The Child of my Mind: HULK turns 20
Exploring Ang Lee's not-really-a-masterpiece-but-still-kinda-interesting movie
I wish, in the early summer of 2003, I’d been able to grasp what it meant to have Ang Lee direct a movie about the Incredible Hulk. The guy behind Eat Drink Man Woman, Ride With The Devil and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon becoming a major creative force on HULK? In 2023, it would’ve set Film Twitter ablaze. But I didn’t have a very deep relationship with cinema at that point and (thank god) Twitter wasn’t invented yet, so I consumed the movie about the big, green guy in the same way that I ate up every other superhero blockbuster of the early aughts. It was out, so I dutifully went to go see it.
And, as was a ritual, when the movie was done, my family went to Pizza Hut. There, we sat in a kind of dull haze, munching
on lunch and not really talking about the movie. What was there to speak of? It didn’t have the aw-shucks pathos and unabashed derring do of the prior year’s Spider-Man, nor was it as slick and neatly arranged as the last month’s X2. Instead, by blending garish comic book aesthetics with weighty themes about fatherhood and the connective tissue of anger, Ang Lee had seemingly made a HULK movie that wasn’t really for anyone. Those who wanted to see Bruce Banner go nuts and tear stuff up would be bored to tears by how many scenes are devoted to people grimly talking at one another and those that wanted to mine the depths of the titular hero’s Shakespearean tragedy would have to sit through what felt like an eternity of the Hulk beating the shit out of giant CGI mutant dogs. At 14, my major takeaway had been “Welp, probably not gonna ask for that DVD for Christmas.”
Now, twenty years later, that incurious teen has evolved into a perhaps-too-curious adult, and I was eager to revisit the HULK to sift through a movie that felt like a fever dream when I first watched it. And to be honest, a lot of it still does. Lee’s big stylized swings never quite meld with what can feel like a dissertation on Marvel Comics. Lee is obviously fascinated by the potential of the story and the methodology of comic books, but unlike someone like Sam Raimi, who embraced the simple emotional grandeur of those stores as important on its own, Lee’s work is more exploratory. “What matters here?” is the question he seems to be asking.
The answer, as the movie shows us over and over, is the relationship between father and son and how one can pass down their turmoil and rage to another generation, through ludicrous science experiments, familial traumas, or otherwise. Set side by side with the comic panel splashes and editing touches that Lee and his crew provide, HULK almost approaches big budget camp at times. But by themselves, set usually in starkly uncluttered spaces, the scenes between troubled son Bruce (Eric Bana) and frothing father David (Nick Nolte) feel uniquely inspired. There’s a later scene that’s so sparse in its production design and arrangement that it almost feels like black box theatre. There Nolte looms and gnashes his teeth at his abused offspring, and it’s unlike anything we’ve gotten in the cinematic superhero genre since.
“Stop your bawling, you weak little speck of human trash,” Brian says when his son screams in rage. Of course, this is followed by Hulk facing his father (who has become “The Absorbing Man,” a B-List villain but a very fitting metaphor for the way an abuser drains the life from any and all relationships) in a fight scene through the elements which, unlike its early 00s superhero peers, seems less fitting for a nu-metal music video montage and is instead seemingly inspired by Renaissance paintings. The defeat of Nolte’s shrieking antagonist in the climax comes in a literal storm of immense CGI, but for a little bit, between the King Lear-infused conversation with Bruce and David and the various tableaus in the clouds, HULK comes together in beautiful unified thematics.
That’s not to say that the rest of the movie isn’t worth watching - I was particularly struck by the grasp for earnest awe in scenes involving the Hulk leaping through the desert and simply fighting some tanks. In 2023, all of that would come to feel like a superhero film first act necessity, the need for spectacle ratcheted up so intensely that only an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach works anymore. Here, though, we have scenes that almost taps into the “You will believe a man can fly” sensibility of the 1978 Superman, back before we knew for certain that superhero stories would even operate on a blockbuster scale. They’re impressive not because we’re in some kind of arms race to trap a fandom’s attention, but because a giant green man who can jump a thousand feet and bench press a tank is, in general, pretty impressive.
Of course, HULK is not just a battle between father and son and rage and innocence, but the mega thrills that dictate the genre and Lee’s own specific fascinations. In combining these, it isn’t totally successful and it never finds the balance needed to make any of its aspirations congeal. In that way, it’s kinda like the Hulk himself: constantly on the edge of breaking free whether it means to or not, a movie at war with both the audience and itself.