Ang Lee has a good eye for the very small and the very big in The Hulk, but not for the things, like plot and character, in between. The film opens with a dazzling montage of microscopic doodads a-twirl like a ’60s light show, and near the end of the film the hero has inflated to the size of a green dirigible and does battle with a protean demiurgic entity twice as big as he is. But the so-called human element that fills out much of the film’s 137 minutes remains abstract, cliché’d, and unconvincing.

After the great success of the (in my opinion) overrated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee perhaps has decided that the epic and operatic is the way to go. And the mythic, too. So like the Hulk himself, the film swells beyond any recognizably human proportions into a huge, pretentious, CGI-rendered cartoon. And Lee misses the point of this cartoon. Like most Marvel heroes — Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, etc. — the Hulk is a whiner, an adolescent-minded neurotic with latent megalomania. Someone just like us. But unlike most of us, puny human Bruce Banner (Eric Bana, ferocious in Chopper, here looking beside the point), a nerdy genetic researcher, gets to act out his dark side when he blows up to the size of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters after getting dosed with gamma rays.

It’s anger, of course, that sets him off (in a New York Times piece, co-screenwriter/producer James Schamus compared him, without embarrassment, to Achilles in the Iliad), and as we all know, it’s the little things that get you riled: insecurity, frustration, relationships, telemarketing, the Republicans.

That’s not enough for Lee, though. He’s looking for the essential, the cosmic. Oedipus, for example. It’s not enough that people make fun of Bruce’s appearance and that his girlfriend, Betty (long-suffering Jennifer Connelly, moving from A Beautiful Mind to an ugly body), has just dumped him. Bruce also has to have recurrent nightmares, repressed primal memories of his biological parents (they vanished when he was a toddler). Having endured the ponderous film’s prologue, we know what’s up. Bruce’s dad, David, worked on genetic-regeneration experiments for the government in the Cold War days. A typical overreaching scientist, he experimented on himself. Whatever mischief David inflicted on his own genetic make-up, he passed on to his son Bruce, and when the government shut him down while he was searching for a cure, well, he lost his temper and ...

Meanwhile, the adult Bruce has inadvertently (and redundantly) jump-started his transformative nature by risking his life to save a colleague from the aforementioned gamma accident (might as well throw in some Christ references). Instead of killing him, the rays make him feel "reborn." So does the surprise visit from dad (Nick Nolte, gloriously derelict and out of control), who provokes that recurrent flashback of something terrible in Bruce’s past lurking behind a closed door. The nascent, inexplicable rage explodes, and so does Bruce. He grows huge, green, baby-faced, wordless with fury. He bursts out of his clothes (but keeps his pants on) and out of the realm of real life as he rips his lab apart.

Many might relate to trashing one’s workplace, but other than that, the Hulk seems like what he really is, an expensive visual effect. Nothing links Banner and the Beast, so most genuine emotional resonance goes the way of cheap thrills. That despite the filmmakers’ contrived melodramatic plotting and grab bag of pseudo-mythical allusions. Betsy’s father, for example, is General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliott), the man who pulled the plug on Bruce’s father’s experiments way back when. Now, neither dad wants to see his kid involved with the other, so David sends out his three Cerberus-like mutant dogs to hunt down Betty, and Thunderbolt sends out the Marines to rein in the Hulk.

Like the Middle East conflict, though, the Hulk becomes angrier, bigger, more spectacular, and more tiresome as his enemies try to take him down. Not that these action scenes don’t catch the eye. Kids of all ages will delight as attack helicopters chase the Hulk around the rim of a canyon, and they’ll mutter "cool" when he tosses an Abrams tank a half-mile into the desert. And Lee’s innovative editing method, a kind of Rubik’s Cube effect meant to imitate the panel structure and exaggerated compositions of a comic book, is at first pretty neat. But like the comic books, that method is static, verbose, and overwrought. Long before the Hulk has metamorphosed into a towering id-like titan battling what looks like a giant, anthropomorphic lava lamp, it’s time for Lee to come to his senses and sensibility again.