In Defense of Ang Lee’s 2003 ‘Hulk’

In Defense of Ang Lee’s 2003 ‘Hulk’

Art: Matt Cokeley

So let’s get right to it: people think Hulk is a bad superhero movie. Well, it’s not a superhero movie. At all. That’s the wrong category. It’s not a good musical or rom-com either. And don’t blame Ang Lee for the confusion, he knew exactly what kind of movie he was making.

Ta-da.

Hulk is a monster movie. A comic book monster movie. Ang Lee did not copy a shot from “Bride of Frankenstein” by accident. Something from “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” would have worked just as well. And if that’s still too subtle Lee also just says it, if that helps any. People ask him, and then he says it. So…

CBR: “Do you see the Hulk as a superhero?”

Lee: “No.”

CBR: “He’s kind of a green King Kong, right?”

Lee: “He’s more monster. More monster of a horror picture than superhero, although he does have a bridge and all that but I never see him as a superhero.”

Ang Lee’s Hulk doesn’t have a mission. He is not here to help. In fact, if you could help him, that would be great, because everyone else he meets tries to kill him. More or less immediately. With tanks and missiles, they even nuke him for god’s sake, it’s not subtle.

This changes everything. When you watch the movie as it’s meant to be… it. Is. Fantastic, it truly is. Fascinating at the very very least. Even the stupid Hulk dogs make sense. They may look bad but they’re not pointless, they actually serve a major purpose. And I can prove it. It’s gonna take a minute but I can prove it.

As with damn near everything else in the pre-MCU, the most significant problem with Hulk is Avi Arad. He and Ike Perlmutter picked over the bankrupt bones of Marvel and took control of it in 1996, which does not qualify someone to be a producer, as he enthusiastically proved every single chance he got, including as the sole producer of Hulk.

His first move here was to hire Ang Lee to not direct an Ang Lee movie. Arad clearly wanted a fun summer superhero movie, all of the marketing says that (hence the tagline “Unleash The Hero Within”), and to make his failure complete he even got a Velvet Revolver song for the end credits. Their very first song, in fact. So picture Arad poolside at Marmont yelling into a phone to secure the first Velvet Revolver song and Lee in a dark room editing his somber monster movie. Ending an Ang Lee film and then immediately hearing Velvet Fucking Revolver is about as jarring as opening the front door and having someone throw an alligator on you. No one does that, that’s not a real thing. It’s not even remotely close to being a real thing that anyone would ever do.

But a movie can, and so Hulk does. It’s as if the producer and director had never met.

Thankfully it was the director who did the casting. Lee first saw Eric Bana in Chopper then cast him as Bruce Banner. Before starting this article I remembered his work here as good but maybe not his best, and he does have an amazing one-shot fight scene in a subway station assuming you conflate Hulk and Hanna like I apparently did. I stand by my assessment nonetheless and don’t get why Bana isn’t a bigger star.

It’s maybe important to mention that Bruce Banner is not the same character that Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno played on the CBS show, The Incredible Hulk. That was David Banner. Totally different person. This might be one of the things that are canon but confusing to the general audience. Why would there be two different Hulks with virtually the same name and backstory? Who knows. Not me, in case you were wondering. It’s insufferable even for comic books if we’re being honest.

Jennifer Connelly plays The Scientist With Rich Girl Hair Who Is Unbelievably Attractive, again, and let’s just address the obvious: god damn.

Jennifer Connelly has been impossibly beautiful every single day of her life. That streak continues unabated in Hulk. More importantly, she is every bit the equal in a really good cast, including Nick Nolte, who plays… um.

Okay, this is gonna take a second, just so you know. WAY longer than anything even remotely reasonable.

In the comics, the character Nolte plays is named Brian Banner, but in the movie that’s changed to David Banner, and this character is also unrelated in any way from who Bixby played (David Banner).

Brian Banner, now called David Banner, is the son of Bruce Banner, whom we never meet, and the father of Bruce Banner, who is the one Bana plays.

That first Bruce Banner that we never meet was extremely abusive and beat the shit out of Brian (Nolte) as a child, so when Brian later had a son, he named him Bruce (Bana) simply so he could beat up “Bruce Banner”.

As god as my witness, all of that is accurate and true, I’m honestly not trying to screw with you. There was apparently some kind of name shortage back when they did all this and they had to ration the three they had.

So yes, Nolte’s character is quite insane, and his son Bruce is more than a little dicey because of that. Which seems reasonable. The confrontation between Bruce and David at the end feels very much like a play, and not the happy fun kind, but rather the kind where a father accidentally kills his wife while trying to stab his son to death because yes that shit absolutely happens in Hulk. The father-son dynamic here is the kind of thing you study in Shakespeare, it’s a Greek tragedy in purple pants.

