beginning. Something he did as a child but then never experienced at any other point in his life. He also somehow managed to get into the exact same field as his father? Which even the army – I want to say general – points out is a pretty crazy coincidence. It also feels unnecessary to have added. The Hulk has a extremely well established origin story:

    “Dr. David Banner, Physician/Scientist, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have. Then an accidental overdose of gamma radiation interacts with his unique body chemistry.”

    Okay, actually that does mention unique body chemistry. But was that because of the genetics he was born with, or self testing? I don’t really want to do a deeper dive into this, so if you know, please tell me?

    This movie really, really suffers from two major points. It’s not the Hulk dogs, or the inclusion of the tragic backstory. It’s terrible, terrible, editing decisions, and a character made entirely out of CGI when that technology just wasn’t there, not to the degree that it needed to be to portray the Hulk anyways.

    From what I can tell, they tried to make this movie feel like a comic book. I don’t know why they made that decision. Everything else is super dramatic, and there’s not a lot of humor in it, so adding these constant, nauseating and distracting, wipes, these quick cuts, none of it makes sense. It’s consistent throughout the quiet dramatic moments, but the moment the action sequences happen it stops, making the film much more like a typical super hero movie, and in those moments you can almost find yourself enjoying it, until we get back to the star wipes and the fades to black and the five different panels of action on the scene. Comic books use this because the pictures don’t actually move, and it brings more life and excitement to the page. Movies, and I’m unsure if anyone informed anyone who was in charge of approving this editing decision of this, move already. It’s sort of their defining feature. We don’t need comic book panels. Because what it ends up looking like is someone who just discovered how to make movies on their computer’s high school film project. It looks like the home movies my dad produced when he first discovered editing software. This was meant to be a blockbuster film, and on top of that, it’s not even the first super hero movie to come out, several others had, X-Men and Spider-Man to extreme success, so it’s not like they didn’t know what worked.

    I won’t linger too long on the CGI, because it’s enough to say that the Hulk looks like children’s playdough, and I know because our children have playdough that is the exact same shade. He has no impact on the world, and this is most obvious when he’s literally globe hopping, jumping around America, and all that happens when this giant behemoth lands is little puffs of dust, there’s no sense of impact, no ground shaking, no rocks breaking. Just…poof and off he flies again.

    It’s boring, and it’s painful to watch. They try to put some romance in there, but it’s so bad, and doesn’t feel like much of anything. The only relationship that holds any weight is Bruce and his fathers, and that’s only just barely.

    Neither Bob nor myself ever thought anything would rank lower than ‘Howard the Duck’ yet here we are, because this barely feels like a movie that was finished. It feels like a first draft, and a poor one that needs a lot of editing. The only consolation is that the Hulk will go on to have better characterization and appear in better films, because if this was the end for him…well what a terrible way to go.