Hulk Me Baby One More Time

A couple nights ago, I had a dream that I was finally sitting in a theatre watching THE HULK, only to find that the movie was incomprehensible, a foreign arthouse flick with lots of talking heads and weird transitions. I woke up in a cold sweat.

Okay, well, maybe not in a cold sweat, but I was a bit disturbed. The point is, I have more than a bit of emotional investment in the Hulk, both the film and the character, and that the green guy has infiltrated my subconscious to the point when I'm dreaming about him. (I also had a different dream in which I had finally obtained a pair of Hulk Hands, and was walking around gleefully punching things, but that may have just been more an emotional release than anything else.) So my mood in walking out of the actual theatre last night, after viewing the actual film, is a bit hard to describe.

The thing is, when talking about the Hulk, the HULK filmmakers have done what most highly intelligent people do when looking to preemptively ward off accusations of "Sell-out!" while making a highly commercialized product that might be considered beneath them for lots of dough: they've taken a simple concept and made it a hell of a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Read some of the press about THE HULK, and you'll invariably find references to Jekyll and Hyde, or Freud and his almighty Id. On one hand, this is understandable, and even commendable: after all, who's going to take you seriously if you say, "I wanted to make a movie about a big green guy smashing stuff," and how could you draw out the smashing for two-plus hours without everyone getting a bit bored with the whole thing?

On the other hand, unfortunately, it sets up the loads of people who were primed by all the trailers and commercials showing the big green guy smashing stuff for a huge disappointment.

Me, I was well-informed beforehand about the character and the guys looking to immortalize him on the silver screen, so I knew what I was getting into. As such, I was well equiped to deal. I could deal with the long, LONG stretches of backstory and setup. I could deal with the exposition and the ham-fisted hints of what was to come ("You've got something wonderful inside of you, Bruce! I just know it!" Yes, yes, so do we, now can we just friggin' SEE it?) I was even able to deal with Eric Bana's banal, joyless performance, with acting so wooden it was a fire hazard. I could barely, just barely, deal with Nick Nolte. I could deal with everything, in fact, except for the one crucial bit: I couldn't deal with being bored to tears. Which I was, for much of the time.

The saving grace was, surprisingly, not the incredibly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly, who I could watch prune shrubbery for a few hours without losing interest. It was, in fact, the big green guy himself. Because the filmmakers, bless their hearts, got that one thing right: they created a main character you could feel for. And the Hulk, not Bruce Banner, is the main character. Bruce, in this incarnation, is so repressed and emotionless that he's dull as stones, and it's a shame that Bana couldn't have Bill Bixby around to advise him how to have some fun with the role. The Hulk, meanwhile, is just this poor guy, misunderstood and persecuted, who also happens to be able to throw tanks a couple miles and use redwood trees for baseball bats. He just wants to be left alone, so he can sit and smell the flowers in peace, and these damn gun nuts keep showing up and shelling him: hey, what would YOU do? Even more impressively, the completely computer-generated Hulk shows more emotion, and seems to be having more fun, than anyone else in the movie. How can you not laugh out loud at the sight of Big Green holding a Sherman tank over his head and shaking it upside down to get all the people out, or even better, of him catching a missle in one hand, biting off it's tip, and throwing it at the helicopter that fired it? Because, when you get right to the point of it, that's what we want to see when we go see a movie called THE HULK: we want to see a guy who's being bullied get the strength to take on his bullies and toss them around like sock puppets. That's the fun.

Unfortunately, these scenes are few and far between, and they're often ruined by a clumsy split-screen editing device that might have been a nice idea in theory, or if used sparingly, but which proves incredibly distracting when it shows up every thirty seconds. And then, in the last half hour, my nightmare came true, as the increasingly out-there Nick Nolte gets the opportunity to literally chew the scenery and the movie inexplicably morphs into a two-man dramatic theatre production, followed by a finale which makes no sense whatsoever.

So, I should have walked out of the theater detesting the thing. But the Hulk scenes, incredibly, redeemed everything else, and I walked home fondly replaying in my head the moment when the Hulk, having hitched a ride into the stratosphere on a military jet, loses his grip in the extreme cold and falls, spread-eagled on his back, staring up at the star-speckled sky just beyond the atmosphere. The look on his face is one of dismay, obviously, since he's in a bit of a pickle, but there's also just a bit of wonder there as well: shit, I'm falling from space, but, wow, what a pretty view! And that look is priceless.