The earliest drafts of the script, with runs by J.J. Abrams and Zak Penn among many others and long before Lee was attached, had a much more traditional superhero-villain setup, with Hulk taking on Absorbing Man (1,2) and Zzzax (1,2). That general idea hung around and Nolte’s character became a mix of the two (1,2). The choice of Zzzax is especially interesting since Nolte is the most flammable looking human being I’ve ever seen, even before he gets that power.

A great many people didn’t seem to even get who the big-bad was in this movie, they needed the villain to live in a cave with an entrance that looks like a snake’s mouth. This is not that, it would be unique even today, which meant it was utterly baffling back in 2003 when people were less familiar with these movies and what they can be. Back then they were so paint-by-numbers even Bryan Singer could make one.

Here is the entire list of DC and Marvel movies that were released in the 20 years before Hulk came out. It’s 11 titles long.

Here is the list for the past 10 years. It’s 46 titles long.

We kinda get it now. If nothing else we have easier access to the internet to spell it out for us. That’s how everyone pretended to understand “Cabin in the Woods”, for example.

The easy assumption is that the villain is General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, played by Sam Elliot, and it kinda is but whatever because more importantly here we have the first very clear improvement over every other Hulk incarnation, before or since. ESPECIALLY SINCE. Just look at this son of a bitch! Even the conservative military version of his mustache is plum glorious!

When this dude yells at you, you stay yelled at, his voice is like an extra fist. THIS is a man people would call Thunderbolt. This is someone who could bring the Avengers to heel. William Hurt plays General Ross in the MCU. William Hurt is no Sam Elliot.

And. You know. Look. I’m sure. William Hurt. Is. Um. Very punctual. With a positive outlook, and professional demeanor. But he is not intimidating. He is not powerful.

If Sam Elliot was in a fight he looks like he’d punch you in the mouth with a roll of quarters. William Hurt would start walking in a circle and snapping his fingers. They don’t even put him in his uniform anymore, and why would they, it would be more convincing to give him those glasses on a stick that fancy people use. Look, he said, “Working on these movies has been a song for me”, and everyone who says shit like that, fuck you.

And that goes double for everyone who complains about Lee’s comic book panels and framing, too. People on websites are always criticizing those but you should never listen to anyone on a website, ever, assume they’re dumb as a rock until proven otherwise. Websites cost like $8 dollars. Access to $8 does not make you smart. Christ, I’ve had three very popular websites and I can barely read.

Those panels are amazing, and you may not trust me on this because we’re only just now becoming close friends, but what about Roger Ebert, I bet you’d trust Roger Ebert. If there’s one thing I know about movie fanatics on the internet it’s that Roger Ebert is like Yoda to you people. Here’s what he said…

“The movie has an elegant visual strategy; after countless directors have failed, Ang Lee figures out how split-screen techniques can be made to work. Usually, they’re an annoying gimmick, but here he uses moving frame-lines and pictures within pictures to suggest the dynamic storytelling techniques of comic books. Some shots are astonishing, as foreground and background interact and reveal one another.”

“There is another technique, more subtle, that reminds me of comics: He often cuts between different angles in the same closeup — not cutting away, but cutting from one view of a face to another, as graphic artists do when they need another frame to deal with extended dialogue.”

We can see an example of that style in the scene with Elliot linked above. It’s a small thing but jarring in just the right way.

And it’s not just the framing and the panels, Lee’s endlessly creative transitions are right from the pages as well.

In this one we start outside looking in, then the frame is divided in half, and then when the door opens we’re handed off to a camera inside looking out (video here). It’s a little like that famous mirror shot in Contact as long as it’s been a few years since you’ve watched that scene and only vaguely remember it.

I could do this all day but I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to do this all day, so here, the last one, and without question my favorite even though I’ve watched it a billion times and still can’t explain why. By now that's no doubt the kind of illuminating analysis you’ve come to expect from me.

I’m not pretending that this is some perfect movie, not at all, but even this flawed version is the best and most faithful incarnation of the Hulk we’ve ever seen from a movie or TV show. Lee gets things right that other directors nope’d out on before even trying.

One of the insane things about Hulk is that there’s essentially no limit to his size or strength, the more you piss him off, the worse your eventual beating is gonna get. As long as he’s angry, he will just keep growing.

