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The Happening and The Incredible HulkTwo summer blockbusters reviewed and a reader contest.

By Dana StevensPosted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 12:03 PM ET

To listen to Slate's Spoiler Special about The Happening, click the arrow button on the player:

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So, it's a shame that the movie decided to split the difference by turning out incredibly, colossally… OK. There's nothing wrong with Leterrier's slick, fast-paced direction or with Norton's performance as Bruce Banner, the tormented scientist who turns into a rampaging green giant when he's angry. (If you don't have enough familiarity with the character to know why, the montage under the opening credits confers a hasty degree in gamma-ray pseudoscience.) Tim Roth makes for an adequate villain as Emil Blonsky, an elite soldier with a Faustian curiosity about Banner's capacity for transformation. (It's the second role Roth's done in the past year in which his body miraculously begins aging backward. Is Mr. Orange secretly Merlin the wizard?) Although the new Hulk, like his 2003 counterpart, is entirely computer-generated, the technology has progressed enough that he no longer resembles an action figure carved from lime Jello.

After a jaw-dropping opening shot of Rocinha, a vast cliff-side slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we find Banner living incognito in a hovel there, employed at a soda bottling plant and studying anger control with a Brazilian yogi. But it's no use; when a U.S. Army team led by Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt) bursts in to kidnap him for weapons research, Banner morphs into the familiar behemoth in torn trousers. (An ongoing gag about how he shops for those size-shifting pants is one of the few good jokes in this often-somber film.) From there, the film is a rhythmic (some might say soporific) flow of ever-louder action set pieces, escalating to a smackdown in Harlem, N.Y., between the Hulk and his nemesis, the vaguely reptilian Abomination.

Other observations culled from this two-hour onslaught of stimuli: The Hulk's transition from an amoral destructive force to a fighter for right happens too suddenly and without sufficient motivation. Liv Tyler, who plays Banner's biologist girlfriend Betty Ross, appears to be made of marzipan—sweet, pliant, and utterly bland. Tim Blake Nelson, the Don Knotts of his generation, kills in a small part as a socially awkward scientist eager to help the couple. And Robert Downey Jr., who pops up as Iron Man's Tony Stark in a cross-promotional cameo late in the film, is such a diabolical cad he makes the slender, diffident Norton look like a choirboy.

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It's been nearly a year since the last Slate summer-movie reader contest, in which contestants sent in their ideas for menacing action-movie one-liners ("Veni, vidi, vici, sugarplum."). The Incredible Hulk's curious status as a franchise reboot raises an obvious question: What blockbuster made in the last five years would you remake now, how would you cast it, and why? I'll dig through the office storage room for an appropriately unoriginal prize and publish the results late next week. Responses must be fewer than 100 words (much fewer would be nice) and must arrive in my inbox, , by Tuesday, June 17, at 10 p.m. ET.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

This was a terrific Fray--articles connected to comic-books often bring out the best in readers. Baltimore Aureole's post title is helpfully self-explanatory, "10 Marvel superheroes I'd rather see in a movie than The Hulk," and the list is well worth a visit. There's an excellent thread on the Ang Lee Hulk movie here, (though there are comments on it everywhere) and even a defense of marzipan here...

Comments from the Fray

There is a certain Department of Defense training film quality to the film The Happening (a convention cleverly deployed by the film Cloverfield but not here). It has a matter-of-fact tone which suits such training films. But what is the lesson and for whom was it produced?

I'll guess that few people ever ponder the possibilities of any form of chemical attack, let alone one which is made upon humanity by Mother Nature herself. Chemical attacks involve the twin concepts of point sources and non-point sources. A big ugly pipe pumping purple poison out of a factory and into your river is a point source, easy enough to find and to fix. A simple example of a point source. A non-point source is, well, more diffuse. No one actually knows where it is exactly, it is just 'out there' somewhere.

The non-point source was what made The Happening so effective. Even films about terrorists who use chemical weapons have a point source, get the guy with the trigger and you stop the threat. The Happening is brilliant in that there is no guy with a trigger. To the extent that an 'event' is triggered at all it appears to be a function of human population density and not the decision of some terrorist with his/her finger on the trigger of some weapon in some definite location…

--wmccomninel

(To reply, click here)

What concerns or rather, what I fear might disappoint, is Marvel's complete control over all future productions. Don't get me wrong- it was beyond travesty that just about everyone was cashing in on this California comic gold rush except the very people that created these characters i.e. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby. But I worry that…bubble gum, family friendly, fun-but-slightly shallow movies will continue to be the standard in the Marvel Universe…

I was fascinated with these comic book heroes as a kid and even though I have left them behind, I've always defended them for their allegorical and symbolic undertones while thoroughly enjoying the action playing out onscreen as an adult. I know that Marvel wants to enlist an entirely new generation of kids to the their universe but they have to grow up one day too. The reason why people like me are guaranteed tickets is not to keep our reps up on some comicon blog but to leave the theater feeling vindicated for retaining our fondness for these comics as adults.

--SatoriThroughAllegory

(To reply, click here)

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