The Hulk phenomenon has been around for half a century, having been invented by Stan Lee for Marvel Publishing under the title Incredible Hulk and immediately following in the famous footsteps of Superman, Daredevil. Well, just a comic book. And quite successful. Over the decades, people and filmmakers have been trying to get the Hulk on the screen, and so in the 1980s a series of films were released with the popular Bill Bixby as Banner and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno (a rival of Arnie) as the Hulk.
But as we know, there weren't enough good computers at the end of the last century, and until Terminator II, the creators never dreamed of having anyone but an actor play the Hulk. It's only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that computers have become so advanced that a computer character can comparatively play the role of an actor. And now that we know that it can be done, now that both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have their CGI characters, a computer-generated character is pretty important in Hulk. But he really can't compare to Gollum, because he's pretty green and there's no real acting to speak of, because he just punches soldiers and buildings and other things that can be destroyed.
Now we're in 2003 and a famous Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, has been brought in to continue directing the currently successful films based on comic books. He continued the line based on Brian Singer's X-Men, which is not just about action, but also about the psychology of the characters with all their moods and crises. So neither Hulk nor X-Men are just action movies, they're mainly about the internal conflict of characters pitted against their innate qualities, against all the things that make them outcasts among other people.
Ang Lee has thrown himself into the film with his Taiwanese diligence, and what has emerged is a good comic book movie that tries to be its own stylization, an outline of history, for people who don't know comics properly and want to know why that is, why it happened , what happened, and why the main character is the way he is.
For the roles, he chose experienced actors who are not associated with any well-known roles. He gave the lead role to Eric Bunn, who is from Australia, was born in the late 1960s and not much is known about him except that he starred in the movie Black Hawk Down. As the good Hulk (Bruce Banner), he's totally fitting and pleasing to the eye, and he doesn't play the angry Hulk anymore. The creation is handled by ILM computers.
His love interest is played by Jennifer Connelly,who can be seen on cinema screens since the mid-1980s, not only in the puppet Labyrinth but also in the Oscar-winning film Pure Soul.
Bruce Banner's father is played by Nick Nolte, who is a pretty big star, and you can really see that he's a skilled actor, he handles the „craziness“ of his character perfectly and is one of the more memorable characters. We know him from 48 Hours, Jefferson in Paris and others...
Ang Lee is really quite a good director for a film based on a comic book, because he's one of the few to attempt comic book stylization. Splitting the picture into several parts, edited from different camera angles, at some points even cutting out
the“ character from the picture, and some of his colorful compositions are memorable. It's a shame that we don't get to the proper action until halfway through the film, but it's not a bad thing, because in the first half of the film we learn some pretty important stuff that makes Bruce Banner, when he gets angry, the Hulk.
Not forgetting the computer Hulk, who is entirely created within the bowels of computers and continues the lineage created by Gollum. Being a comparable teammate and adversary to normal actors.
And what kind of movie is it? Well just a good one, one of the good movies, based on a comic book and acting like it. Even if it doesn't have what it takes to be the first successful movie based on comics. It doesn't have what it takes to be Batman...
Original article January 15, 2019 – Kritiky.cz
