Hulk

He’s Addicted to Rage-ohol

By Fearless Young Orphan



The Hulk (2003)

Directed by Ang Lee





Here is a very interesting Chunk of Awfulness – a bad

film that makes me feel guilty for trashing it. I know

that I don’t like it. It’s dull and depressing, completely

missing its own point. But it has such a hurt dignity,

such sad-eyed characters, so much woeful staring, that

I feel as if I’m teasing someone whose dog just died.

This film has its share of fans who feel it is underrated and actually a quality piece of

work; I’d nearly agree with them if not for the fact that it is, at its heart, supposed to be

about a guy who changes into a big green temper-tantrum throwing toddler when he gets

pissed off. I was never able to reconcile the human drama, which is endless and fairly

tedious, with this outrageous conceit.



So according to the sources on imdb.com, Ang Lee’s idea was to make a “superhero

tragedy.” Very well. He got the “tragedy” part right, as very little happens that isn’t laden

with misery and despair, but I think he forgot the “superhero,” part, because our Hulk in

this case is treated like a dangerous disease and doesn’t do much of anything that is

heroic. To my mind, a “superhero” is more active than passive – whenever Hulk gets

active, he’s into breaking shit, and his heroism is passive dumb luck with a lot of collateral

damage.



I’ll pause a moment to reference the Marvel comics, having to admit I know almost

nothing of the Hulk series. I have heard that this movie goes almost completely off-canon.

So I won’t be able to compare this to the Marvel superhero adventures. My knowledge of

the Incredible Hulk is 1) the TV show from the late 70s, starring Bill Bixby, which I LOVED

as a child and which I can still watch without shame because it’s rather surprisingly good,

and 2) the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton in the Hulk role, which

was entertaining if not completely enthralling. I won’t get into comparisons too much;

there’s little point. The only difference I’ll mention is that the 2008 film was willing to be

aware of the plot’s intrinsic silliness and work with it. I saw Ang Lee’s Hulk on its

theatrical release in 2003 and was extremely

disappointed that it turned David Banner into a

psychotic villain. That was so wrong. Also, I was

quite bored with it. In the theater, where it’s

harder to escape, I thought this movie would

never freaking end.



Now I have watched it again for the sake of

chunking, in a situation where I can turn it off

and recuperate from the tedium. Plus, I know

ahead of time that David Banner is going to be a

villainous jackass. So I was less offended (though

still perturbed) by these previous problems and

more concerned about the imbalance of the

movie as a whole. It’s just way off, the deformed

lovechild of a real scientific drama and the

gigantic, green, literally heavy-handed metaphor

for “the monster in all of us.”

Der Unglaubliche Hulk! AWESOME!

Going through a plot that is fairly well-seated in

the cultural awareness is sort of a drag, but I have to do it this time because Ang Lee

warped the story to fit with some inner fantasy of his own. In this version, David Banner

was an overly enthusiastic genetic researcher whose military bosses denied him the use of

human subject testing. He therefore did what these guys always do – he tested on himself,

frigging around with his own DNA. Then his young wife got pregnant and they had baby

Bruce, and David realized he passed his frigged-up genes along to the child.



When his project is cancelled, a fit of hulky rage leaves Bruce’s mother dead and David in

prison, so Bruce is adopted and raised by others and he doesn’t remember his early

childhood except in nightmares. Bruce has blocked all memories of the day of his

mother’s death – a fact which is laden with significance in the mind of the movie but which

actually, when you think about it, means almost nothing in the context of the film.

Consider it. Would it have changed anything about the story if Bruce had not witnessed his

mother’s death, or if he had always been able to remember it? Well, I admit the movie

would have been a lot shorter, because a painful amount of time is spent trying to unlock

his memories of that terrible day.



Now that Bruce Banner has grown up (and is portrayed by a rather vacant-looking Eric

Bana), he’s working in genetic research (a coincidence unexplained by the film except with

the vague term of “predestination”). His research partner is Betty Ross (not Betsy Ross,

designer of the American flag) who has apparently just ended their “relationship” because

Bruce is “emotionally inaccessible.” This is definitely the best kind of breaking up because

regardless of whether their “relationship” is over, Betty still works with Bruce, gazes at

him with heartbroken adoration, moves heaven and earth to help him whenever she can,

protects him, cuddles him, and looks very interested in his gigantic green side, which is a

kinky avenue that a Rated PG-13 film isn’t going to travel. Betty is played by Jennifer

Connelly, who is a remarkably lovely woman and can, in fact, gaze with such intense

heartbroken adoration that she is one of the reasons why I almost can’t berate this film.

