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Hulk (HD DVD)
Universal // PG-13 // December 12, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $29.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The best of the recent wave of comic book adaptations have been helmed by directors like Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, and Christopher Nolan, all of whom emerged from independent film. Given that, it may not have seemed so odd to pair a director like Ang Lee, someone who's closely associated with quiet, character-driven dramas, with a pop culture icon most people think of as mindlessly muttering "Hulk smash". As it turns out, though, Lee's spin on the character is as awkward a mesh of 
those two styles as you might have guessed, devoting the bulk of its 138 minute runtime to its characters and themes rather than one elaborate effects spectacle after another. Hulk underperformed at the box office and suffered one of the most disastrous second-week drops ever, presumably due in large part to the audience expecting a balls-out action movie and getting something else entirely. I had the same reaction to Hulk that most people seemed to at first -- much too long and much too boring -- but with a new release on HD DVD, I thought I'd give it a second look. I did warm up to the movie a bit with another pass but not enough to actually recommend it.
Bruce Krenzler (Eric Bana) is a research scientist searching for a way to strengthen human DNA, on the verge of a breakthrough that would empower the immune system to instantly heal any injury. Having long since forgotten his first few years of life, Bruce is unaware that the biological father he's long thought dead, David Banner (Nick Nolte), had devoted his life to that same quest decades earlier. Father and son reconnect after Bruce is pelted with gamma radiation in an experiment gone wrong. By all rights, Bruce should have died, but the mutated blood he inherited from the experiments his father performed on himself has reshaped him. Yeah, you know where this is going, so I'll try to keep it short. Yup, Bruce now transforms into a muscular, mindless green monstrosity whenever he gets angry, with only Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) able to sooth him into reverting back. Both greedy military contractor Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) and Betty's father, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliot), have their own reasons for wanting to take down the Hulk. Meanwhile, David Banner is off his rocker, at first thinking he's helping his son by sending a pack of mutant dogs to off Betty but then sees Bruce as the key to surviving his own self-engineered destruction.
Hulk tries to juggle the tone of a comic book with Ang Lee's flair for characterization and a mega-budgeted summer adrenaline rush, failing to really succeed on any front. Hulk devotes the majority of its bloated runtime to characterization and dialogue but doesn't really do anything particularly interesting with them. It's a two hour-plus movie, but you can fully summarize everything that happens to all of the main characters with a few sentences each. Betty Ross is defined purely by her relationships to other characters, Glenn Talbot might as well have had a moustache
to twirl as a conniving military industrialist, and "Thunderbolt" Ross ping-pongs back and forth between a commanding, authoritative presence and meekly rolling over whenever someone tells him to do something.
Worst off is Bruce Banner, who's drawn (or not, rather) as a blank slate. That's fully intentional -- he's a man who's forgotten his past and suppresses his emotions -- but that doesn't make for much of a compelling lead character. Eric Bana is fine in the role, his first lead turn on these shores, but he's not given enough to work with to make much of an impression. The supporting cast fares better, though. Jennifer Connelly is lovely as always, stunning enough to make clunky dialogue like "somehow, I think your anger is activating the Nano-meds" sound tolerable. Some may snicker whenever Nick Nolte's on-screen, considering how closely his disheveled character resembles his infamous mug shot, but Nolte brings an intense, unrestrained performance to the movie. And, of course, Sam Elliot is as reliable as ever as General Ross.
As for action, it's always nice to see the Hulk leap around desolate mesas and tear through a fleet of tanks like a twister in a trailer park. Banner's alter-ego doesn't really rear his gamma-irradiated head until forty-someodd minutes into the movie, though, and the extended brawl with the military that starts in the desert and follows to the streets of San Francisco is the only one that got my pulse racing. I mean, the first big fight in the movie has the Hulk duking it out against an enormous French poodle, for crying out loud, and what passes for a climax is over in two minutes flat.
