There's a reason practically nothing original ever comes out of
Hollywood. The business suits holding the purse-strings at big studios
don't want to take risks. They want the tried-and-true, over and over
again. A successful formula is regarded as a priceless commodity, a
thing to be milked until every dime has been squeezed from it then
shelved so it can be pulled out in 10 or 15 years, dusted off and put
through another good milking.
Upbudget "blockbuster"
movies in particular aim for the lowest common denominator. The old
dictum "nothing succeeds like success" is taken to its most
ridiculous extreme in these films. They're almost invariably heavily
derivative of some past success. Anything that may, at any stage, creep
into them that may be unfamiliar to viewers is regarded as a risk rarely
ever judged worthy of taking. Dialogue is kept to the absolute minimum
and what little is allowed is kept to the absolute simplest--usually
just a string of time-tested clichés used to glue together the
explosions and CGI effects. These are films that don't want you to have
to think, on the grounds that asking this of the viewer would alienate
non-thinkers. Those clichés are both easier and safer. They, after all,
became clichés because people have heard them before. And heard them.
And heard them. Reaction is predictable, at least until the cliché has,
by repetition, been ground to dust. The movies are even designed to tell
you exactly what emotional reaction you should be having to what you're
seeing. It isn't enough for Spielberg to show you the horrors of
the Omaha beach landing in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN--he then has to show you
the tearful soldier and give you the long, slow pan over all the
scattered corpses to somber John Williams music. In case anyone got the
idea it was a pleasant experience.
Even idiots, I
suppose, need entertainment. The problem with most Hollywood
fare--particularly the "blockbuster" breed--is that almost all of it is
aimed at idiots and actively alienates anyone else. Movies like the
TRANSFORMERS atrocities, the last three abominations traveling under
(and travestying) the name of STAR WARS or anything ever touched by the
hand of Roland Emmerich may be great for selling tickets to cretins and
peddling plenty of tie-in merchandise but they're dreadfully stupid,
unengaging and actively insulting to anyone who isn't a complete moron.
They make lots of money, of course. There are lots of morons out there.
This
doesn't mean there are no good, big pictures. It can be taken as a
truism that personal art films don't get hundred-million-dollar budgets
but Hollywood's "nothing succeeds like success" ethos do create a
hierarchy of certain filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of
generating box-office gold and while many of those who rise to the top
of the heap are pop hacks, studio stooges and shit merchants like
Emmerich, Michael Bay, and Brett Ratner, some of them are
genuinely talented and, as proven successes, are sometimes allowed to
take a crack at the big pictures and are often given a much freer hand
than would normally be allowed on a show on which the budget had taken
serious wing.
Ang Lee is one of the latter. A few years
ago, he helmed HULK, Universal's uber-budget screen adaptation of
Marvel Comics' mighty, gamma-irradiated Jekyll-and-Hyde. In real time,
critical response to it was mostly quite positive. The popular response
was very different. HULK suffered massive box-office drop-off after its
first weekend, was written off as a flop (though its eventual gross
doubled its budget), spawned a sequel constructed around the idea of
making a movie as different from the original as possible and today,
nearly 7 years later, is routinely reviled by those who haunt the
movie-related corners of the internet, placed in the company of ELEKTRA
and CATWOMAN whenever the worst comic-to-film adaptations are discussed.
In
general, I consider the state of contemporary film criticism to be
rather poor. HULK, however, was a case where the pros mostly had it
right. It is a big-budget "blockbuster" flick, with all the
baggage that implies. No film of that origin is ever going to be
RASHOMON. It is, however, also an excellent film, one of the best
comic-to-screen adaptations we've ever had. It isn't perfect. There are a
few scenes that don't work, some corners that are cut, a clunky line or
two in the script and an epilogue that should have been handled better
but with all its flaws, it's still a mini-masterpiece and when measured
against nearly everything else that's produced on a budget with a
comparable number of zeroes, that "mini" seems more like an extraneous
qualifier.
HULK tells the story of Bruce Banner, a
brilliant but emotionally stunted scientist whose calm exterior conceals
repressed childhood trauma. When a lab accident reacts with his unique
physiology (a product of medical experiments by his batshit crazy
father), the cork pops from the bottle and all that concentrated bad
mojo is unleashed in the form of a full-body transformation into a huge
green monster that grows in strength as it grows in rage. Jennifer
Connelly plays Bruce's scientist colleague and estranged love, who is
drawn to Bruce because his emotional distance plays into her daddy
issues. And the daddy she's trying to find in another and fix by proxy
is none other than the man who put away Bruce's own crazy father decades
earlier.
It's a long story.
And
that's one of HULK's strengths. The story is complex and involving, the
polar opposite of the typically brainless excretions of the blockbuster
factories.
