DO NOT SEE THE HULK!!!
by David Miller

My god, what a terrible film. I'm actually kind of depressed. This was supposed to be an anti-summer movie, maybe terrible, but at least humanistic, and hopefully, so bad it was good. It was simply bad. I have lost my innocence. Do not see this movie. Do. Not. At one point, a guy near us sighed, "this movie sucks," and slumped back in his chair.

The first hour is really dull. The second hour is so bad it is great. We're talking watch-a-fake-looking-green-monster-beat-an-evil-poodle-through-a-windshield kind of great. Normally, when I see a movie and dogs are harmed in any way, I turn against it, but I was enjoying it here. Maybe because it signaled the beginning of the film's utterly preposterous second hour. But the good times of utter over-the-top stupidity come to an end when Nick Nolte performs a literally scene-chewing performance. You know how people like to misuse the word, "literally." As in, "David was literally being a bear this morning," when in fact David is figuratively a bear, bein grumpy. Nick Nolte LITERALLY chews the scenery. And then the last ten minutes are like some dumb, dreamy, floating, elegant action, which encompassed the climax (ripped off from many, many comic books, Avengers #250 springing to mind) as well as the denoument. So it left a bad taste in my mouth. Actually, the bad part lasted about twenty minutes, after you thought there was nowhere left to go in the movie, except a major dangling subplot that you don't care to see resolved anyway. The bad part was interrupted by the crazy Nick Nolte scene, then bad again. A couple times the movie is beautiful, emotional, elegant, etc, but these are single shots which literally add up to maybe two minutes, if I'm feeling generous; maybe someone can go in with a stopwatch and actually quantify it. Jennifer Connelly had an expression that nearly moved me to tears. A couple times while the Hulk is fighting the military, the framing and context are beautiful and surreal. It was weird to be so affected in such an awful context.

I'll mention one of Lee's innovations: use of split-screen, and multiple split-screens, to simulate comic book panels. Didn't bother em at all, didn't affect the movie one way or the other. I probably wasn't getting the full effect, since the picture was framed so the bottom of many of the "panels" was cut off by the lower edge of the screen, so maybe the effect will impress me more on video, if I see it again, which I won't.

Ironically, one of the movie's weakest point's didn;t bother me at all: the fake-looking, Gumby-animated Hulk. I can't see, in the context of a movie so bad, how people can find themselves distracted by one bad special effect. It might have been the worst thing in a not-so-bad movie, like X-Men, but in context, it works fine.

If the film itself wasn't enough of a bummer, the theatre served me regular coke instead of diet, and I didn't want to miss anything, peversely enough, so I went and got my money refunded after the movie. The guy acted like I was crazy. But I got my $3.25 back. Something for seeing this film.

That evening, Friday, I received two different invitations from friends to go out. I declined both, electing to lie down for bed by 10 pm. I was awake for two hours, thinking about how terrible the last year of my life has been. Thank you, Ang Lee and Marvel Productions. Thank you.