|
gamma bomb explosion Before I saw the movie I had heard about the gamma dogs, but seeing them on the screen still made me cringe. As to why they were added to the movie is beyond me. Maybe the people behind the movie saved money by creating their own villains rather than using any from the book. Whatever their reason for being in the movie, I could have done without them. Looking at the movie as a whole it was interesting to see the spin that they put on Bruce and his dad and I can partly understand why the writers did what they did. Since in the book Bruce became the Hulk back in 1963 that would mean that Bruce would be in his sixties today. So rather than having Bruce be a man at that time they shifted the focus to his dad and had Bruce as a child. That change I could accept, but seeing the dad be played by Nick Nolte and having him inject Bruce with a chemical was less than satisfying to me. The father may have been physically abusive to Bruce as a child, but there was never any chemical manipulation. If the movie had stayed more true to the book it would have been a great visual to see Bruce shoving a teen aged Rick Jones down into a protective ditch as the gamma bomb exploded. Yes, instead of Banner working on a serum he was working on a bomb for the military and my guess for the change is the following logic: We no longer live in an age of atomic bombs. Nor did we hear the phrase nuclear missiles used as much as we did two decades ago. Today thanks to either the current administration and or the media we live in an era where there are weapons of mass destruction, which makes me snicker. Is that phrase more user friendly? Is it easier to use the acronym WMD? Are bombs and nuclear warheads passˇ? Do they sound too much like Hiroshima and the movie War Games? Now instead of being told to duck and cover when there is danger from abroad all that we have to do is cover our doors and windows with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Sigh. Somehow I don't think that we have made that much progress. Putting aside the change in terminology I'd also have to point out that the general view of radiation has changed in the past forty years. Where once radiation was seen primarily as a means of inflicting harm, today radiation has become a cure of sorts. So having Banner working with radiation as tool for medicine rather than as a means of killing makes sense to me. Besides Banner the writers also had to bring Betty into the twenty first century as well. Before she died in the book Betty was a modern strong willed woman who loved Bruce despite all of the problems that they had over the years. However, when she first appeared forty years ago she was seen as the somewhat shy daughter of a general with mixed feelings about an equally shy scientist who worked for her father. This young woman walked around in vaguely looking Jackie Kennedy outfits and didn't say much. Naturally that early image was never going to see the big screen. The average movie watcher can't remember anything beyond the nineteen nineties and seeing someone with nineteen sixties if not nineteen fifties tendencies would have confused people. Putting aside the plot elements and characterizations, I have to comment on visual look of the movie itself. Even though I may be in the minority, computer animation never does much for me and I wish that they had stuck with a human in the role of the Hulk. Seeing Jennifer emote to nothing was hard to watch and the animation didn't mesh well with the emotional feel of the film. Lee often had the actors doing what for me felt like a play about chemical addiction and then there would be the green creature leaping to and fro. The two did not mesh well. It was though Lee was reminded that they needed some silly action sequences in the movie besides the hyper dialogue that was spouted for most of it. Focusing on one or the other would have made a much better film. |