Revisiting Hulk
With Edward Norton going green in The Incredible Hulk on June 13, I thought I would revisit the 2003 Ang Lee adaptation of the Bruce Banner saga. To be clear, Hulk ’03 and The Incredible Hulk ’08 exist in two different universes. Marvel Studios has made it a point to distance itself from the 2003 flop like McCain running away from G-Dub.
But when Hulk was released, I was one of a handful of people who didn’t hate the movie. Sure, the action was terrible, the CGI was a joke, and the screenplay was awful. Yet, upon rewatching the 2003 film, I couldn’t help feeling that Ang Lee found something inside the story that no other director could.
Just as it was an epic failure, Hulk was an epic tragedy. Like so many other Ang Lee films, it was a story about how the chasms created not by our own making, but rather by circumstance, stand between two people in love. In the case of Hulk, it happened to be the genetic experimentation of a father passed onto his son, along with a little childhood trauma.
Bruce Banner (a.k.a. Hulk) and Betty Ross don’t end up together in the end. Lee characters rarely do. It’s this essence–this tragic love story Lee found buried in a mediocre screenplay–that still surprises me when I watch Hulk, today.
Without Ang Lee’s Hulk, Marvel wouldn’t have been able to reboot the franchise. Hulk was a failure, to be sure; but it wasn’t the catastrophe it should have been.
In the hands of a McG, a Simon West, or a Michael Bay, the Hulk franchise would have crumpled to the ground like a post-Angry Man Bruce Banner. Then someone would have shot it in the head to put it (and us) out of its misery. It would have been that bad. Lee’s Hulk wasn’t though.
Now we have Louis Leterrier, an action director, taking charge of the franchise. Don’t worry folks. You won’t have to worry about art-house backwash in The Incredible Hulk when it hits theaters next weekend. Lee’s fingerprints won’t be anywhere to be found. For some of us, though, they will be missed.
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