God forbid I make her feel any worse

than she does already. She does a

great job in the role, but I’m not sure

if that’s a compliment because

basically, she’s employing exactly the

same woeful gazing she did in The

House of Sand and Fog and A Beautiful

Mind and Dark Waters. If you need a

tragically beautiful woman to gaze the

hell out your movie, call Jennifer

Connelly.

Oh god make her STOP STARING AT ME!

Back to the film and the plot. Betty’s

father is a military general (Sam Elliott) who is estranged from his daughter and is going

to serve as the leader-who-doesn’t-get-it, resulting in a lot of expense reports needing to

be filed. Bruce’s father David (Nick Nolte, looking like a walking disaster) has recently

been released from prison and comes to find his son, taking a job as a janitor in their

building which somehow, and in spite of what you’d assume would be security measures,

gives him access to everything in the laboratory and the ability to sabotage Bruce’s

experiments and then do a few of his own. Also, he has a lot of lab equipment at his nasty

house, obviously bought from a junkyard dealer who likes to manufacture crystal meth.



The sabotage causes Bruce to be permeated with gamma radiation. The method by which

this happens is rather coincidental, so it’s lucky for Evil David Banner that his haphazard

plan worked out perfectly. What should have killed an ordinary man just triggers Bruce’s

wonky genes and makes him Hulk out whenever he gets upset. And of course he has such

an upsetting life, and he’s stuck in such a dismal movie, that we can assume this will

happen with great frequency.



After that, the plot more or less descends into one dreadful situation after another, most of

which end by either Betty Ross gazing with tears brimming in her lovely eyes, or Bruce

Banner Hulking out and wrecking a lot of stuff. We also get to watch a remarkably strange

performance by Nick Nolte as the older, crazier David Banner (Bill Bixby – my expired

darling – do not fear, for he will never replace you in my heart) who growls and snarls and

generally acts like a sleazy serial killer as he endeavors to turn himself into something as

cool as his son.



Naturally this film will invite comparisons to its sort-of remake, sort of rescue-job The

Incredible Hulk (2008), but what Ang Lee ended up with is actually quite a bit more like

David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly (1985). They are both films about loving

relationships torn asunder by deadly dealings with science. Cronenberg’s film was also

grim, but a great deal more sentimental, creepy and gross; it’s a horror classic. The

creature that Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) becomes is hideous, inhuman, barely

scratching itself to a merciful death. The creature that Bruce Banner becomes is, in theory,

a violent terror but is, in reality, kind of a joke. He’s only theoretically frightening in the

confines of his movie world, but to the audience, he’s either the archetype of a big dumb

jock or sort of an adorable idiot.



Some viewers complained that the CGI on the Hulk

looked bad, that he was more like Shrek than the

Hulk they expected – I agree that he looks cartoony,

but my greater concern is this: how exactly do you

take an enormous green muscle-man with bad hair

and make him look realistic? Think about the Hulk

as portrayed by Lou Ferrigno on the TV show; Duuuuuuuuuuh



technically this is about the dopiest-looking TV

monster ever. It didn’t matter. The difference is that I believed in that Hulk, believed that

he would ultimately do the right thing. The Hulk as imagined by Ang Lee doesn’t look

smart enough to make that kind of decision, and he’ll attack anything that’s coming at him,

including soldiers who are protecting the rest of us. The movie makes a rather awkward

effort to suggest that nobody is actually killed by the Hulk, but I find that quite hard to

believe. And troops are not a conscience-free kill, even though they may be shooting at

him. It doesn’t work that way.



Actually if you think very much about the TV show, you’ll recall that it, too, took a rather

serious viewpoint of the whole Hulk experience. David Banner as portrayed by Bill Bixby

was a sad, regretful guy and the entire point of the show was that he was on the run,

Fugitive-style, never able to settle down in one place, and that he was condemned, Kung

Fu-style, to always be running headfirst into local trouble that would invariably lead to

him getting angry. And you wouldn’t like him when he was angry. He’d turn into the Hulk,

who would fix everything by causing massive property damage but no actual deaths. To

some extent the show had a tongue-in-cheek humor about itself, but mostly it was quite a

serious weekly action-drama. So why could that work, in this watcher’s opinion, while I

persist in nagging Ang Lee?



