Despite the ambition and strangeness of Ang Lee's attempt at successfully bringing the Jolly Green Giant to the big screen, it never really works in any conventional sense of the word. Many put that down to stilted dialogue or wooden performances, or simply the fact that there just wasn't quite enough HULK SMASH-ing in the film. However, the sorest thumb is probably Lee's decision to shoot and edit Hulk in splitscreens that are made to resemble comic book panels, which doesn't work for a plethora of reasons. Chief among them being that the audience doesn't know where to look or what's important at any given moment. Despite both being visual mediums, movies and comic books are wildly different art forms. There are no time restrictions placed on how long a comic should take to read, as opposed to a film's objective and unchanging running time. As a result, viewers of Hulk are missing half of what Lee's trying to show them when looking at one panel instead of another. It was an admirable but foolish attempt as comics are designed to be read a panel at a time, not as a whole. While many comics creators have done interesting work with panel layouts that make the page itself part of the story, the cinema screen is too rigid a canvas to get anywhere close to replicating the experience of reading a comic.
