20 Years of Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’

The Hulk, as a basic concept, finally infiltrated global pop culture at large after The Avengers in 2012, the superhero team-up film that introduced Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (he was cast as a replacement for Edward Norton, who starred in the 2008 movie). When Bruce became enraged, he grew big and green and liked to smash things, though none of the character’s subsequent film and TV appearances in the MCU ever touched on the question of his anger and where it came from. This question is central to Hulk, a film whose stylizations are entirely reminiscent of the early 2000s superhero movie boom (involving X-Men, Spider-Man and the likes), and yet one where intimate human drama constantly takes center stage. For Lee, it was this opportunity, to make “a personal film on a big canvas,” that drew him to the project, having found elements of Faust and Greek mythology while reading the script. It was his first and thus far only comic book movie—the production would prove frustrating thanks to the era’s technical limitations—but it proved to be a dramatic high-mark for the genre looking back, even if it received a middling financial and critical reception at the time. 

Bruce is played by Australian actor Eric Bana, whose version of the young scientist seems reserved at first, but the more the story reveals itself, the more Bana is allowed to unravel the character’s hidden layers, in tandem with the film’s thorny conception of Marvel’s big green monster. The specter of abuse looms large over Hulk, both via its tale of a mad scientist father giving both life and unimaginable power to his son before returning decades later to snatch it away, and through numerous flashbacks and dream sequences that ground Bruce’s bottled-up rage in potent visual metaphors. The image of a closed door recurs frequently throughout the film, functioning both as a symbol for Bruce’s repressed memories and the festering rage he keeps contained, as well as a literal reminder of a defining day from Bruce’s childhood, where all he remembers is his parents yelling behind closed doors.

They created, in the process, a villainous father who tries to consume not only his own son’s body, but his very sense of being, making him question his existence and why he was brought into the world, once again combining the literal and symbolic to double down on their emotional potency.

The script, by James Schamus, Michael France, and John Turman, keeps the true nature of these memories at bay, affording the film the structure of a psychological mystery, which Lee further transforms into an atmospheric domestic drama—enhanced tenfold by Danny Elfman’s moody score—despite its monster movie setting. The cast is populated by powerhouse performers, from Jennifer Connelly as Bruce’s love interest Betty, a woman torn between her allegiance to him and the desire to keep him safe with the help of the U.S. military, to Sam Elliot as her distant father, a ruthless, gruff general torn similarly between affection and duty, and finally, to Paul Kersey and Nick Nolte as the younger and older versions of Dr. David Banner, Bruce’s military scientist father, whose love is constantly subsumed by his desire to harness the enormous power he inadvertently passed down to his son, after experimenting on himself to achieve immortality through cellular regeneration. David eventually becomes a version of the comics’ Absorbing Man, whose body both consumes and mutates into any physical material with which he comes into contact, but this physical transformation goes hand in hand with his emotional identity. In initial drafts of the screenplay, the Absorbing Man and Bruce’s father were separate characters, but Lee’s dissatisfaction with the story led him and producing partner James Schamus to combine the two in order to streamline the family drama. They created, in the process, a villainous father who tries to consume not only his own son’s body, but his very sense of being, making him question his existence and why he was brought into the world, once again combining the literal and symbolic to double down on their emotional potency.

The physicality of Lee’s Hulk similarly works to magnify this Shakespearean saga. While Lee himself performed the body movements of the monster’s unhinged flailing, what stands out most about this Hulk is his design in moments of stillness, from his lumbering posture to his rounded face. His mop of unkempt hair and far-away boyish look betray a sense of helplessness and childlike curiosity, which turn to ponderment when the Hulk is brought face to face with the ruins of his childhood home on a military base. Though he was a child in the ’70s and ’80s in the film, the white-picket-fence suburbia of his youth bears a strong resemblance to an idyllic vision of 1950s American suburbia, albeit one where the horrors of domestic abuse lurk inside locked rooms, and the possibility of nuclear war is never far from the mind.

The base, located in a sprawling desert, also resembles a nuclear testing site, harkening back to the Hulk’s 1960s comic origins as the product of a novel “gamma bomb.” Radiation still plays a part here, as scientific inquiry becomes tied to tangible, tactile experimentation that sees animals mutate and bubble until they explode (using unsettling practical effects). These various origins of the character, from the comics and from the movies, are each tied up in notions of hubris, wherein scientists and fathers attempt to play God, and they each become entangled in Lee’s film through abstract imagery. In a moment of resurgent memory, Bruce recalls his dying mother—having been stabbed by his father—reaching out to the vast, empty, lifeless desert for help only to be met with the devastation of an enormous green explosion in the distance, courtesy of David setting his lab to self-destruct after the military shuts him down. The whole film lives in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, an image that returns once again in the movie’s climax, when David—now attempting to absorb the Hulk entirely—engorges into an enormous mushroom shape, a Lovecraftian nightmare creature made from physical matter and nuclear radiation, but pulsating with psychic images of painful memories extracted from Bruce, as if they were being projected onto its translucent surface from within. In Hulk, power and anguish go hand in hand. 

This is a far cry from the action-heavy final acts of most modern comic book movies—not to mention, it’s a climax steeped in tragic abstraction rather than straightforward heroics—though it fits the wild stylistic swings Lee takes throughout the film. Some of these are often maligned, like the jigsaw-puzzle visual approach to several scenes, meant to evoke comic book paneling. These prove to be mildly distracting during intense dramatic exchanges that could benefit from more focus, but they serve their purpose perfectly during action scenes, transitions, and moments of exposition, mirroring the experience of reading a comic book by allowing the viewers’ eyes to drift between images connected by the narrative.

Despite these evocations of comic pages and the movie’s many fantastical elements, the key to Hulk’s emotional resonance is Lee’s approach to interpersonal and often intimate drama.

However, despite these evocations of comic pages and the movie’s many fantastical elements, the key to Hulk’s emotional resonance is Lee’s approach to interpersonal and often intimate drama. Its confrontations are quiet, and rather than unfolding between sworn enemies, they focus on loved ones torn apart by circumstance. The more the action builds in absurdity, like having the Hulk fight mutant dogs, the more Lee ensures potent unearthing of the story’s emotional core. The big climax sees Hulk fighting his father in the sky after he transforms into lightning—à la the comic villain Zzzax, who was also part of the script until Lee and Schamus combined him with David’s character—a battle depicted in flashes of still images that also resemble comic panels. However, immediately prior to this, the confrontation between father and son begins in a dark, empty room illuminated by spotlight, as if Lee were building the drama of the forthcoming fight by stripping away all formal cinematic artifice, and allowing Bana and Nolte the room to let loose in a physical space designed like the stage of a black box theater.

By affording his actors lengthy scenes in which they ponder and introspect, Lee turns his action into melodrama, building it atop powerful emotion foundations, whose devastating effects ripple through the rest of the film. Twenty years on, few comic book movies manage to feel this stylistically inspired and thematically self-assured—or like their character-centric stories are the main attraction, rather than obligatory inconveniences en route to empty fireworks displays. In spite of its occasionally jagged comic book tonality, Lee’s film remains an engaging work of popcorn moviemaking. Plenty of modern superhero stories pay lip-service to trauma, but Hulk digs deeply and unapologetically into this idea, anchoring its explosive theatrics in the rigorous drama of fathers both rejecting and consuming their children, whose lives become defined by the deep wounds that fester in the aftermath and take destructive forms.

Hulk is available to stream on Peacock and Tubi.