Fan Rant: In Defense of Ang Lee's 'Hulk'

I loved what Lee did the the Hulk. I'm not expecting the new one to hold a candle to it.

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Not to split hairs, Scott, but how can Ang Lee buck a trend of safe, obvious superhero movies if those movies came after Hulk? I don't think trends had anything to do with it. Lee's Hulk would have played the same way whether it was made in 1999 or 2009. If anything, the failure of Hulk was the cause of the safe trend.

Thankfully Nolan pushed the reset button on all of that, resulting in the current tap of superhero adaptations that take comic book content as seriously as the stereotypical comic book geek does, yet removing the stigma and selling it gangbusters to all walks.

Hulk was an anomaly, which is the only non-indifferent memory I have of it.

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I would have to agree with Scott. I'm not a fan, per se, of Ang Lee's film, but I definitely didn't dislike it. I'd say the ingenuity of it far outweighs it's downfalls. I'd say the film's biggest flaw is that Lee tried to make it a comic book film rather than a film based on a comic book, and I don't think that sat right with people. Being a fan of comic books, in general, I found a lot of that film entertaining and ingenious, more so than many of the films that surfaced at the time (exceptions being X-Men and Spiderman). However, Peter is right that Nolan's Batman effectively killed the comic book film. Now, we get real films based on comic books, and that makes me excited for this Hulk.

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I loved the emphasis on character and motivation in Lee's Hulk. It was a different spin on the normal shallow comic book interpretation- I have zero interest in the remake, it will be flawed and derivative like Ironman and Transformers but wont take half as much cash!!!

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Interesting that the other day Erik Davis does a fan rant about the worst review of a movie in history because the critic didn't justify anything he said about the movie and now we get this rant from christopher campbell that doesn't say anything about Hulk besides the fact that he thought it was good. No offense, because I generally really like your stuff chris, but when I saw the topic of this I was hoping you would go into details about what you thought worked about the original Hulk movie.

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I'm right there with you. I see it's flaws but it really it is a beautiful film. And we're not alone, it was included in this years' Overlooked Film Fest in Champaig, IL, a fest founded by some guy with the last name of Ebert. There are handfuls of other comic films that people (and fanboys) should gripe over.

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Ang Lee makes boring, boring, plodding movies that snobs obsess over. Its ok when that plodding is applied to something like Brokeback Mountain that is trying to appeal to that snob crowd that includes most critics, but in a superhero movie its just plain tedious.

The Hulk was awful through and through. It was similar to Superman Returns in that it was obviously done by someone who hadn't lived with the character and didn't have the wherewithal to understand how that character could play in a modern construction that kept true to the source material.

You listed bad superhero movies about B-list or worse Superheroes. Elektra never had a hope. Ghost Rider and Punisher were likely to suck on paper long before the movies were made. Daredevil was truly a bomb, but Hulk reminded me more of X-Men 3 and Superman Returns. They were made by people who chose not to respect the comics. You don't have to adhere to the comic books, but I think a healthy respect for them or a childhood love of them results in a solid film.

In the case of the awful Superman Returns, Singer abandoned the method that worked well with X-Men 2 (Namely, basing the movie off of an awesome graphic novel and then deviating in subtle ways) and chose to base his movie off of the previous Superman movies (which hadn't stood the test of time at all) and ignored decades of great stories from the comics with which to base a film. His Lex Luthor was preposterous to anyone with a cursory knowledge of today's technology and legal situations. The story was contrived and plodding.

X-Men 3 was similarly flawed. Ratner had no love for X-Men. The movie was loosely based on the "Dark Phoenix Saga", but without any love for the source material or any respect the result was a boring, pointless waste of a film.

That was the problem with Hulk. If there was no history, no established story that gave you a clue to how good a Hulk movie COULD be, then Ang Lee's Hulk might have been perceived in a better light. But unfortunately, it was a boring, poor take on a classic.

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I'm going to have to disagree. I wanted to like this. When I first heard Ang Lee and the Hulk, I was really interested. And adding real characters (instead of the standard two-dimentional comic roles) would be great, right? Except they weren't. With the exeption of Bana, they were just as two-dimensional as in the comics, except they weren't in a comic. Now they were in a ridiculous comic/soap opera/tragedy.

And the movie didn't just have 'slow spots,' it had entire sections that dragged along painfully until somebody got angry. The first and second times I watched it, Banner got angry and became the Hulk and the movie was fun for a while. The third time, I got angry and fast-forwarded to the good parts. Like I said, I wanted to like it and even gavie it a second and third chance.

Not all was bad. There were a couple dramatic scenes that were interesting, and most of the movie was filmed well and looked better than many of the hero movies I actually liked. Some of the action scenes were great (the dumb dog scene and the final 'battle' were disappointing), but but as a whole, I did not like it. I will admit it was better than Elektra and The Punisher (not hard), but I put it in the same group as Ghost Rider (and Spiderman 3, X-Men 3, both Fantastic 4s, and Superman returns). Not awful, just disappointing. And I actually liked Daredevil.

I guess everybody has their preferences.

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I absolutely love Ang Lee's Hulk film as a balls out crazy film though it is much too long and fails at capturing the Hulk mythos in a satisfactory way. What I love is the unhinged glee with which the Hulk bounds and jumps and destroys. Which is Ang Lee himself in the mocap suit. And that same energy goes into the batshit CG transitions and sci-fi close ups of mutating cells. And the there are the EYES OF NOLTE! A performance for all time. He shakes the very foundations of reality with the power of his ACTING! And the scene in which Nolte's eyes get vignetted and then loom over the frame in a crazy pre-modern fashion! BEWARE THE EYES OF NOLTE.

The movie makes little sense but if you just cut all the plot and character trash out of it, it's a surrealist masterpiece!

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Long story/short ...

Not nearly as bad as everyone made it out to be. But not nearly as good as it should have been.

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I'm with you to an extent. And I'd like to state publicly that Superman Returns is my favorite superhero film of all time. No shit. So suck it, fanboys.

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I saw HULK at Ebertfest this year, first time revisting it in five years or so, and I liked it much better on the second viewing. Lee did an excellent Q&A after where he explained a lot of the decisions he made regarding the film, and talked at length about the father-son dynamic, which he said was a way of working through his own shit around his father.

He openly admitted to the film's missteps, but he was surprised at how vehemently the fanboys hated on it. Personally, I liked the way he delved more into character development and motivation -- it's one of the few comic-book adaptations I actually found interesting. But, I'm not a fangirl, and I can also see why the HULK fanbase didn't care for it.

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How does the Hulk, which runs around smashing things get two movies and a bad television show anyway? (BTW one of the Blade movies did mutant poodles as well.)

Both Lee's version and the new Norton version suffer from the same thing, a BAD character.

How do you relate with the Hulk?? There is no crossover from comic fans to regular people.

I don't read comics, so maybe there is actually a story there, but I didn't pay for Lee, and neither will I pay for Norton's versions. I'm sorry but Hulk isn't that interesting.

(I've seen most of the comic movies, but rarely go to the movies to see them.)

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Kind of like how the Joel Schumacher Batman movies weren't that bad.

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Compared to Steel, it's a golden morsel. Serously, how DO you screw up a story about a man who makes weapons then wants to stop the weapons so he dons an armor and goes kick some bad guy ass?

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I'll admit that maybe Ang Lee's 'Hulk' isn't as bad as its rep. But still dude, MUTANT POODLES. I turned it off right there, because there is no way I can take seriously any movie that tries to make me afraid of my childhood dog.

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