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Hulk (Widescreen Special Edition)

Hulk (Widescreen Special Edition)

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $15.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good story, flawed execution
Review: I really wanted to really like this film. While some complain about the introduction, it was OK with me. What got to me the most was all the "comic book layout" scenes that kept popping up over and over and over and over. After a while, I just wanted to scream at the director. If there could be a version without those scenes, I'd definitely be interested in picking it up. Until then, it stays on the shelf.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Flawed, but not nearly as bad as you may have heard.
Review: I watched this movie solely out of loyalty--to the comic books I read in my youth, to fond memories of the old Hulk TV show starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno (who appears in a brief cameo early in the film, and looks stiff even without a line to speak). The reason for my reluctance, of course, was the parade of negative reviews, along with uniformly bad word-of-mouth. The movie was supposed to be slow, with corny-looking CG effects and too much comic-book hokum to try to make sense of.

Well, it's all true. By modern action-movie standards, this one is pretty slow to develop. His enormous green badness doesn't make his first appearance until more than 40 minutes into the film. The CG-animated Hulk occasionally looks exactly like a CG-animated Hulk, and after Spielberg's dinosaurs this might be a disappointment. And while most of the comic book silliness does manage to hold together, the final conflict is a step too far, and difficult to follow besides. On top of this, Eric Bana is not the most convincing actor you'll see, and Nick Nolte's performance as Bruce Banner's criminally psychotic, mad genius father is entirely a matter of personal taste. At one point in the movie, the Hulk picks up a tank by its gun and swings it around like he's performing the hammer throw at the Olympics; only a few seconds later, as if to underscore what exactly is physically impossible about this (even after you've accepted the notion of a big green man who can throw a tank thousands of feet), he bends the gun of another tank, and the tank fails to move. Finally, we are forced to swallow the now completely discredited fad notion of repressed memories as a psychological motivation for our man Bruce Banner.

Ugh.

To balance this, however, we do have Ang Lee's completely arresting visual style, augmented here by the use of split screens in what must be meant as an homage to the comic book medium from which the Hulk originates. What others seem to perceive as "slow" I perceive as "well-paced." Lee is a good filmmaker, not a maker of music videos, and his care does show.

So does his seriousness, and this really seems to set a lot of people off. Do these critics really believe the movie would or could have been better if Lee had brought more campiness to it? Or is there some deeper need to relegate a character from a comic book to a style they can view with ironic detachment? For in the end, the Hulk is little more than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with more fireworks, and I seem to remember that Stevenson's tale had more going for it than campy shenanigans. The word "archetype" comes to mind...

There's a lot to quibble about in this film, even if you take it for entertainment value alone. But there's a lot here that other action-film makers could learn from. A lot of viewers, too.

Postscript: the extras in the two-disc version are no more or less than you might expect. I don't really have the time to watch these sorts of things anymore--working for living and all--but in general I've found that too much of these "making of" documentaries can interfere with enjoying the film as a _film_, with forgetting the artifice of it all and losing myself in the movie. Deleted scenes are particularly deadly in this respect. Only the "true" fan will want to watch them all. The rest of us should settle for the single-disc version if we settle for any version at all.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Sulk
Review: Hey, what's with the music hating? The Arabian music wasn't bad. Granted, I don't particulary LIKE that type of music, but for some reason, it gave the scenes in this film an elegant and poetic beauty. I liked it. It was different. You people are so close-minded, you'll dismiss anything if it's not the "norm". Anything diverse or different, and you'll cast it aside. That's pretty much most of you people's feelings about "Hulk" itself. The film wasn't your typical "big budget comic book summer blockbuster", so you all hated it. Uh oh, it's not lame and predictable like Spider-Man! HORRORS! Cry babies. This movie was not boring. The actors were NOT wooden. Ang Lee's direction was wonderful. I hate you all.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Shame on you Universal
Review: Universal deserves to be punished for this. This DVD forces you watch about 5 minutes of previews, WITHOUT the ability to skip past them. Patently dishonest on the part of the studio, especially since the previews were for some sexy movies, that I wouldn't normally want my son to see. AND THEN I see that there are no English subtitles in the disc, so that my wife, who is Japanese, had to go without understanding the movie. FINALLY, there was something wrong with the audio. I had to turn the volume up to the highest level on the TV to hear most of the dialogue. I will punish Universal by avoiding their next few titles.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Hulk Smash Boundaries of Comic Book Movies!!!!
Review: People fear change. it's nothing new, just look at the resistance put up when women wanted equal rights, or the race riots of years gone past. so, when a comic book movie comes along that tries to deal with things that can't be solved by blowing things up (well, not ALL the time, anyway) people reject it.

This is the case with HULK, possibly the most ambitious comic book movie in cinema history.

Firstly, this comic book movie looks like a comic book. There are no pretentions that The Hulk is a real thing. it is a huge, pastel coloured blur of action and anger that is a joy to watch when he is smashing something, and is actually quite scary when he and his alter ego Bruce Banner meet for the first time. Ang Lee makes the movie run like a comic book narrative, with cool shifts in view and frame movement, a type of structure that serves to keep the movie going when the Hulk is not on screen.

Secondly, there is a genuine issue at the bottom of this movie. HULK deals with psychological issues like childhood trauma, with the Hulk being Bruce Banner's outward expression of the traumas within him, the way teenagers often have an outward persona when their lives have been troubled. The issues are dealt with before the action, and the reason people did not like this aspect is because they were afraid to THINK before things start to explode.

