Hulk
“Angry man is unsecure.”
I never did get around to giving this the second chance I really knew it needed, and I’m actually pretty glad to find my first review seems to have disappeared. What I remember of it is, I was pretty taken by the shot transitions; but I was appalled by the visual effects – but on that point, I never did find out if what I’d seen was actually a particularly bad workprint (I know, naughty).
Well, though the visuals seemed slightly cleaner than I remember, they’re still by far the movie’s biggest failing. It’s as Kermode has said even of the more recent movie, I can’t comment on that but I agreed with him when he said the same of Spider-Man 3, the CG characters just don’t have the right mass somehow (bizarrely, they got it perfect in the first two Spidies). The colours, too, don’t feel quite right here – the green and purple pops off the screen, sure, like a comic book, but it jars nastily with the textured realism of the surfaces. That said, even in the Hulk segments, I was simply so absorbed in the characters and the story this time that despite the subpar effects work, somehow the impact of what the images represented wasn’t lessened at all. The scene of the Hulk skipping over sand-dunes like a tumbleweed as the military shoot at him like a fish in a barrel, for instance – it’s just heartbreakingly beautiful.
The shot transitions are even cooler than I remember, and more than make up for the effects. The way the picture-in-picture frames kind of drift about the screen, it’s so fluid it’s almost dreamlike at times, like when Josh Lucas’ character threatens Eric Bana with hostile takeover and leaves the room, the screen splitting into 3 to show theirs and Connolly’s faces. It’s an incredible moment that kind of resembles what Bruce McDonald did to a much greater extent in last year’s Tracey Fragments. I love the moments where the camera completely crosses the axis too, I don’t think I even noticed it the first time.
In short, it’s kinda apt that they took the Incredible away from the title here. The visual effects are undeniably pretty rotten and the movie sinks just a little each time the green is on show. But other than this, I honestly haven’t seen a movie so differently a second time in my life – words really can’t do justice to quite how much I hated it 5 years ago. Jennifer Connolly is simply mesmerising, there’s probably about 30 minutes of mere glances here from her that crush me in themselves. I definitely owe Ang Lee an apology for taking so long to get around to really seeing it like this.