I am admittedly a life-long comic book nerd, but I'm not a stickler for every last detail making its way on-screen. That's probably for the best, considering that Hulk doesn't lift much more from the comics than a few characters and the gamma radiation trigger for the jade giant. Ang Lee's origin story is worlds removed from the more concise one that other guy named Lee penned more than four decades prior, and none of the familiar villains made their way into the movie. The Hulk is pitted against the military might of "Thunderbolt" Ross, but other than that, he fights three mutated dogs and a character who's kind of a retread of The Absorbing Man (and Zzzax briefly, for anyone keeping track at home). Who cares?
The movie's incarnation of the Hulk was created entirely in the digital domain, and the CG effects that were criticized so widely in 2003 haven't aged well in the several years since. The closer shots are fairly strong, with ILM infusing quite a bit of expressiveness into the character, but he has an overly rubbery appearance and almost never gels convincingly with any of the live-action elements. The worst effect in the movie is the
freeze-framed aftermath of Talbot's explosive attempt to bring down the Hulk when his underground base is in lockdown. I've read that Ang Lee had quite a bit of latitude making the movie, but you'd think someone would've pointed out how unsalvagably ridiculous that looks. Likewise for whatever the hell was going on after the Hulk dispatched the movie's central villain in the climax. (C'mon, it's not a spoiler to say that the title character beats the bad guy at the end of a $135 million tentpole flick with an eye towards a film franchise.) As for the gamma irradiation...? Kind of sad to think that someone's still using the 'Emboss' filter in After Effects all these years later.
Even more grating is Ang Lee's attempt to make Hulk look like a comic book. The screen continually breaks up into panels of varying shapes and sizes, rapidly moving across the screen while expanding and contracting. It's a dizzying headache, and the 'clever' wipes Lee uses to transition from shot to shot are almost as annoying.
With a second viewing, Hulk isn't quite the disaster it was made out to be, but just because it's not all that bad doesn't mean it's all that good either. For me, Hulk falls somewhere between 'tedious' and 'barely tolerable'. Not recommended.
Video: Just off the bat, don't fret when you spot an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 promised on the disc's packaging only to see Hulk unfold at a screen-filling 1.85:1. There's a misprint on both the disc art and the flipside of the HD DVD case.
Universal has done an outstanding job with this release, boasting an image so sharp and so richly detailed that I actually found it distracting at times. I've never been keen on the "it's like looking out a window" cliché, but the depth and dimensionality of this HD DVD are three-dimensional to the point where it does seem as if Jennifer Connelly and Nick Nolte are on the other side of a thin glass pane.
For the most part, the movie has a faintly grainy texture, just enough to remind viewers that Hulk was shot on film. A handful of small specks are easily ignored, and challenging sequences such as the strobing and the sparks that litter the screen in the climax are never marred by any compression hiccups. Only a few negligible concerns keep it from landing a perfect score. Not that this is the fault of the transfer, but the battle with the mutant mutts is excessively dark, presumably to help obscure some of the computer-generated effects. A small number of scattered shots have a slightly soft tinge to them, and some ringing around high-contrast edges were infrequently spotted. I may not think much of the movie, but Hulk's presentation on HD DVD comes dangerously close to perfection.
Audio: The sound design of the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is extremely aggressive whenever the action kicks in, teeming with discrete imaging, smooth pans from channel to channel, and a substantial thud from the subwoofer. It's not as devastatingly loud as I went in expecting, but I don't really
have any complaints. The quieter moments fare well too, and the extensive dialogue emerges without any concerns.
The disc also includes six-channel dubs in French and Spanish along with the usual assortment of subtitles.
Supplements: The HD DVD drops several of the extras from the two-disc DVD release, including the interactive "Anatomy of the Hulk" feature, four sets of comic art depicting very different takes on one scene from the movie, cast/crew bios, and, of course, the demo of the Xbox Hulk game. Otherwise, everything is present and accounted for, at least in some form, although none of it is offered in high-definition.
