For a brief time, in my adolescence, I was deeply into The Incredible Hulk. I inherited a solid run of Peter David’s work on the title, and I loved how this book, ostensibly about a rage monster who likes to smash things, was giving me scenes of Bruce Banner in therapy. I started counseling at a young age, so this connection was both very pure to me and very funny in the context of the book itself. David’s work hasn’t aged particularly well, but I still enjoy a lot of what he did there, and it formed a lot of the basis for my appreciation of the Hulk’s first trip to the big screen.
Hulk
Ang Lee (director), Frederick Elmes (cinematographer), Tim Squyres (editor), James Schamus, Michael France, John Turman (writers)
Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte
Universal Studios
June 20, 2003
In 2003, there weren’t established cinematic universes. Technology was finally hitting the point where these characters could be realized the way that people had always dreamed of, and with the achievement of this standard, production companies were trying everything they could, wanting to see what stuck. I was interested in Hulk from the start; I could pretend it was because of Ang Lee’s reputation or any number of things, but really I just kept thinking of those David comics. I was so into the idea of this movie that I went to a Superbowl party just to watch the half-time spot drop on a big screen.
The thing about Hulk as a comic character, and as a comic book, is that it doesn’t really have roots in superhero conventions. It’s easy to see how it was lumped in together; Marvel did have plenty of hero books even in its early years, and if it wanted these characters to play well together, a certain amount of remolding was required. That said, the story of Hulk is ultimately a horror story; it’s the story of a boy, his family, and his trauma. To cement that for his film, Lee borrowed from a couple of sources in updating the Hulk’s origin story; the extensive opening credits detail his father’s maniacal quest to achieve regeneration on a molecular level. When all of his tests fail, David Banner resorts to testing on himself; it’s only after this point that the first mention of Bruce occurs; the senior Dr. Banner borrowed from all manner of life to create his own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of a baby boy.
It is a particular horror, to be betrayed by one’s parents. It is a wound that never closes, and Lee takes the time to explore what that means for Bruce throughout the film. It’s not just that his father is unstable, violent, full of rage, it’s that, ultimately, he is self-obsessed; he is only concerned with his son in so far as that the boy represents the possibility to continue his research; when he realizes that his illicit work has been found out and the military is coming for him, he attempts to murder his child rather than give him up.
The rage these events spawn in Bruce takes a lifetime to mature; and throughout that lifetime, we’re shown snippets of the way he copes with that. He is not a child who expresses himself openly, and it’s easy to infer why; to do so would be to draw attention, and to draw attention would only make things worse. So his mannerisms tend toward extreme self-control; he represses emotions from the age of a toddler, to an extent that even other parents note the odd behavior; his mother brushes off the observation, pointing out that “he’s always been like that.” This behavior continues through to adulthood; our first introduction to Betty Ross establishes that the two have already dated and broken up; Bruce’s inability to express himself, to engage emotionally, is what drives the wedge between them. We’re even shown scenes of this here and there; when Betty is personal, vulnerable, Bruce is analytical, calm, reassuring. It’s apparent that he means well, but meaning well is not what Betty is trying to pull from him in those moments; she wants to bond.
Lee pulls these moments out of every scene, laying them subtly throughout the entire film; it takes forty-two minutes for Bruce’s first transformation to occur, and every single one of those moments is conveying information that Lee feels is important for us, the viewers, to know. He lays the dynamics of Bruce’s relationship with Betty out carefully, he lays the motivations of both of their fathers out, he demonstrates the difference between Bruce and his father in their actions; when confronted with danger, David attempts to cut the chaff of his life in order to escape, while Bruce throws himself on the figurative pyre to save others. All of these moments reach a head after the lab accident that triggers his first transformation. When Hulk is first revealed, the avatar of a lifetime of rage, those first expressions of it are furtive, accidental. His transformation is slow, painful, physically repellent, he stumbles through the rooms and corridors of the laboratory, his shoulders hunched, his arms drawn in, hugging himself. Trying to contain himself. Bruce has seen enough of unbound rage to fear it.