And they do explode. there is plenty of smashing and bashing in the final parts of the film for any popcorn fan, so much so it even gets a bit confusing towards the end. but tell me that the site of the Hulk catching a missile and throwing it back at the gunship that fired it is not cool and i will turn green and pulp your head, puny human.

it is let down by a pretty boring performance from Eric Bana that had me wishing they had gotten Steve Buscemi for the role of Bruce, but other than that, irradiate your screen with this and Marvel at how good it is.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I just can't honestly give a 4 or 5 but this was fairly good
Review: I REALLY wanted this to be a good movie. After watching this DVD and listening to the Directory's commentary, I think it was actually Ang Lee who was responsible for messing this all up. Everything he thought was really good was exactly why you and I didn't like it (the Arabian background music at times, the long drawn-out broody thought scenes of Banner, etc.) The action is superb and although the CGI doesn't make you think Hulk is real, they are fun and just real enough to be very good effects. They are enjoyable effects. The final third of this movie makes up for MANY ills of the first 2/3rds.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: "Hulk"
Review: Talk about your hidden dragons. Director Ang Lee seems quite determined to make, if not an art film, then at least an artistic one. He directs his movie with an eye for green-tinged beauty; the photography is lavish and layered, the color darkened until you can barely tell what's going on. It's almost enough to distract you from the fact that the film isn't going anywhere. When the Hulk isn't smashing, the movie's catatonic (albiet a well-filmed bout with catatonia), and Lee's repeated hammering at the film's theme is a poor substitute for human dimension. Lee is sailing a barge through a creek. Still, there's much to be liked in the ambitious (if not quite perfected) special effects, and the cast is a strong one. It's a long and humorless film, but seeing it is better than missing it. Features Jennifer Connelly, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte, and Eric Bana as the Hulk's gentler half.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: see it
Review: the hulk is great it has great acting spectacular acting but it may be a little to smart for it own good. theres scenes in the movie were it seems as the characters are qoteing shakspere ( dont kno if i spelled that right) and eric bannas performance seems to be every were but besides that the hulk is great and is good enough for a low 4

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Should have been called "DUD"
Review: Ang Lee viewed the story as a Greek Tragedy. The only tragedy here was letting him direct this ponderous, dull, flat meandering film. The multi-frame scenes that are supposed to mimic a comic page only distract. I mean how many frames of helicopters flying endlessly over featureless desert are needed?
The story starts out with a confusing obtuse story about the hero's father doing some sort of proscribed experiment. Unfortunately the rest of the film adds nothing to the plot. The characters are all either flat and stereotypic, or silly caricatures. You never get a chance to develop any sympathy for anyone in the film.
And just so it does not go unmentioned: four star generals DO NOT
command bases; secret or otherwise.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Glorious; Pure Cinema
Review: Bruce Banner's dad is a mad scientist who worked for the Government on some fanciful technology for regenerating damaged tissue. Being a mad scientist of course he experiments on himself and passes on something decidedly strange to his son. Grown up, his son is at work on similar lines when a nasty accident with gamma rays triggers whatever latent weirdness Daddy had left him with. Now when he gets angry he turns into the Hulk, a huge green monster of astronomical strength who flings tanks into mountains, rugby tackles assault helicopters in mid-air and runs across continents in minutes. What follows is a tug of war between his love interest Betty (Jennifer Connelly) who wants to cure him, the military, led by Betty's dad General Ross (Sam Elliott) who want to develop him as a weapon or, failing that, destroy him and his own now completely demented dad (Nick Nolte) who wants him to realize his destiny as a new and better kind of being or some such mad nonsense.

Richard Donner's 1978 'Superman' breathed new life into comic book adaptations and there has been a steady stream ever since with four Superman films, four Batmen, two X-Men, two Blades, the 1995 'Judge Dred', the 1996 'The Phantom' and the recent lacklustre and tedious 'Spiderman' among a good few others. Most of them are nothing special, a few of them are fun, Tim Burton's first two Batmen stood out as particularly interesting in their visual flair and imagination. Then the word got out that there was a 'Hulk' on the way, to be directed by one of the most consistently interesting of contemporary directors, Ang Lee. Intriguing to say the least as Lee is best known for beautifully observed and witty social dramas and the Hulk is a long way from 'Sense and Sensibility' or 'The Ice Storm'. But then so was 'Crouching Tiger' and that had certainly been an eye opener. So this film was awaited with some anticipation.

I'd seen a lot of decidedly lukewarm reviews and they'd led me to expect the result might be disappointing. But then I saw the movie and it is not. It is, for my money, by far the most brilliant of all recent comic book movies. It goes to huge lengths to look and feel like a comic book with a remarkable intensity of visual imagery, heavy use of strong and unreal primary colours, fast editing, rapid camera movements, exaggerated emotions, a minimal use of dialogue and maximal use of pictures to carry the story and a seriously revisionist take on the popular image of the French poodle. The result is pure glorious cinema, a really remarkable movie that looks like no other, is breathlessly exciting and terrific fun. The design and direction is extraordinary, the acting excellent with Bana and Connelly highly effective as the young leads; but with Nolte and above all the brilliant Elliott rather stealing the show as their impossible fathers. Don't let the nay-sayers put you off: this is fabulous.


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