I just saw a preview of The Hulk tonight (Tracer, where were you?), and it ROCKED! At the end of the movie, the audience applauded loudly, and no wonder. Ang Lee made an exhilaratingly wild film with a core of dark father-son conflict.
PROS:
Eric Bana gave a sterling performance as the conflicted Bruce Banner/The Hulk. He showed a man who has tightly reined in his emotions al lhis life until he literally explodes with pent-up rage. He has a brief nude scene from the back-nice!
Jennifer Connelly is as luminous as ever and also did outstanding work as a woman caught between her love for a man and her fear of what he has become.
Nick Nolte looked suitable as the villain. I doubt he needed much makeup to look as wasted and gouged by time as he did.
The CGI was excellent. The FX wizards did an amazing job of mapping Eric Bana’s features onto the Hulk, so you can see the man in the monster. The Hulk leaps about a lot more than I remembered from the comic books, and he looks like a CGI character, but c’mon, the dude is 12 feet tall and green! What do you expect him to look like, Liza Minelli?
CONS:
The climactic fight was set at night and the action was very hard to make out at times.
A few plot holes I won’t describe now, including one major hole that sets up the final battle, but still. . . .It was so obvious it made me cringe.
The origin of Banner’s transformation is altered significantly in order to set up the main plot conflict, which is going to upset purists
One neat effect is that transitions between scenes and multiple action during the same scen is laid out in squares and superimposed ovals like the pages of a comic book, very nifty.