Afterward, the change in Bruce’s demeanor is striking; Betty finds him asleep on top of his bed the next morning. In a delightful scene, as she’s trying to draw more out of him, Bruce is hunched over the table, eating a breakfast of what looks like leftover penne with his bare hands. It’s marvelous, what Ang accomplishes here, showing rather than telling, letting the actors display their characters through their actions rather than laying everything out in each beat of dialogue. Bruce, the paragon of control, devours his food like an animal instead; Betty watches him in mingled curiosity and horror, trying to maintain her focus on the conversation as she witnesses this utterly bizarre scene playing out before her.
This is where the next bit of borrowing makes itself apparent; as I watched scenes featuring the Hulk fighting mutant dogs (the short word is that they’re great, I will brook no argument) and helicopters in the desert, the thing that struck me was how it resembled the mannerisms in King Kong movies. Hulk and Kong are very similar; they are both outsiders, too large for their worlds and struggling to understand it changing around them, each being attacked by men with a thirst for blood.
Still, though, Hulk is not only about imitation; one of the truly great things about this film, fifteen years on, is the way that it proved prescient for the slate of things to come. I stated already that Hulk is not a superhero movie; he does not don a costume and save the world. However, it is still a comic book movie, through its entire DNA. It’s evident in the scene transitions, some of which are truly breathtaking, featuring inset panels, or stacked frames laid directly along a horizon line, so that two separate frames detailing two separate camera angles nonetheless form a complete picture. It’s evident in the comic-book style lettering that is used for the credits; not just the opening ones, where most modern hero movies like to insert their character, but for the entirety of the end credits as well. It’s also evident in the set design, high-color laboratories, some painted in primary colors, some in purples and greens, evocative of the Hulk’s own color scheme.
It’s those little touches that prove how thoughtful the film is, and why it still stands up to me as the best iteration of the character, including the much-beloved Mark Ruffalo version. For all that I like Ruffalo’s acting for what it is, the fact remains that Hulk is a side character in the MCU, and so is treated with the carelessness that a side character often is. It’s funny to audiences when he swings Loki around like a caveman’s club in The Avengers, and those same audiences casually ignore the glee he takes in destruction as the Chitauri attack. By contrast, Lee’s Hulk (both because Lee directed the film and because Lee himself provided the motion capture) is trying to do what any child overwhelmed with rage and hurt does; he is attempting to get clear. He engages in combat only defensively; he acts to prevent a threat and disengages as soon as that threat is gone.
These thoughtful moments continue throughout the film, and they’re anchored by superb acting; every cast member spends a film that is ultimately about emotion expressing themselves fully and deeply. For all that Sam Elliott’s General Ross harbors an animosity toward Banner, he draws an engagement with the Hulk to the desert, where there are no civilians. When the Hulk inevitably does land in the city, Ross immediately backs off, letting his daughter Betty in to talk the Hulk down (compare this to the modern MCU and its enthusiastic engagement with wholesale destruction in the middle of downtown New York on a repeated basis). When Eric Bana is demonstrating Bruce’s repression and reserve, he’s still engaging with his costars on an intellectual level; Bruce is friendly, if distant, like a coworker. This sets him apart from Norton’s iteration, who felt tired throughout the entirety of his film, or Ruffalo, who plays Bruce’s idiosyncrasies for a laugh. Even the maligned “jumping through the desert” scenes are fabulous; they invest us in the world in a way that modern comic book movies do not. We can feel the distance between the desert and San Francisco with each leap, we see the effect he leaves upon the world in scenes where he bounces off of a roadway directly in front of an oncoming car, before leaving that driver alone with his shock, the Hulk having already moved on.
This isn’t to say every moment is perfect; there are certainly those that fall flat, such as Nick Nolte’s biting into a power cable, half on the verge of capering like a jester, and to pretend that Bruce’s origin isn’t over-complicated would be absurd. Like Peter David’s work on the comic book, the CGI has certainly aged, and none too gracefully. Still, though, Hulk is a comic book movie with heart and thought behind every frame, which is far more of a pedigree than most movies in its class can boast.
