Just viewed “The Incredible Hulk” at the local cinema and here are my thoughts. Spoiler Warning; what little there is to spoil.

First, let me say that this “reboot” makes the first attempt at the Hulk look gay in comparison. Sure, there are idiots out there that still prefer Ang Lee’s Hulk, but once again, those people are idiots.

In the first attempt at the Hulk, the Hulk has daddy issues and then literally fights a metaphor of his father.

In “The Incredible Hulk” the Hulk SMASHES, and SMASHES good.

Is this new Hulk perfect? No, not by a long shot.

Here’s my tick list of things I did not like with T.I.H.

Ed Norton was not a good in the role. Not that he was not a good choice for the part, he was, but for some reason I felt that he seemed distant in this movie. Hard to put my finger on.

HULK CGI. I must admit, creating, rendering, coloring and lighting a huge green monster must be difficult, but I would have thought five years later we would have a credible looking Hulk. The SFX company that created the bulk of the Hulk and Abomination animation was the company Rhythm and Hues, which traces it’s roots back to Triple I and TRON. They did a very good job I must say, but the Hulk fell apart when it came to close ups of the face. The Abomination fared much worse overall and in some shots looked downright crappy. Most people won’t notice, nor care though, I am extra picky though. I wish WETA would have done T.I.H. as their work on just King Kong was outstanding, let alone the neigh unbeatable LOTR SFX. However, I must admit, WETA would have cost significantly more.

No music. I was working out at the gym before I went to see T.I.H. and Raiders of the Lost Ark was on the tele, and it reminded me how a great movie, plus great musical score=Awesome movie. T.I.H. pretty much was devoid of any music. This has become a trend in Hollywood, with some directors abandoning the traditional film score to “let the audience decide what they think is emotional, instead of cueing it with music.” That’s all fine and good if what you see on screen evokes emotion, but mostly all movies today don’t. 2001: A Space Odyssey had practically no music in it, but at some points in the movie it is extremely intense; music would have ruined those intense scenes.
I guess most movies today just simply don’t deserve a good film score, and I don’t think audiences realize they are missing out. Eh, I could prattle on all day about this subject, but moving on.

Superhero Desensitization. Previously superhero movies were generally done poorly and were released infrequently. Now, there are several superhero movies that come out every year, and all pretty much follow the same damn plot: First they do the Origin story, then reveal that there is a virtually IDENTICAL villain that has the same powers as the hero, albeit stronger and then the two fight it out and then the hero wins. The End. BOOOORING.
The Hulk falls victim to this as well, but I did not mind it as much; watching the Hulk literally pummel the Abomination into the pavement was satisfying.

Spiderman 2 has my favorite fight scenes between a superhero and villain; between Spidey and Doc Ock. Why the scenes work so well is that the fights bring out the humanity of Spiderman and show that he is vulnerable like the rest of us, even with his super powers, and that Spiderman can be killed. To me, Spiderman 2 is the Superhero movie made yet. It works on just about every level and future writers and directors should try to top it, but they won’t. Fuck, even DARKMAN was better than most superhero movies today.

The End. No, literally, the end of the movie made no sense. Hulk stops short of killing the abomination, but there is no conclusion. They should have shown Blonsky changing back to his human form and then being put into some sort of stasis cell in another scene. There is no wrap up at all to WTF happened to the abomination at the end of the movie.

Next movie. They should make the next Hulk movie darker and more tragic; i.e. the villain needs to kill Betty Ross in the next Hulk movie and then have the Hulk go APESHIT on the villain. That pretty much sums up what I think they need to do with the next Indiana Jones movie; Kill Indy’s son and maim Indy. After all, in the canon, Indy’s son was not mentioned and Indy ends up sans an eye by the time he is in his 90’s. We already know Indy cannot die, thanks to the Young Indy series; we know he lives till his 90’s and that he loses an eye. However, his son could be killed off and it would take the audience by surprise and bring some fucking Pathos back to the series to finish it off.

Shame that an Incredible Hulk sequel most likely won’t be made. Norton was apparently “difficult” to work with and even contested a screenwriting credit against Zak Penn, so he won’t be back and I can’t see the producers re-rebooting the Hulk with yet another Bruce Banner. On that note, the movie did make me realize how great Bill Bixby was in the role of David “Bruce” Banner in the t.v. series.

Overall, The Incredible Hulk delivered on the “Hulk Smash,” which I am happy about, but it was lacking in a lot of other areas.