That's also the beginning of HULK's problem
with the audience it initially drew. Far too many of those who, in 2003,
trekked to their local movie-houses to take in the opening-night show
assumed they'd be getting a typical big Hollywood summer picture. With
their heads filled with anticipation of two-plus plotless hours of a
brainless monster brainlessly breaking things, they were utterly
bewildered by having, instead, stumbled upon an actual film; well
plotted, well paced, well played by a first-rate cast. Dashing
expectations can be a risky proposition when it comes to movies.
Usually, though, a film that exceeds our expectations is taken as a
pleasant surprise. Not so with HULK. In a chillingly perverse twist, the
movie, instead, has stood repeatedly condemned for, in effect, being better than was assumed it would be. Worse, it routinely took (and still takes) lumps for even trying
to be more than just another disposable popcorn flick. It's both a
"summer blockbuster" and a movie based on a comic book and there's an
unfortunately common notion afoot that projects in those categories are supposed
to be merely mindless rubbish for dazzling bumpkins. "Fun," defined in
the most reductionist manner, and nothing more. Any pretense of being
something more is just that. An affectation of unwarranted importance. A
preposterous attempt to blow up the material into something more than
it is. HULK, it seems, just doesn't know its place; it commits the sin
of aiming for something more than mediocrity. In a sense, this is a
testament to the film's quality. It clearly doesn't cater to such low
expectations.
But that's a big part of why it took a
beating from a loud segment of the public. Even allegedly professional
film critics like Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum complained
about the lack of "big dumb fun." Ang Lee, as she sees it,
"anesthetizes his Marvel Comics mutant with a mopey psychological back
story that leaves little unanalyzed space for fun." Charles Taylor, the
gibbering git who used to grind out what passed for movie reviews over
at Salon, dismissed HULK
as a "leaden, pretentious flick" that is "just schlock art for the NPR
set." It takes itself too "seriously." Lee "has no taste for the low."
Lee "seems to be under the impression that he's working from myth
instead of a good pulpy premise." And so on.
This is
Beavis-and-Butthead level "criticism," albeit dressed up, Madison Avenue
style, by a few words of more than two syllables. It's also,
substantively, fairly typical of (if slightly more literate than) the
standard grief the film gets from its detractors on the internet in the
years since its release. In general, those who fulminate against it fail
to make any real case for it being a deficient production. Honestly, on
what planet is a movie rightfully considered problematic if it isn't
dumb enough?
And that's only the beginning. Feeding off
one another, advocates of HULK's irredeemable suction roll out a small,
standard litany of related complaints with a regularity that numbs the
mind. That's also the effect generated by the complaints themselves,
which--hewing, always, to that same Beavis-and-Butthead level--amount to
anything-and-the-kitchen-sink efforts to rationalize a dislike of a
movie that, in truth, does little to earn it. The movie is said to be
poorly paced. It isn't. Viewers who lack an attention span be advised up
front that you may find HULK challenging but your own shortcomings in
this area hardly amount to a problem with the film itself. The CGI Hulk
character is bashed and it became fashionable to demeaningly compare it
to Shrek. Other than both being some shade of green, the two characters
have no similarities and the larger complaint, even if taken in any way
seriously, falls into the category of whining about superficialities.
Special effects aren't a story; they're just a means of telling one. I'm
not a fan of CGI but the CGI Hulk was competent, and, for its time,
state-of-the-art. If the criticism isn't aimed at the technology itself
(and it isn't), it is without substance. You find few HULK detractors
who don't knock the movie by making a grand show of noting that, when
the mutant dogs appear, one of them is a poodle. And so on.
That's
not to say the film isn't subject to any number of legitimate
criticisms. It's just that most of what it gets doesn't fall into that
category. And anyone who would throw out HULK in a discussion of
all-time-worst comic adaptations, or, worse, mention it in that context
in the same breath as something like ELEKTRA or BATMAN AND ROBIN is, to
put it bluntly, a clown whose words aren't worth the breath wasted to
give voice to them. Further, pawning off as a serious criticism that a
movie isn't sufficiently dumb actively discourages even attempting to
rise above the level of those genuinely bottom-of-the-barrel projects
and I find this to be reprehensible. Ang Lee was aiming for something
more with HULK and he succeeded admirably.
That is, of
course, my own conclusion and no one is bound to agree with it. I
certainly don't insist that a fan of typical Hollywood summer fare who
disdains HULK actually offer some rational critique of the picture--I'm
not a cruel man. I do, however, insist that, for anyone who expects to
be taken seriously, HULK must be accepted or rejected for what it really
is, not for having fallen short of some inane standard invented solely
for the purpose of making HULK fall short of it. For my part, I think
it's a misunderstood, if relatively minor, masterpiece, a film in the
same vein as (if not necessarily on par with) BLADE RUNNER, EXCALIBUR
and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST--all generally snubbed in their day,
all eventually rediscovered, all now just as generally hailed as
classics. I'd like to think this is the fate that one day awaits HULK.
It certainly deserves it.
--j.
[Cross-posted to my movie blog]
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