Defenders of Ang Lee's "Hulk" seem to think that those who don't like it just didn't "get" it. That's not the case. I got it. I understand what Lee was trying to do. He just did it terribly. The film was ugly, dramatically inert, and gimmicky (the aforementioned comic book panel editing style reeked of the Adam West "Batman" TV show). And don't even get me started on the ending. Just because Lee was trying to do something different doesn't mean that he was successful at it.

I like superhero movies that dare to be different. Tim Burton's "Batman Returns" (1992) is possibly even more maligned and polarizing than "Hulk," but that's an instance where I thought the filmmaker was trying to do something different and succeeded at every level: it was dark, funny, beautiful, strange, layered, and steeped in references to past film history, particularly the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

Ang Lee's "Hulk" failed at the box office because it was a poor film. Period.

Steely Dan was bad (snore), but Ang Lee's HULK was far from bad. What I found, soon after seeing it in a theater (and feeling ambivalent about it) was that HULK doesn't play nearly as well in the theater as it does on home video. Maybe the smaller scale and convenience of being in ones home, gives the film a different pace. Regardless, I went from thinking HULK was just OK, to thinking it is brilliant after watching it again on DVD.

Non-American directors often take liberties with science fiction films. Jean-Pierre Juenet made his ALIEN movie in to a clever beautiful and surreally intelligent composition. It wasn't well received, but it is brilliant. The 5th Element and Starship Troopers were also, I think, misunderstood by humorless American audiences. (They are COMICS, after all...)

Hulk goes in the opposite direction, and leaves the humor aside to amplify the drama. Ang Lee gives us a HULK that has dynamic motivations and presents The Hulk in a wildly surreal and yet very human way.

Additionally, Nick Nolte is in top form in HULK, a tragically overlooked performance. Just to see Nolte do his thing is worth digging out the DVD and taking another look. If you do, watch out, you might find yourself - so far removed from the hype of the moment of it's release - enjoying HULK.

Hey, they HATED Blade Runner....

Hulk and Blade Runner, huh? Hardly.

Don't blame "humorless American audiences" for the total failure of Lee's The Hulk. It fell flat because it had no soul. Indeed, all that you could do was laugh at that film. Thus American humor was crucial to any enjoyment of the film at all. Mockery was its saving grace. I agree with you about The Fifth Element. That underrated film rocks. Its a total goofy blast. And Blade Runner is in this American's top five favorite films ever made. Why turn this into some native border dispute that has absolutely nothing to do with this film? The onus is on the film maker to connect with the audience not for the audience to connect with the film maker. At the very least, they aught to meet in the middle but to go so far as to praise Lee's effort is to encroach the apologists' realm. The Hulk looked horrible. The script was horrible. The acting suffered at the hands of the script. The experimentation was just that and did not rise to the level of innovation. Finally, if there was anything redeeming about The Hulk why in the world are the makers of the new The Incredible Hulk doing everything humanly possible to distance themselves from the previous film?

melvinhermille-

I'm curious to know what you factors you weigh in determining if a movie has a "soul" or not. It's certainly an easy way of dismissing a movie without a supporting argument. I've read the Hulk script, have you? Pacing was its main problem.

When you make claims such as "mockery" being its only saving grace, it just reveals how out of touch you are. Yes, the film must connect with the audience but what audience are you talking about? It did connect with a certain audience but if you're using American Idol as litmus test for a successful artistic film then go watch Michael Bay and then its much easier to use "American Humor" in the pejorative.

I certainly don't agree with Jeunet's Alien Ressurrection (the whole maternal aspect was just offputting) or Starship Troopers (you're talking about the one with Denise Richards, right?)- both horrible.

Remaking a movie is a horrible method of determining the quality of the original. We could talk about Psycho, the Jackal, Manchurian Candidate, and a score of others but the best example is Stephen King's attempt at redoing the Shining since he had been upset with Kubrick's film for decades yet...never got close to the original.

Just a note: 5th Element is not an underrated movie- it was a huge box office hit (grossed 3x its cost) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Effects.

By "soul" I mean that there was nothing in the film for me to invest in it emotionally. I would think the term is pretty self-explanatory and that particular language, that very word, is almost ubiquitous to discussions about all art. Why you would challenge my use of it seems to be nothing but contentious.

I've never watched even one performance of one episode of American Idol or any of those prime time television popularity contests. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Micheal Bay film. I would have to search a list of them to confirm that but my ignorance of such must speak for itself. Most of my exposure to music, film, and literature is by word of mouth from people around me whose opinions I either trust or whose taste I am familiar with. How in the world you got from point A to point B with that allegation is bizarre. Let me put all of your speculation about my taste and judgment to rest. Some favorite films of mine are 12 Angry Men, Unforgiven, Casablanca, Laurence of Arabia, Once Upon A Time in The West, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Blade Runner, to name a few. Some favorite books are Moby Dick, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Leaves of Grass, Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy, Jesus' Son, The Great Gatsby, Deliverance, Suttree, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Borges' Selected Non-fiction, again, to name a few. My musical tastes run from the likes of the Stanley Brothers to the Del McCoury Band to Chick Corea to Charles Mingus to Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash to Kate Bush to PJ Harvey to Mozart to Beethoven to Chopin to Handel and, to go full circle here, Wilco. Last night I fell asleep listening to Mozart's heavenly and transposing Clarinet Concerto (K.622 should you want acquire a very beautiful piece of ear-candy for your own enjoyment). Now, I could start naming more obscure works of brilliant art but I thought I would keep my list to subjects which are immediately accessible so that you don't have to leave the page to find out what the hell I'm talking about.

