Despite its inevitability, Lee’s addition of the father has huge implications for this character. Instead of the science accident creating Hulk, in Ang Lee’s universe the gamma simply enables the Hulk that was already there. The biggest change is that the character is no longer an "accident" but an inevitability. The Hulk is a fragment of Bruce’s subconscious, a Minotaur at the center of the maze of his mind. His anger permits him to do as he pleases, perhaps for the first time in his life. “You know what really scares me?” he tells Betty (Jennifer Connelly) after calming down and resuming melanin-neutral activity, “I like it.” This Hulk is a release of endorphins, a play on its origins as a take on the Jekyll and Hyde story, a revenge fantasy for the "little guy." Lee asks an all-important question: what if Mr. Hyde was as empowering as Dr. Jekyll believed him to be? In this scenario, Hulk becomes an emergence of Bruce’s instinct and unfiltered ambition. He could be read as a better form of Bruce, or at least an uninhibited one, awakened by anger and empowered for destructive justice, human evolution and devolution at the same time.
Yet, like the most powerful monsters, Hulk really just wants to be left alone. The military, led by Betty’s bootstrapping father (Sam Elliot), whose wife is nowhere to be seen, looks at Bruce and sees dollar signs. His name is Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (I wonder with a name like Thaddeus if a nickname even more severely epic was needed, but I appreciate the attempt). He seals Bruce in a sarcophagus to haul him over the Nevada desert, as many of the great monsters have been. He becomes King Kong in chains, Nosferatu in a coffin of plague death. When he wakes from a nightmare as the Hulk and explodes from his sensory deprivation prison, you believe Bruce’s earlier statement that the Hulk isn’t just rage, but freedom.
The film communicates his emergence in tribal drums, pounding; in quieter moments, Bruce's feelings are scored by Duduks, ancient Armenian oboes, pleading. Elfman interprets Danna's Eastern-inspired score in his own style, resulting in a fusion of Elfman's driving Gothic choruses and Danna's meditative, ancient atmosphere. The result is a film with a feeling of powerful longing, more than any other superhero film. This Hulk at times seems like an earth spirit in the wrong time. He was born a mourner.
Lee’s visual restraint allows Hulk's escape to be destructively cathartic, yet calm. He portrays Hulk's journey across the desert as scenic and diminishing. Against the natural wonders, the Hulk looks small and far away. Pondering the lichen that reminds him of his own cells, or the house that he grew up in, he is a monster in the sense that he knows himself, yet can't conceive that he is a monster. It’s no accident that Hulk’s transformation for the third act occurs in a sensory deprivation tank, as the memory of his mother causes him to burst from the chamber, sopping wet and furiously alive. Whereas the monster usually represents a broken person struggling to be rid of themselves, Lee unmistakably turns the beast into Bruce’s unification, not a form of torture but of release.
Bana has never quite fit the mold of an action star or love interest. As Bruce, he seems unlikely to have such power within him, “to share with the world,” as his mom puts it in an ignorant but true mythic prophecy. Yet this makes him more appropriate for this particular role, as an outsider in himself; unlikeliness is his power. He’s like Bill Murray in Tom Cruise's body. As the woman strong enough to love both the Bruce in Hulk and then more carefully, the Hulk in Bruce, Jennifer Connelly has the right withdrawn, intelligent beauty. She turns a nothing part into the right impression of iconic romanticism. She's love statuary.
Hulk uses jumps in time and perspective to try and communicate the unification of this unlikely human with its monster, a change that Lee sees spread out over decades of comics and tries to condense. Through repeated flashbacks, he takes the film on its spiritual journey. A door hides a perilous secret. The child Bruce opens it and sees the outline of the Hulk, before he knew who that was (has he been seeing him his whole life?). Then that climatic recollection of seeing his father’s murderous rage open the door makes Bruce’s dilemma coherent: the power that he loves in himself, is him becoming the father that he hates. Freud would probably call this a universal truth of boyhood. For all the film’s weirdness, there's ambition in turning Hulk into a symbol with so much angsty power. Can you honestly recall any truths of this character portrayed that strongly, in any of the last twenty-two Marvel films? In the last one, Hulk posed for selfies in a cardigan while dabbing.