The difference once again falls to an active versus passive. The TV show’s David Banner

actively dove into a dangerous experiment that caused his mutation, he was actively

seeking to cure himself, actively traveling from place to place searching for people or

things that could help him, actively avoiding capture, actively inserting himself into the

problems he encounters and trying to help others. Or, in other words, he was a

beleaguered superhero.



Hulk’s Bruce Banner is so damn passive. He’s different because of his inherited genes and

through no action of his own, the laboratory accident that mutates him is sabotage and

unintentional on his part, and once he starts “hulking out,” he does nothing but look tired,

troubled, and confused, and nothing else happens in the film that isn’t inflicted upon him

by someone else. Only once does it appear that he’s trying to figure anything out about his

condition – he looks at some of his own blood and then

thinks, “Hmm, that’s weird,” and gets so upset that he Hulks

out and trashes the lab. He becomes a non-character in his

own film, nothing but the subject of a series of tests and

obstacles that are created by others so they can watch him

turn big and ugly. Or in effect, Bruce Banner and the Hulk

are upstaged by Betty Ross, who at least seems to be trying

to accomplish something. When you have this utterly

passive Bruce Banner, you can’t engage audience sympathy,

A microscope means “scientist.” and you can’t understand why a knockout like Betty Ross

loves him.



I’ll draw another comparison. The Phantom Menace is a film so terrible that it is actually

able to decrease the quality of other films – perhaps the first instance I have ever seen of a

movie with contagious badness. One mistake it made was that Anakin Skywalker “saves

the day” completely by accident – that little bastard doesn’t do anything special. When

you take decision-making out of the hands of your movie’s hero (using the term loosely)

you have robbed him of his heroism.



The first half of the film is not quite awful. It’s dull, but it’s not terrible. The truly terrible

comes in the second half, when there is a lot of filler on a military base with Betty wringing

her hands and trying to “help” Bruce, accomplishing nothing, then getting kicked off the

base, so the bad scientists can start poking Bruce with pointed sticks. The scientists

discover that poking Bruce with enough pointed sticks will make him angry, and they

don’t like him when he’s angry, and he escapes and then kills or at least seriously injures a

lot of troops, which just adds to the whole grim distasteful feel of the thing. Hulk goes

merrily skipping to San Francisco, downing helicopters and tanks along the way, until he

and Betty have a reunion that calms him down. Then, he’s back in the military’s hands

again. Go, passive Hulk, go!



But we might still not reach the depths of true awfulness until for some stupid reason

Bruce and David Banner are allowed to face off for a father-son talk. Like the military

couldn’t see this coming, the discussion turns heated. Oh, by the way, David can transform

too, into a creature that takes on the molecular characteristics of his environment, which

he accomplished by conducting another really lucky experiment in an unguarded lab.

More fascinating than the men’s transformations is Nick Nolte’s over-the-top

performance, and by now we understand that David Banner is the super villain and a big

fat jerk too, so it sure is lucky when the Hulk manages to accidentally kill him.



The movie still isn’t over. We get to see a tedious conversation between Betty and General

Ross, and a final “stinger” scene that is more interesting and has a better superhero feel

than the entire movie that preceded it.



I hate to say this is a dreadful film, because Ang Lee has some tricks that are terrific,

employing charming comic-book editing and a few really amazing effects (the lightening

and the Hulk in the clouds- wow!). There is an intense scene of the Hulk fighting three

Hulked-out dogs, which is really the best action in the film. I do not think it is a

coincidence that this is the single scene in which Bruce Banner is acting on his own – he

goes to rescue Betty from the dogs, the only truly heroic thing he does in the entire film.

But this is perhaps seven minutes of an almost two-hour film, and seven minutes of

greatness do not cure 100 minutes of the passive doldrums and a near-complete lack of a

superhero in the superhero tragedy. If this movie were only about a man who was

transforming into something that could support the dead-serious tone around him (like

Seth Brundle in The Fly), we might be all right. But a big passive green Marvel Comics

lunkhead? No. I remain completely unconvinced.