Hulk (2003)

 “Puny human!”

This is, incredibly, the first ever Hulk film... and it’s utterly, irredeemably awful. It’s a shame: the film is well-directed by Ang Lee with some nice visual touches. But it’s essentially a very, very, well-polished turd.

Part of why it's awful is the poor performance of Eric Bana as Bruce and Jennifer Connelly as Betty. Neither of them are exactly favourite actors of mine; they bring a touch of plywood to this as they do to most of what they do. Admittedly Sam Elliott does a good job with a badly written Thunderbolt Ross, while Nick Nolte is genuinely excellent as Bruce's dad, who also doubles as the Abomination.

But what truly dooms this film is the script, which completely fails to get what makes the Hulk interesting, as well as failing to give the characters and humanity or to give us decent dialogue; some of the lines are cringeworthy indeed. The whole concept is misconceived, drawing on the retconning of Bruce's childhood in the comics of the '80s and '90s under John Byrne and (much better) Peter David, beginning with his father's experiments with gamma radiation in the '60s and dealing with repressed childhood memories. Yet there's a reason this was a retcon; you need to start by just doing the gamma ray explosion and the fun Jekyll and Hyde "Hulk smash" stuff that the Hulk is about. All this childhood stuff needs us to know Bruce/Hulk first so we can start to explore the psyche behind those repressed memories- and make a link between the Hulk's rage and childhood abuse that the film doesn't really make.

Bruce and Betty have no real chemistry or, indeed, personalities, and Betty seems to be there mainly to act as the Faye Wray to the Hulk's King Kong. This may be a film with lots of genuinely cool action set pieces but it has no charm, no characters and is just dull, dull, dull.

The Mandalorian: Chapter 7- The Reckoning

"Tea?"

This penultimate episode does nothing to stop me seeing this excellent as pretty much a Western in terms of plot, themes, characters and archetype- you could pretty much take away all the robots and spaceships and tell this whole story, flabby middle episodes and all, in the American West. This is, of course, no bad thing, and is a big part of why this genre series doesn't come across as mere fan fiction- there's lots of fan service here and there, of course, and rightly so, but fan service doesn't drive the plot so much as the notion that a Mandalorian's gotta do what a Mandalorian's gotta do.

So when Mando gets that message from Greef that he can come back and have all forgiven by the Guild if he kills his former employer, an ex-Imperial type who has the place swarming with Stormtroopers. Only here is it made clear that we are not too many years after Return of the Jedi- is this Imperial remnant a harbinger of the First Order?

Our Ugnaught friend gets a name- Kuill- and a backstory- he's moral and dignified, earning his freedom from centuries of slavery by the skill of his hands, and gently repairing IG-11 as a harmless protective and domestic droid in an extended flashback evoking parenthood. This, of course, makes us like him. So they kill him, the bastards.

It's also nice to see Cara- a person Mando respects, and perhaps almost a friend. It's also nice that Greef admits and abandons his proposed double cross after Baby Yoda heals him- this sort of thing gives the characters depth and agency, and makes them feel like people rather than plot functions. Greef May have been an antagonist but he is, in his way, an honourable man. Although I love the fact that the whole load of them are ambushed right after the line “Nothing can go wrong”.

Then things get intense. There are hordes of Stormtroopers, some of them those cool scouts with their speeder bikes, and Werner Herzog is simply superb- I love how he’s a genuinely ideological Imperial, believing the Empire brings order and not chaos (like Rome) and genuinely puzzled as to why Mandalor had to resist.

And, if things weren’t intense enough, we end with our gang all captured as a big TIE fighter lands and out comes the Big Bad, one Moff Gideon. More please. This is awesome.

The Mandalorian: Chapter 2- The Child

“I’m a Mandalorian. Weapons are part of my religion”

A short second episode follows the explosive first one and, well, if we’re talking pure plot, it’s entirely filler. But that’s not the point, of course; this is episodic telly, not cinema, and the advantage of that is that stories get a chance to be a bit picaresque, to breathe, to let the characters get a bit of development without rushing towards the resolution of the plot. One could almost say that good storytelling is like good sex. Ahem.

Anyway, this episode is essentially thirty-one minutes of the Mandalorian being delayed from leaving Tattoine  with his baby Yoda quarry because some Jawa have nicked his ship. That's it. But so much fascinating stuff happens, not least of which is that the first ten or so minutes are free as the camera lingers on Mandy and baby Yoda in what I, as a geek, have to refer to as Tenser's Floating Crib (did I think of that, Dave, or did you once use the phrase in passing?) as they walk for a bit and discover the theft of said ship as Mandy does a load of impressive Indiana Jones stuff trying manfully to besiege the Jawas' big tracked vehicle thingy. Through all of this, the camera shows little Yoda watching silently and thinking its little baby thoughts. Film critics speak of the male gaze; this episode has a lot of the baby Yoda gaze.

The only other character is Mandy's mate from last episode, played by Nick Nolte under a lot of makeup for someone so famous. The subtitles tell me that he's an Ugnaught, which is a cool detail, and the two part on friendly and honourable terms.

The main bit of coolness, though, is of course where baby Yoda shows the Force is strong with him by raising his cute little hand and levitating the rhino thing. This is several layers of cool. Two episodes in and I'm enjoying this very much.

The Mandalorian: Chapter 1- The Mandalorian

“Is it true that you guys never take off your helmets?"

It's here, at last. Disney Plus has reached the UK which, aside from a bunch of Star Wars films I need to belatedly blog, means the arrival of a certain acclaimed series, the title of which my inner voice always renders in the tune of The Pixies' "My Veloria(n)". And yes, you're welcome to that earworm.

I recall surprisingly little of Mandalorians. I know Boba Fett well from the original trilogy, and I recall that, at some point in the prequels (which I'll be blogging soon), he gets retconned as a clone with a Kiwi accent. That's it. I'm a Star Wars fan, but not an uber-hardcore one.

But I'm enough of a fan to notice all the many Easter Eggs, from the wipes between scenes taken from Akira Kurosawa via George Lucas to Salacious Crumb in a cage via all the many familiar alien races and tech- and an environment that, despite the preponderance of CGI,  just feels like Star Wars- starting with the hive of scum and villainy in which we first meet our eponymous Mandalorian, acquiring and delivering his quarry to an employer who turns out to be played by none other than Carl Weathers, the first of two legendary septuagenarians to appear in this first episode.

It's both brave and interesting to have an amoral bounty hunter protagonist who isn't particularly talkative, and whose depths as a character will be left to unfold slowly- and that's even before we get to the fact that, like Judge Dredd, he never removes his helmet.

The tone isn't unrelentingly grim and gritty, though- this is Star Wars. So we get the mystery of who is the Mandalorian's new employer and his hired former Imperial Stormtroopers- said employer played, bizarrely by auteur Bavarian director Werner Herzog- and his elliptically discussed target. We get Taika Waititi as IG-11, a superbly animated CGI version of IG-88 from all our Kenner plastic figure childhoods. We get the physical comedy of our protagonist trying to ride a Blurgg- a female one, of course, as he males are always eaten during mating.

Intriguingly, too, we get some back story- our hero is paid in Biskar, a substance which he gives to a Mandalorian woman who seems to be an armourer for unspecified but perhaps ritual purposes that hint at a forgotten history and culture, no doubt to be explored further. We even get teasing flashbacks.

We end with a sadly much-spoiled revelation that the target is a cute baby Yoda. This may be thirty-eight minutes of pure fan service, with the carbonite and the land speeders, but it's bloody good fan service. I'm already hooked.