Ang Lee's audio commentary would've been better off if at least one or two other members of the cast and crew had joined the director in the recording booth. There's something instantly likeable about Lee -- he has a disarming voice, and his minor fumbles with the English language are hopelessly endearing -- but the numerous lengthy gaps in the discussion quickly became annoying. He'll say two sentences, pause for fifty seconds, toss out another three sentences, then remain completely silent for a full minute. Draw that out over two hours and change, and that's the commentary. I appreciated his attention to detail when it comes to such themes as fear versus anger, and Lee shows off a great sense of humor as he comments on the villainous Partaking Man and toying with Austin Powers-style blocking of a naked Hulk before deciding to keep him in the trademark purple pants. There's just not enough of it. Too subdued to recommend to casual fans of the movie, it's the type of commentary that's better left playing in the background rather than actively watching.
On the original DVD release, "Hulk-Cam: Inside the Rage" tossed a few short, lightweight snippets into the middle of the movie via extended branching. Since branching appears to still be outside of HD DVD's reach at the moment, this footage is made available directly through the main menu, although none of it's really worth a look.
A six minute set of letterboxed
additional footage includes a glimpse of Betty and Bruce's presentation, a late night phone call about Betty's recurring dream, a cockteased teenaged Bruce flipping out in a science lab, and a few other brief snippets. Forgettable.
A few featurettes make up the rest of the extras. "The Evolution of the Hulk" (16 min.) opens with Stan Lee commenting about the origins of the Hulk, both as a comic and as a character. After a brief look at the lightly animated cartoon from the mid-'60s and the live action series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, the featurette's last 7 minutes suddenly shift gears into a shameless plug for the movie. A promotional piece in disguise.
The usual making-of featurette is divided into four segments, each clocking in around six minutes, and they can be viewed individually or played all at once. They include casting notes, looks at both the practical and digital effects (including a de-pantsed Hulk, if you're into that sort of thing), and the recording of Danny Elfman's score. Rounding out the featurettes are a fourteen minute piece on how wonderful and lyrical Ang Lee is, ten minutes behind the scenes of the dog fight (okay, seeing a dog in a motion capture suit made me laugh), and a five minute clip about the paneled, comic book-style approach to Hulk's editing.
Conclusion: Hulk might be worth a rental just as a home theater showcase, but as a movie, it's too far down on the lower rungs of barely-okay for me to recommend. Rent It.
those two styles as you might have guessed, devoting the bulk of its 138 minute runtime to its characters and themes rather than one elaborate effects spectacle after another. Hulk underperformed at the box office and suffered one of the most disastrous second-week drops ever, presumably due in large part to the audience expecting a balls-out action movie and getting something else entirely. I had the same reaction to Hulk that most people seemed to at first -- much too long and much too boring -- but with a new release on HD DVD, I thought I'd give it a second look. I did warm up to the movie a bit with another pass but not enough to actually recommend it. Bruce Krenzler (Eric Bana) is a research scientist searching for a way to strengthen human DNA, on the verge of a breakthrough that would empower the immune system to instantly heal any injury. Having long since forgotten his first few years of life, Bruce is unaware that the biological father he's long thought dead, David Banner (Nick Nolte), had devoted his life to that same quest decades earlier. Father and son reconnect after Bruce is pelted with gamma radiation in an experiment gone wrong. By all rights, Bruce should have died, but the mutated blood he inherited from the experiments his father performed on himself has reshaped him. Yeah, you know where this is going, so I'll try to keep it short. Yup, Bruce now transforms into a muscular, mindless green monstrosity whenever he gets angry, with only Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) able to sooth him into reverting back. Both greedy military contractor Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) and Betty's father, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliot), have their own reasons for wanting to take down the Hulk. Meanwhile, David Banner is off his rocker, at first thinking he's helping his son by sending a pack of mutant dogs to off Betty but then sees Bruce as the key to surviving his own self-engineered destruction.
