hulk

i guess i can see it now. when i first saw hulk on the big screen i really loved it, even though it seemed that everyone else hated it. i didn't understand the strong negative reaction it got, i thought it was a pretty good film. it starts off with bruce banner as a young boy, his parents fighting, then we jump ahead to today where he is working in a lab. there is, of course, a mishap, and bruce is turned into the hulk. his father shows up and tries to get bruce to understand what is happening to him. for some reason his father sends some mutant dogs to attack betty (the love interest), so he hulks out and saves her. she is quite frightened by bruce's transformations so she turns him in to the government. they take him to a base out in the desert. after much destruction, he escapes and goes back to find betty. he changes back to bruce and all is thought to be well, until he meets his father again, who now has some powers as well after testing on himself. there is a giant fight and showdown between the two of them and somehow his dad turns into a huge bubble and is destroyed by the military. the things i liked about it so much was the style that the director ang lee used. he would often show the action happening in different boxes, mimicking the panel layout of a comic book. i thought that was really cool! the cast was really good (eric bana was a fresh import from australia, never having appeared in an american film before) and the effects were great.
now though, having rewatched it, i still love the panel layout lee used, but much of the rest of it does not hold up to repeat viewing. the storyline is pretty strange, heavy on the father/son drama that is not at all based on the original hulk mythology. for some reason ang lee often has shots of reptiles and moss covered logs all by themselves interspersed through out the film. huh? that doesnt make much sense... its probably some artsy thing, but it doesnt fit at all with the hulk story. also, the ending is just plain dumb. the showdown with his father was unnecessary and really confusing, ang doesn't really do a very good job of showing us what is happening or what is going on, we instead get some poorly cut scenes that obscure most of the action taking place. dad turns into a bubble? really?!? now with six years gone by, the effects, which looked so impressive then, dont really hold up. hulk looks silly in much of the action, especially all the stuff in the desert. maybe its the movie itself, or maybe its the comparison we can now make between this drama and the action-packed 'incredible hulk' that recently came out, but i'm pretty sure the new one is head and shoulders above this first attempt.