Hulk Smashing!

[major_clanger]

I noticed the other day from the listings in our local newspaper that our nearby multiscreen was doing preview showings of Hulk this weekend. The writeups I'd seen sounded promising, so after bugshaw and I had got back from our respective trips yesterday we headed off to see what Ang Lee had made of Big, Green and Angry.


Answer: almost certainly the best sf/action movie of the year (yes, that includes you, Matrix Reloaded), and perhaps one of the best comic adaptations I've seen.

Now and again a movie comes along with a visual style so distinctive that it sets a new template for its genre. The Matrix for instance, or Alien. Lee's take on how to convey the essence of comic-book format on the big screen is almost certainly set to follow. Split screens, multiple splits with alternate-viewpoint or time-staggered shots of the action, frames-in-frames; to anyone familiar with the conventions of the comic book, Hulk is like a graphic novel given depth and motion. At one point, the central characters are descending a steep, sloping shaft into a buried complex. Conventional cinematography might have followed them down via a tracking shot, or filmed their approach from below. Lee gives us a screen black except for a diagonal stripe of tunnel, with the action seen as if far off to one side. An impossible, nonsensical shot in normal film, where viewpoints have to be real, but a staple of comic-book cut-away illustration. And it works, beautifully.

But look alone cannot carry a film, Fortunately, Lee gives us much more than that. Above all, he takes the apparently ridiculous core of the film seriously, and gets away with it. As a review in SFX noted, this is not simply a film about a man who turns into a rampaging green monster when he gets angry. Rather, is a film about the emotional impact on a group of antagonistic characters about the fact that one of them turns into a rampaging green monster when he gets angry (and takes this as a cue for a lot of semi-pop psychology about trauma, repressed memory and anger management.

Indeed, Hulk is at times almost too self-consciously serious, as when Lee shows a confrontation between two key characters on a dark, empty, stage-like set. The whole scene is lit and shot and for that matter acted very much like a film of a stage play, and for a moment it feels as if we've nipped out to the toilets and wandered back into the wrong picture. And the film has its flaws: the ending feels like a tacked-on sub-plot rather than the culmination of the movie, whilst one scene features the most ill-advised monster animal baddie since Night of the Lepus. But overall, it succeeds wonderfully. And the Hulk himself is superb, done so well that again the fundamental silliness of the idea (yes, he still has his too-tight purple pants!) is brushed away by his sheer visual impact and screen presence.

Oh, and yes, Hulk does get to Smash. Lot and lots and lots...

Great fun, very well done, and if there's any justice, set to become a classic. Oh, and when you go and see it, look out for the brief shot of an older management-type talking to a rather, er, 'hulking' security guard. Both look oddly familiar :-)

Clanger Rating: 9/10 - see this NOW (or endure the wait until next weekend if your local cinema isn't doing previews, bwahahaha)

MC

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man transformed into a rampaging green giant is in need of a new pair of trousers...

I had seen a trailer, and I wondered.

It sounds as though Ang Lee may have made a film which only can work well in a cinema.