Hulk tries to juggle the tone of a comic book with Ang Lee's flair for characterization and a mega-budgeted summer adrenaline rush, failing to really succeed on any front. Hulk devotes the majority of its bloated runtime to characterization and dialogue but doesn't really do anything particularly interesting with them. It's a two hour-plus movie, but you can fully summarize everything that happens to all of the main characters with a few sentences each. Betty Ross is defined purely by her relationships to other characters, Glenn Talbot might as well have had a moustache
to twirl as a conniving military industrialist, and "Thunderbolt" Ross ping-pongs back and forth between a commanding, authoritative presence and meekly rolling over whenever someone tells him to do something. Worst off is Bruce Banner, who's drawn (or not, rather) as a blank slate. That's fully intentional -- he's a man who's forgotten his past and suppresses his emotions -- but that doesn't make for much of a compelling lead character. Eric Bana is fine in the role, his first lead turn on these shores, but he's not given enough to work with to make much of an impression. The supporting cast fares better, though. Jennifer Connelly is lovely as always, stunning enough to make clunky dialogue like "somehow, I think your anger is activating the Nano-meds" sound tolerable. Some may snicker whenever Nick Nolte's on-screen, considering how closely his disheveled character resembles his infamous mug shot, but Nolte brings an intense, unrestrained performance to the movie. And, of course, Sam Elliot is as reliable as ever as General Ross.
As for action, it's always nice to see the Hulk leap around desolate mesas and tear through a fleet of tanks like a twister in a trailer park. Banner's alter-ego doesn't really rear his gamma-irradiated head until forty-someodd minutes into the movie, though, and the extended brawl with the military that starts in the desert and follows to the streets of San Francisco is the only one that got my pulse racing. I mean, the first big fight in the movie has the Hulk duking it out against an enormous French poodle, for crying out loud, and what passes for a climax is over in two minutes flat.
I am admittedly a life-long comic book nerd, but I'm not a stickler for every last detail making its way on-screen. That's probably for the best, considering that Hulk doesn't lift much more from the comics than a few characters and the gamma radiation trigger for the jade giant. Ang Lee's origin story is worlds removed from the more concise one that other guy named Lee penned more than four decades prior, and none of the familiar villains made their way into the movie. The Hulk is pitted against the military might of "Thunderbolt" Ross, but other than that, he fights three mutated dogs and a character who's kind of a retread of The Absorbing Man (and Zzzax briefly, for anyone keeping track at home). Who cares?
The movie's incarnation of the Hulk was created entirely in the digital domain, and the CG effects that were criticized so widely in 2003 haven't aged well in the several years since. The closer shots are fairly strong, with ILM infusing quite a bit of expressiveness into the character, but he has an overly rubbery appearance and almost never gels convincingly with any of the live-action elements. The worst effect in the movie is the
freeze-framed aftermath of Talbot's explosive attempt to bring down the Hulk when his underground base is in lockdown. I've read that Ang Lee had quite a bit of latitude making the movie, but you'd think someone would've pointed out how unsalvagably ridiculous that looks. Likewise for whatever the hell was going on after the Hulk dispatched the movie's central villain in the climax. (C'mon, it's not a spoiler to say that the title character beats the bad guy at the end of a $135 million tentpole flick with an eye towards a film franchise.) As for the gamma irradiation...? Kind of sad to think that someone's still using the 'Emboss' filter in After Effects all these years later. Even more grating is Ang Lee's attempt to make Hulk look like a comic book. The screen continually breaks up into panels of varying shapes and sizes, rapidly moving across the screen while expanding and contracting. It's a dizzying headache, and the 'clever' wipes Lee uses to transition from shot to shot are almost as annoying.
With a second viewing, Hulk isn't quite the disaster it was made out to be, but just because it's not all that bad doesn't mean it's all that good either. For me, Hulk falls somewhere between 'tedious' and 'barely tolerable'. Not recommended.
Video: Just off the bat, don't fret when you spot an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 promised on the disc's packaging only to see Hulk unfold at a screen-filling 1.85:1. There's a misprint on both the disc art and the flipside of the HD DVD case.
