Living through an era of seemingly endless and ever-expanding franchises and multiverses, when “listen to the fans” is a governing principle for the purveyors of pop culture, it’s easy to forget that the superhero genre once offered filmmakers an exciting avenue for pop-art indulgence. Pity, then, that appreciation continues to elude Ang Lee’s Hulk, an ambitious take on Marvel’s big green menace and one of the boldest entries into the cinematic superhero canon.
A willfully melodramatic amalgamation of styles and thematic fixations, from atomic anxiety to childhood trauma, the 2003 film was derided for its lack of action and purported over-reliance on dialogue. Unsurprisingly, the woeful “Critics Consensus” for the film on Rotten Tomatoes read: “There’s ultimately too much talking and not enough smashing.”
After 15 years of enduring so much comic book sludge, re-watching the first cinematic stab at Marvel Comics’s modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story can feel like an almost melancholy enterprise. And that’s not just because Hulk is a formally audacious, well, marvel, but also for its surprisingly thorny exploration of the rotten heart of the military-industrial complex.
The film’s open disdain for Josh Lucas’s smarmy soldier turned suit Glenn Talbot and his militaristic ambitions not only stands in stark contrast to the Disney-owned Marvel Studios’s entanglement with the U.S. military, but also bucks the jingoistic mentality that was prevalent in American popular culture during the early years of the War on Terror. It’s certainly a far cry from the ethos of Sam Raimi’s beloved Spider-Man, which ends with a patriotic shot of the eponymous webslinger leaping off a flagpole, the American flag proudly waving behind him.
Instead of displaying the American chauvinism fostered by the George W. Bush administration, Hulk delightfully revels in psychosexual drama. Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) gamma radiation mishap doesn’t begin a transformation as much as it completes one that’s been set in motion by his father’s (Nick Nolte) reckless genetic experimentation. Bruce’s fragmented memories and sweat-inducing nightmares feel ripped straight from the depths of the American subconscious, littered with patriarchal violence, mushroom clouds, and rows of drab single-family homes that seem to shift between a sparsely populated desert community and a full-on doom town.
This whirlpool of repressed memories and Freudian anxieties bursts onto the screen via eye-popping edits—the agave needles puncturing the frame are particularly memorable—and split screens that recall the films of Brian De Palma as much as the panels of a comic book. But lost amid all the talk of everything from the film’s flashy scene transitions to its faux-split diopter shots is an appreciation, let alone recognition, of Lee’s sense of the uncanny.
We get our first glimpse of the Hulk as he stands in the door frame of Bruce’s parents’ bedroom during a psychedelic dream sequence, his bulging physique shrouded in shadows. And the second on-camera Hulk transformation occurs in the banal setting of a suburban living room where Banner’s expanding frame knocks tacky chandeliers off the fireplace mantel.
It might be a stretch to call Hulk a Lynchian experience, but Lee’s juxtaposition of the fantastical with the everyday, as well as its recurring motif of a nuclear blast, does bring to mind Twin Peaks: The Return in its purposeful lack of verisimilitude. Similarly, Lee’s framing of the Hulk’s imposing stature against mundane backgrounds—a technique recently utilized in Higuchi Shinji’s Shin Ultraman and Jordan Peele’s Nope—carries shades of Anno Hideaki’s framing of the Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion. And once the action finally erupts, after an hour or so of build-up, Lee renders the green Goliath as a force of nature and repressed male rage, laying waste to squadrons of tanks and helicopters with a similar, though less balletic, choreographic flair that made his previous film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so dazzling.
Amid the film’s action set pieces, Lee never loses sight of Hulk as a character, imbuing him with a complicated humanity. Universal’s involvement with the film is appropriate, given the studio’s connection to the monster movie canon; not for nothing did Roger Ebert liken the purple shorts-wearing giant’s movements to those of King Kong. There’s also a wounded innocence to the Hulk’s more vulnerable moments (getting hit by a rocket, laying eyes on Jennifer Connelly’s Betty Ross) that recalls Boris Karloff’s tender performance in Bride of Frankenstein.
There’s a depth and complexity that permeates the film that’s felt not just in its considered character drama, but also in its visceral action sequences. As such, looking back at this fascinating creation 20 years on, as audiences continue to endure one safe and predictable superhero movie after another, it’s easy to wonder what could have been had more studios chosen to harness its boundless and kinetic creativity.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