The MCU reins that in considerably, which is understandable, if characters like Hulk and Scarlet Witch were as powerful as they are in the comics they could put a beating on Thanos all by themselves, they wouldn’t even need Scarlet Johansson and her handgun. You’d think they would but no.

Ang Lee at least shows us that side. You could argue it’s inconsistent but it’s there.

A lot of people dismiss it as bad CGI when he’s 20 feet tall at the beginning of the Hulk dog scene…

…but THIS is actually the consistent version of Hulk, not the version we see in the MCU now. He knew Betty was in danger in that scene, he knew his dad had sent something to kill her and that she might already be dead by the time he got to her. Very few things are gonna make Hulk angrier, and therefore bigger, than that (the most powerful Hulk ever was in the “World War Hulk” comic run, which began with him being banished to Sakaar and his wife being killed and ended with him breaking the tectonic plates under New York and damn near splitting the planet in two. So, as a rule, it’s probably a good idea to keep whoever Banner is dating under an impenetrable force field at all times so Hulk doesn’t kill every single one of us, including me, a delightful man. Sakaar no doubt sounds familiar, and it should, this is in fact the basis for his storyline in Thor: Ragnarok).

And yes, the Hulk dogs, as mocked as they may be, are important to the story. As Bruce later explains…

Bruce is what David Banner was always trying to become, the Hulk was the goal of the experiments he did on himself in the Army. David knows the monster is real now, and he’s gonna have to insist that Bruce let it out and hand it over.

“And now, finally unleashed, I can harvest it.”

– David Banner

If you want to argue that a movie sucks because its two-decade-old CGI is spotty then I guess that’s what you’re gonna do. Older things aren’t modern things. It was very smart of you to notice that. Guess how many USB ports a Shelby Cobra 427 has? Shut up, that’s how many. Still awesome.

The complaint is apparently that it doesn’t look like a real Hulk, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, and some of it is off, no question, and Uncanny Valley definitely applies at times, but there’s way more good than bad in this.

By and large, the movie gets the physics of movement right, little things like the one-two he does on the tank feel right; you can see there’s a little lull here, first, he lifts it up, then he swipes left to decline.

(This clip really needs to be viewed with sound because I’m pretty sure he says “moooo” as he hits the tank and believe me when I tell you that you don’t want to miss it. Full tank scene here)

The way it looks when he runs is terrific, and here Lee shows another thing Hulk does with ease in the comics but the rest of the MCU ignores completely; he can pretty much jump to the moon.

The one and only time he does do something superhero-y is when one of the F22 Raptor pilots trying to kill him losses control and is about to crash into the Golden Gate bridge, so Hulk jumps down on top of it to push it clear. This bites him in the ass IMMEDIATELY as the pilot then, in mere seconds, shifts from “the monster just saved my life oh how nice of him” right back to “murder the monster and I say ‘monster’ as a general term because he hasn’t actually done anything wrong”.

This movie is called Hulk, not Pilot, so guess whose side karma was on after that little stunt.

He ends up flying well past flight level 950, to about 100,000 feet (19 miles), in a plane with a ceiling of 60,000 feet. This is very very bad, it is way too high, and the engines stall as he climbs the thin air (which Lee very subtly shows, a nice touch for the 5 people on earth who noticed).

Despite all your shit Hulk was nice to you and saved you and then you tried to kill him — YET AGAIN — and so now you get to float off into space and die screaming into the freezing black void and this is 100 percent your own fault so suck it.

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins had a really beautiful fight in the clouds telling the story of Zues and Ares and the creation of the Amazons. Taika Waititi had one even more beautiful showing Hella and the death of the Valkyrie. Both of them followed Lee’s fight between Hulk and Zzzax (Taika, of course, wins this non-contest hands down, without question, what he shot is amazing).

So what went wrong? Why didn’t Hulk connect with audiences at the time, and why doesn’t it get the credit it deserves?

Well, the way it was marketed and the movies it was lumped in with sure as hell didn’t help. This is not a fun superhero movie, and it shouldn’t be, because Hulk is not a fun superhero. At its core the story here is a pretty grim drama about genetics as a blessing and a curse, it’s about a son following in his father’s footsteps even when he doesn’t want to, even when he doesn’t know he’s doing it.

The very worst thing you can say about Hulk is that it’s interesting, and way ahead of its time. It wasn’t until Christopher Nolan that audiences truly embraced a dark comic book movie, and to do that took a character that people literally call “dark”, it’s part of his name.

It can be hard to get into a dark comic book movie with bright visuals (something Nolan avoided), but assuming you can, Hulk is a fascinating movie, and utterly deserving of a second chance.