Universal has done an outstanding job with this release, boasting an image so sharp and so richly detailed that I actually found it distracting at times. I've never been keen on the "it's like looking out a window" cliché, but the depth and dimensionality of this HD DVD are three-dimensional to the point where it does seem as if Jennifer Connelly and Nick Nolte are on the other side of a thin glass pane.
For the most part, the movie has a faintly grainy texture, just enough to remind viewers that Hulk was shot on film. A handful of small specks are easily ignored, and challenging sequences such as the strobing and the sparks that litter the screen in the climax are never marred by any compression hiccups. Only a few negligible concerns keep it from landing a perfect score. Not that this is the fault of the transfer, but the battle with the mutant mutts is excessively dark, presumably to help obscure some of the computer-generated effects. A small number of scattered shots have a slightly soft tinge to them, and some ringing around high-contrast edges were infrequently spotted. I may not think much of the movie, but Hulk's presentation on HD DVD comes dangerously close to perfection.
Audio: The sound design of the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is extremely aggressive whenever the action kicks in, teeming with discrete imaging, smooth pans from channel to channel, and a substantial thud from the subwoofer. It's not as devastatingly loud as I went in expecting, but I don't really
have any complaints. The quieter moments fare well too, and the extensive dialogue emerges without any concerns. The disc also includes six-channel dubs in French and Spanish along with the usual assortment of subtitles.
Supplements: The HD DVD drops several of the extras from the two-disc DVD release, including the interactive "Anatomy of the Hulk" feature, four sets of comic art depicting very different takes on one scene from the movie, cast/crew bios, and, of course, the demo of the Xbox Hulk game. Otherwise, everything is present and accounted for, at least in some form, although none of it is offered in high-definition.
Ang Lee's audio commentary would've been better off if at least one or two other members of the cast and crew had joined the director in the recording booth. There's something instantly likeable about Lee -- he has a disarming voice, and his minor fumbles with the English language are hopelessly endearing -- but the numerous lengthy gaps in the discussion quickly became annoying. He'll say two sentences, pause for fifty seconds, toss out another three sentences, then remain completely silent for a full minute. Draw that out over two hours and change, and that's the commentary. I appreciated his attention to detail when it comes to such themes as fear versus anger, and Lee shows off a great sense of humor as he comments on the villainous Partaking Man and toying with Austin Powers-style blocking of a naked Hulk before deciding to keep him in the trademark purple pants. There's just not enough of it. Too subdued to recommend to casual fans of the movie, it's the type of commentary that's better left playing in the background rather than actively watching.
On the original DVD release, "Hulk-Cam: Inside the Rage" tossed a few short, lightweight snippets into the middle of the movie via extended branching. Since branching appears to still be outside of HD DVD's reach at the moment, this footage is made available directly through the main menu, although none of it's really worth a look.
A six minute set of letterboxed
additional footage includes a glimpse of Betty and Bruce's presentation, a late night phone call about Betty's recurring dream, a cockteased teenaged Bruce flipping out in a science lab, and a few other brief snippets. Forgettable. A few featurettes make up the rest of the extras. "The Evolution of the Hulk" (16 min.) opens with Stan Lee commenting about the origins of the Hulk, both as a comic and as a character. After a brief look at the lightly animated cartoon from the mid-'60s and the live action series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, the featurette's last 7 minutes suddenly shift gears into a shameless plug for the movie. A promotional piece in disguise.
The usual making-of featurette is divided into four segments, each clocking in around six minutes, and they can be viewed individually or played all at once. They include casting notes, looks at both the practical and digital effects (including a de-pantsed Hulk, if you're into that sort of thing), and the recording of Danny Elfman's score. Rounding out the featurettes are a fourteen minute piece on how wonderful and lyrical Ang Lee is, ten minutes behind the scenes of the dog fight (okay, seeing a dog in a motion capture suit made me laugh), and a five minute clip about the paneled, comic book-style approach to Hulk's editing.
Conclusion: Hulk might be worth a rental just as a home theater showcase, but as a movie, it's too far down on the lower rungs of barely-okay for me to recommend. Rent It.
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