This post is for my friend “Big Suz.” She has been writing some Days of our Lives fan fiction and has built up quite a following on one of the major DOOL fansites. I am going to help her to take her writing to the next level; via properly formatted DOOL screenplay format. Here is an example of a Days of our Lives screenplay (format).

dool

Hopefully, with some work, Big Suz will make it to the Big Time.

This little ditty of music is going to be in the movie. It’s going to be at the finale. Absolutely Amazing performance of the Saint Saens piece, Danse Macabre - Raúl Prieto Ramírez on the organ.

I stumbled upon this comic called “The Steel Claw” recently and found it quite amusing. I was short-run comic series made in the 80’s. As far as I can tell it was a tribute to the silver age of comics, complete with silly dialogue. Here is a classic.

Still debating on whether or not to toss out what I have written so far and take the mysterious angle to the opening. Also, to have the scenes as montage up to the “temple” entrance. My fear is that I am too “wordy” in my action descriptions. Most scripts today, even ones that are action heavy, have more dialogue. Oh, there will be a lot more dialogue later, but I don’t want to put off a prospective reader by big blocks of action text.

Well, I am up to page five now (Well, starting on page five) and counting.

I hope to have up to page fifteen (the end of the prologue) done by this weekend.

Script 1.3

Boring, slow and without life.

That pretty much sums up Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull.

My Flaws that I caught:

The area 51 skull’s magnetic field makes no sense. It produced a strong enough magnetic field to pull gunpowder to if from several hundred yards, but later in the movie the Conquistador skull’s magnetic properties can be nullified by simply covering it up with a cloth.

Why would the government have “buried” the alien corpse in the warehouse so soon after the apparent ufo crash in Roswell? You would think that they would have had the corpse in some even more super secret lab trying to extract it’s secrets. I can understand the Ark of the Covenant being put in Area 51, that’s fine. It is, after all, just a fancy box (unless you open it, or according to the bible, touch it). But, the government mothballing the most significant find of all known history is just absurd.

Also, why was the alien remains from area 51 simply and utterly forgotten about? Why couldn’t they just use that skull from the corpse?

Area 51 would not have been guarded by just four guards. Why would a Nuke test shut down Area 51?

A lead lined fridge would not have been sufficient enough to protect Indy from the radiation from the nuke blast. Furthermore he would have been turned to goo inside of the fridge when the shockwave hit and at the very least been liquidated upon impact inside the fridge.

To be quite honest I can’t figure out how the Skull went missing in the first place. So, let me get this straight:

Aliens arrive in past, teach the “Mayans” advanced tech. become Gods among men. Then die inside their spaceship. “Mayans” build fancy temple around ship. Conquistadors show up, steal one of the skulls. Conquistador dies somewhere else in Peru and is buried with the skull. Ox finds the skull and tries to return it to spaceship site, but then decides to put it back at the burial site??? and then goes insane. sigh.

What does not make sense, is apparently the ancient skeletons had been sitting on their thrones for ages right? So long that the “Mayans” built a whole elaborate temple around the spaceship. The aliens in skeletal form were all there before the conquistadors showed up, so why did the aliens just leave way back then?

OR the story could have been setup where the conquistadors attacked the aliens and the “mayans” and killed them all and then took one of the skulls.

Anyhoo.

The CGI in the jungle scenes really sucked. The computer game “Crysis” does comparable graphics, and it’s a video game.

The snake scene went from o.k. CGI to rubber snake.

When Indy opens the giant obelisk entrance to the temple/spaceship, why were there dead bodies at the bottom of the apparent trap? It’s not exactly a big boulder; i.e. it was pretty freakin’ elaborate for an entrance booby trap that apparently was reset since the conquistadors were there.

Why did Indy blow up the jungle cutting machine? It was not really even in their way. It was crossing their path, but not actively attacking them.

The ant scene failed because you knew that the big russian was going to end up getting punched into the ant pile and eaten. With Raiders there was the constant threat of the propeller blades in the infamous fight scene with the big bald german, but you really did not expect the german to be utter shredded by the blades.

The monkeys were just gay. I think everyone in the theater was sighing during that obvious George Lucas contribution to the movie.

There is a lot more that I could nit pick, but to be honest, not really much happened in the movie.

Last week a script sold for “six figures” (and I doubt it sold for $100,001, most likely $500,000) to MGM. It’s Title: “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

This week has not been the greatest. This upcoming week one of my best friends of all time is getting married. However, I have nailed the beginning of the movie pretty much down pat. So hopefully it will be written by the end of the week.