Incredible Hulk (2008)

Incredible Hulk (2008)

Oh Ang Lee where were you! It is not difficult to tell that this movie is aimed squarely at young males predominantly in the IT profession who wish they had big muscles and dated Liv Tyler.
In short, this movie starts where the first ended in South America. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is in Brazil and the US military in the form of General Ross (William Hurt) wants him as a weapon. Bruce in turn wants to cure himself so he can be with his girlfriend (Liv Tyler) and an English soldier (Tim Roth) wants to have the power of the Hulk. In a nostalgic touch Lou Ferrigno again features this time as the voice of the Hulk.

Edward Norton recreates the performance of the climatic scene in the original The Fly (1958) movie communicating in every scene with his eyes to “kill me, kill me”. The reasons to want to die for appearing in this movie are the absence of dialogue and the Michael Bay like (Armageddon) obsession with special effects as opposed to a storyline, character development and anything remotely concerned with intellectual pursuits. 

The main character is Bruce Banner who transforms into the Hulk when his blood pressure gets above 200 heartbeats per second. I know this because the Director regularly uses a heart rate monitoring device to show how Bruce struggles to remain in control.

Liv Tyler reprises her role from another Michael Bay movie called Armageddon where she is a beautiful woman who stands by her man. William Hurt is good as Liv’s father and Tim Roth is menacing and scary as the villainous character. The standout performance is by the scientist Mr Blue Dr Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) who engenders the only glimmer of humour and positive tone in the movie.

This movie is a special effects fest. The special effects for the Hulk and the transformation scenes are excellent but he seems more animalistic and brutish in his rendering than the first movie. There is a new character called the Abomination which is really an excuse for the special effects IT whizzes to come up with a grotesque inside-out version of the Hulk. The scene featuring the audio canon and the Hulk is a definite highlight from a SFX perspective. 

The Direction by Louis Letterier is like that of someone driving a car on cruise control. The plot is like something from an average child’s storybook and the setting is more like a physical obstacle course from a computer game featuring Brazillian slums or the city scenes in the final fight set piece. The scenes, settings, characterisation and dialogue appear two-dimensional as we watch the Hulk smash and break things. The technique showing the number of days since incident or turning into the Hulk, from my cynical view, seemed like an editing device injected after the movie was filmed to try and create drama and interest. 

The music and sound were incidental and background fillers and a lot like traffic noise. The use of lighting in the factory scenes where the Hulk could not be fully seen was well conceived and executed. The action scene at the University where the military were filmed attacking the Hulk were nicely filmed and provided a contrast between the refinement and sophistication of the university and the raw violence on its grounds. 

I do not honestly know what would be the take-out message for this movie. It is mostly likely do not mess with science and genetics by taking performance enhancing drugs or you will become majorly ugly and psychotic. The end of the movie keeps the Abomination alive which makes the heart sink about the possibilities of his reappearance.

The Incredible Abomination [1.5 stars out of four]

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