The Hulk of today has been reduced to an in-joke, a pantomime of Looney Tunes comedy and trend culture. Disney has sanitized him; to do so, they’ve persecuted the psychology out of him while barely paying lip service to it in the first place. Even his half-hearted attempt at a standalone arc seemed like an afterthought in the MCU, or an obligation. When the new Hulk said, “Puny god" in The Avengers, he meant that he was more physically powerful than someone who claimed to be a god. There’s no revelation in that statement, which is a fact, that he’s literally bigger and stronger than Loki. When Hulk in the 2003 film says, “Puny human,” it’s in a sinking nightmare: Hulk says this from behind a foggy mirror, and he’s talking about Bruce.
Compare the fight against Abomination in The Incredible Hulk (2008) with that against the father in Hulk. Nolte is a campy, exasperating presence in the fourth act of Hulk. He's dad-rage, full of impudent snark. It comes out against Bruce as though he's finally old enough to see it, like he didn't feel right swearing in front of Bruce until now, even though he killed his mom. Abomination and Hulk are similar on paper, yet in practice, the scenes share almost nothing. The final fight in The Incredible Hulk is pure animated mayhem, a fight with no context, no shared goal, no history beyond their previous fights. But the battle against his father in the thunderstorm in Hulk is fake-painterly, the movie impression of comic splash panels. It culminates so much of his journey into an extravagant, poignant series of singularly angry images, spread out like a CGI fresco. Nolte overworks the conversation, in which Lee puts father and son on an over-lit stage as prisoners of the same life, and lights their emotional fuse. The father’s placation, his rage, his regret, are all so funny, pathetic, and threatening that it could have come straight from Shakespeare on a sarcastic day. It’s a comic book soliloquy. As his father dies, he becomes an atmospheric bubble of primal energy, memories and neurons becoming physical images. The story, the film itself, is in the panel.
This poignant over-portrayal could only come from a director engrossed by this material. Yet, the film is not always serious, as comic books rarely are (at one point, the Hulk knocks himself in the limes with a tank turret so offhandedly that it barely registers on first viewing). For a director trying to take decades of comics and represent it all with one movie, this kind of comedy was unavoidable, even if it was unpalatable. His act of reduction is not always an act of refinement. Sometimes, it feels more like compression.
I have often asked myself what turns people off of Hulk. I believe the visuals are more responsible for its reputation than the story. The design of Hulk himself is strange: he is, of all things, kind of good-looking, like the handsome Shrek at the end of Shrek 2. Lee tries to emulate the frame of the panels with the lens and the work is effective only half the time. It works beautifully when the screen is split between perspectives or times, something Brian De Palma did well in Phantom of the Paradise. The diverse angles of visual attack in the scene where Bruce is transported in his vacuum-sealed coffin or when he destroys his office after transforming for the first time are visual wonders. Tension in the gamma accident scene is choreographed by separations between panels, much like a comic book (in a good way). But sometimes, Lee goes too far, switching too fast, or even displaying a character’s death as a silly combination of 2D cut-outs and CGI transitions, an example of taking a stylistic feeling and making it literal in a medium that it was not made for.
Some characters also test the limits of the audience's patience in a film called "Hulk" that lasts 138 minutes. The Josh Lucas character could be removed from the film, as could the impossible-not-to-mention scene where Hulk’s pants are ripped off in a moonlit fight against buff poodle mutants injected with the Hulk genome. If ever a scene was made to be cut out of a movie and added as a bonus bit on a DVD, that would be it.
People are right to nag these choices, but there’s emotional resonance at the core of Hulk that should have been a source code for the rest of superhero films to build on and improve. It’s so theatrical and perversely gratifying that its visual critiques are on a much lower level than its dramatic victories. There is simply no room in the Disney machine for emotions on this psychological scale. Lee’s Hulk isn’t sterile and perfect; he’s not resolved with the human within him. He doesn’t dab or joke with Thor with his jolly green butt hanging out. Most importantly, he’s not a hero. The journey he takes is broader and more mythologized than any taken by the new Marvel characters, who are so concerned with remaining consistent to the broader franchise that their private emotions go numb and fall off.
The new Marvel movies are not bad. In some quantitative ways, they are better made than Hulk, which often tears at its seams and causes collateral damage all around it with its weird choices and techniques. But in the case of the emotions in the new Marvel franchise, it’s always safety first. Hulk, by nature, is least able to survive that restriction.