Should you want to try to further degrade my culture on the basis of this tiny fraction of my preferences, by all means, I accept your condescension and welcome the separation from whatever you might consider to be superior works of human expression; like The Hulk, perhaps?

I didn't say a single thing about Alien Resurrection or Starship Troopers so you might want to check what sphere of your brain that attack was lobbed from. It's malfunctioning.

As well, I didn't say that remaking a film was a barometer by which we could measure the original's effectiveness. Lord knows, the new and lifeless 3:10 to Yuma is an ugly cousin to the very good original. Same goes for the new Manchurian Candidate. It pales next to the original. What I did say is that the makers of the new Hulk were vying for separation from the 2003 Hulk. They did not want the public to think that it was to Lee's Hulk what Spider-Man 2 was to Spider-Man. That is a completely different point than the one you wanted to put in mouth.

Is The 5th Element not underrated? Great. I stand corrected and now know that my fair judgment of the film is in accord with the masses. Good for me and "Power to the People!"

No, I have not read the script for The Hulk. Should it have been a masterpiece, even more discredit to Lee for the boring mess he delivered us from its insightful pages and for what I believed was the script through its translation to the screen.

Finally, when I have invested time and money into something which fails to engage and stimulate my mind and/or my pleasure then I wrench enjoyment from the experience by mocking the thing. That's my right as a viewer. Some other recent and similar experiences in the theater were had before the atrocity that was Eragon, the trite and incredibly overrated Juno, and the saccharine studio-stamped "epic" The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

If you enjoyed The Hulk, good for you. You got your money's worth. I did not, boohoo!

P.S. Was Armageddon a M. Bay film? That movie was so horrible I considered a do-it-yourself lobotomy to remove the brain matter where its memory was registered. If its not a Bay film, still, shame on whoever it was that made that stupidity which undermined all verisimilitude with situations that stretched to the point of shattering even the broad allowance of suspended disbelief inherent to the sci-fi genre.

"Starship Troopers (you're talking about the one with Denise Richards, right?)- both horrible. " Starship Troopers was one of the most brilliant underrated films of the last two decades. As was-- and here I think I'm in a minority of one-- Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows.

I think we all fall into the trap of substituting our own opinion for undeniable fact. While there is no doubt that there were problems with The Hulk, the fact remains that there are defenders of the film (including me). This suggests that there are objective strengths to the film. Some of us subjectively feel that these outweigh the faults and others do not. But to say that this is "a poor film, period" denies the experienced reality of others.

Generally I think it is a faulty argument to say, "well, such and such a film has also been critisized", but such broad statements invite that argument. So my response is, people have told me Citizen Cane was boring. So they believe it also to be a poor film. Period.

OH MY GOD! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? HOW DARE YOU MISSPELL THE NAME OF THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE!... Just kidding, lol! But seriously, it's Kane with a K.

I don't know if Starship Troopers is among the "most brilliantly underrated" films, but I agree that it is certainly among the "most underrated", or at least "most unfairly reviled". Like certain other genre films, this one suffers terribly because of the expectations viewers took with them. I was initially terribly disappointed with it myself (having been a fan of the juvenile Heinlein novels, as well as some of his later work) but over the years my attitude towards it has warmed. I know that I initially saw it expecting something like "Aliens", with a perhaps more intelligent look at "service = citizenship", but now I feel that the film's four-color/cartoony treatment and high "hack-factor" actually compliment some of RAH's particular views. Another genre film that IMO gets an unfair amount of fan bile is "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". The film is a far cry from the genius of the original work, but as a film, the movie is reasonably solid in script, acting and flow.

jrd_2 didn't say Starship Troopers was the "most brilliantly underrated" film of the last two decades, he said it was one of the most brilliant underrated films of the last two decades.

"Brilliantly underrated" would mean Starship Trooper's manner of being underrated approached genius.

Phew! Thanks for the correction. And to think that the point of my entire post was undermined by a spelling error!

BeDrinkable, I seriously was not trying to undermine your post at all. I was only having fun in the midst of otherwise heated debate. My apologies. Your point is well taken. I've heard/read people refer to C.K. as boring. It makes me wonder what they want from their entertainment but such is taste. Nonetheless, that someone was entertained by The Hulk causes the same question in my mind but inverted, so to speak. And yet again, such is taste. Usually with these kinds of situations a broader listing of likes and dislikes becomes more enlightening than a reference to a single work. If someone says that they liked The Hulk but they also enjoy Casablanca, The Proposition, Little Miss Sunshine, Gangs of New York, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Junebug, Bad Lieutenant, Love Liza, Rocky, Serenity, A Fistful of Dollars, etc. then it would be fair to say that The Hulk struck a favorable note with them and they got to enjoy it. But if their list of favorites is swamped by universally and generally panned bad movies then... Well, is that just bad taste? What's interesting to note is the staying power of works of art verses those pieces which fade and, by so doing, are shown to be less than insightful with regards to the perennial human condition. It is also interesting to note the influence of works, not among the audience, but among the artistic peers and subsequent generations. You might not be hard pressed to find some among the public who call C.K. "boring" or "pretentious" but I doubt you'll find a filmmaker of any regard that would have anything but the utmost respect for the genius demonstrated in the work from the ground up. Now, if I might offer my own neck for the guillotine, I'll own up to enjoying a very disparaged movie of recent release. That of the much maligned "Ghost Rider". I had fun while watching it. I'm not going to add it to my very large DVD collection. I doubt I'll ever watch it again. But while sitting in the theater, I enjoyed it. However, and here's the issue I have with defenders of The Hulk, I would never argue that Ghost Rider is a good film. I recognize all of its weaknesses and concede to those criticism. If someone calls it a bad movie, I shrug my shoulders. They're correct about that.

Again, my apologies if my playful moment came off as offensive.