Retro Review - The Hulk

This is the movie that made me start disliking the whole "reimagining" of established properties.  Why can't companies that produce movies allow them to be made in the image that they were intended? 

The Premise:  Bruce Banner is injected with nano tech machines, which was done by his father and then he witnesses a gamma bomb explode and then he repressess the memories and 20 years later he's working on a machine to "bomb" people with nano tech machines to cure them of everything from bad breath to cancer, except the machine breaks.  Bruce, stressed out because the has machine problems (as with everything else in his life), decides that he's going to be a test subject and locks himself into the lab where he has started the machine to bomb him with the nanites or nanobytes (or whatever they are called).  Something goes wrong and he is overdosed with these nanobytes and then he has a weird dream about his childhood.  Also, his father (Nick Nolte playing Nick  Nolte) manages to show up because he knows what Bruce is working on, magically, and that he is monitoring Bruce's ability to hulkify when he get's angry.  Oh and it was all set up by Nick Nolte's character (Brian) from the very beginning that this was what's going to happen to Bruce no matter what.  That's all fine and wonderful but here's the original premise - From Wikipedia

"The Hulk is cast as the emotional and impulsive alter ego of the withdrawn and reserved physicist Dr. Bruce Banner. The Hulk appears shortly after Banner is accidentally exposed to the blast of a test detonation of a gamma bomb he invented. Subsequently, Banner will involuntarily transform into the Hulk, depicted as a giant, raging, humanoid monster, leading to extreme complications in Banner's life".

and

"During the experimental detonation of a gamma bomb, scientist Bruce Banner rushes to save a teenager who has driven onto the testing field. Pushing the teen, Rick Jones, into a trench, Banner himself is caught in the blast, absorbing massive amounts of radiation. He awakens later in an infirmary, seeming relatively unscathed, but that night transforms into a lumbering grey form that breaks through the wall and escapes. A soldier in the ensuing search party dubs the otherwise unidentified creature a "hulk".^[25]

Pretty  basic premise to use when creating a movie - Man gets into explosion -> freaks out ->hulkifies.

The whole movie in and of itself is actually not bad, it's just not good.  I love Ang Lee's use of border's like a comic book superimposed on each other instead of transitions and I like Sam Elliot as Betty's father -General Ross -(perfect in fact for that role), but the whole of it is terrible in execution.  The movie itself should have had a main bad guy (Rhino or Abomination or The Leader) or even just General Ross who is doing something like building a weapon to contain the hulk and research him for weapons development

They also should have done with this movie - being the first Hulk movie was find a Hulk-nerd director, like Favreau with Iron Man, but having read the Wikipedia on the making of Hulk it was doomed from the start, with one guy writing about a million drafts (and a lot of them used scenes for both Hulk movies) but the problem lies in harvesting bad ideas such as combining absorption man with Banner's dad and a few other ideas like nanobytes or nanodes or whatever.

This movie could have been so much more, but just reverts to "look at this cool shit we can do with computers" or so it seems.  The fight scenes, the scene where hulk gets into it with the tanks are all well done, the ending where he fights his dad and all the supposition there was hard to accept.  The graphics, for the time, were really good, but not Jurassic Park explosive good.  Nothing really made you go "wow" although there was the San Francisco scene that everyone wanted to see Hulk just beat the shit out of the military.

Disappointing, but it's good for a mindless evening of action and bad plot.

The Breakdown

The movie wasn't that bad- it had a great character and good development

The Good - Ang Lee directing the movie in a comic book style, Sam Elliot as Thunderbolt Ross and the look of the Hulk and the Hulk's child like attitude from temper tantrums to his quiet solitude.  Plus - Hulk dogs.

The Bad - Nanobyte technology, Banner's father being a super bad guy and the whole story behind Banner's father.

The Ugly - Hulk dogs - especially the poodle and Hulks tantrum when he kicked the couch.

On my scale of A-F, I give it an overall C, it's ok, but I have a hard time dancing to it.

I have to write up "Deep Blue Sea" - Thomas Jane (Punisher), Saffron Burrows (Some movie that she was popular in) and Samuel L. Jackson (what movie hasn't he been in in the last 20 or so years).  DBS is about genetically engineered sharks killing people in interesting and fun ways.