(incidentally, I'm turning a lot of this into the review, so if you read my review, it might be redundant)
Ok, I saw it yesterday. And it was pretty darn good.
Though I agree. The directing is phenomenal. Ang Lee uses shots to communicate so much more than is being shown, and using multiple shots or multiple angles really help. Plus, he used trasitions in very unusual ways, often ways that communicate as much as the content of the shots do.
One of the shots that stands out best to me is when Bruce and Betty are in Bruce's childhood home, and he looks at the door where "it happened." The shot disolves to the door in a way that suggests a flashback. But instead of the flashback, he just shows the door as Bruce is seeing it right there. Which did two things at least for me. One, it forces you to remember that there is a violent flashback to recall so you anticipate the revelation. Two, it shows that there ISN'T anything being recalled (or is there?) as Bruce claims not to remember the details of his mother's death at that time (though you may suspect he's lying about it). If I remember right, we don't find out that her murder was accidental until a few scenes later, but we certainly know that David killed her, and we know that the Hulk form, at least, remembers this.
The acting I felt was only fairly interesting, with Eric Bana beign the only one that really stood out. Everyone else was just passable: good enough not to hate, but nto good enough to remark on. I do wish that I'd gotten to hear "HULK SMASH!" a couple times, or "Puny Human" more than once.
However, as impressed as I was with the directing, I felt that the story was week. Ang Lee sets up three or four conflicts, resolves them sequentially, and then tacks on one more so we can have the Hulk "disappear" at the end. I didn't really think about how linear and predictable it was (after all, I pretty much knew the elements of what would happen for everything except Bruce's mother's death -- being a reader of Marvel comics-- so I didn't worry about predictability.) until the end, where we get a final Supervillain, it seems mostly thrown in for good measure. It was far from developed enough,and didn't even make a lot of sense to people who are into comics.
But once I saw the end, I started thinking about everything else. And yeah, it seems to me that you'd be able to predict everything even if you didn't know much about the Hulk. And yeah, the rival scientist is pretty much one-dimensional. And ALL the characters besides Bruce and Betty seem like such morons. "He can take continuous high-caliber machine gun fire from multiple sources, so... let's keep doing that. That's a good idea." Ironically, the evil scientist's approach to non-lethal containment would have been best if he hadn't tried to shove a drill into Hulk's eye.
However, yeah, I really enjoyed it. I think the best reasons to watch it are because you're a) a fan of Ang Lee, or b) a fan of the Hulk character. Because despite predictability and occassional flatness, the film does an amazing job of capturing the Hulk's character and the themes. In fact, I was impressed by the themes -- the freedom and power that anger brings us, how we ENJOY that destructive and uncontrollable power -- in a way that I never did with the comic book, and especially not with the Lou Feregno series. Â Those themes are brought in powerfully. And that alone balances out poor plotting. The excellent directing and cinematography only enhances the film. So yeah, I liked this movie a lot, much more than I can complain about it.
I just have one question. WTF was with that frog on Bruce's hat at the end?