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These pants look like pants from a video game. A video game from 2003, when this movie came out. The fake-looking surface is a texturing/shader issue like I talked about before. It's pretty egregious, but that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that they appear to be painted on him.

See, a character moves around when you move a skeleton, which is pretty much what it sounds like -- imagine a bunch of joints connected by wire, and then you sculpt soft clay around it. You bend the joints, and the sculpture moves. There's two ways of making the model move. One is that you say it's pretty much like clay that's attached to the skeleton. This is called "skinning." When it goes wrong, you get melty faces and Gumby elbows.

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(A lot of tutorials cover the "collapsing elbow" problem.)

TrueCG.com

The other thing you can do is a simulation, which is something you do for hair and cloth and tassels and maybe dangling genitals or something. You tell it where it's attached, or pinned, to the skin or skeleton, and it sticks there, and everywhere else it uses a bunch of complex physics equations to tell it how to move. Like with a skirt, you tell it the waistband is "pinned" to the character, and the rest of it figures out what to do based on the pinning and air resistance and whatever it crashes into.

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The Hulk's pants had a minimal amount of simulation, if any, so it looks like a second skin, which looks weird most of the time, but looks absolutely bizarre during certain movements, like this:

What the hell are those pants doing?

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PANTS DON'T DO THAT.

THIS IS WHAT A WOMAN IN A BIKINI WOULD LOOK LIKE IF PANTS DID THAT:

Getty

OK, I've got to go watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again so I can stop being mad at Ang Lee. Now that you are a CG expert, I will leave you with this clip as a test to see if you can identify what parts went wrong. (Hint: Everything.)

For more from Christina, check out The 5 Miserable VFX Jobs That Make Movies Possible and 4 Reasons 3-D Movies Don't Have to Suck.