With the Avengers now officially the third most profitable film to date, I thought it was time to look back one of the films that didn’t actually inspire it. The forgotten green goliath film, Ang Lee’s HULK.
Now many people were not keen on this film, saying it was too serious for a comic book movie and far too arty. Well, guilty as charged. But is serious and artsy a bad thing?
People grew up watching Bill Bixby and Lou Farrignou as the Hulk and you can only imagine this was such a departure from what they knew it was too different to get to grips with.
Now the film is not perfect, but then again I am a purist. So when you change something as fundamental as the origin of a character I am going to pay attention and want to pick holes in it. This Bruce banner is a doctor working on a way to help heal soldiers in the field, where an accident in the lab bombards him with gamma radiation.
This does not simply transform him into a monster with breath taking anger management issues, but unleashes something that was already in his DNA. You see Bruce Banner is actually an unintentional side effect of his father’s attempt to become super human. He gets his abilities from starfish, jellyfish and lizards. Weird right?
Playing Bruce Banner is Eric Bana, and I like to think his name helped with the choice of him donning the purple trousers. Overall he is solid throughout but then there are moments where he goes overboard and is just plain overdramatic. As for the Hulk himself? Gone is the green paint and pixels take over the job, which allowed him to do some pretty impressive thing never before seen. It takes a while to get to see him in all his glory but when he gets there he does deliver. The several times you see him get more and more annoyed and actually get bigger, out stretching even his own socks, does give you reason to believe you wont like him when he is angry. But for me he looked too much like Bana, he was a handsome green bugger, and didn’t look as much a Neanderthal and brutish as I would have like.
So who does our not so jolly green giant face off against? Nick Nolty. Scary stuff as it is but he plays Banner’s father, locked aware for years for killing his own wife and then hunts his son down after his release. If it wasn’t bad enough that he was just plain weird, but he was also the reason Bruce Banner isn’t Bruce Banner in the film. Little Bruce Bann… I mean Krensler was adopted, all because daddy went psycho. He does have his moments however, and what he lacks in history he makes up for by being an uber-cameo for numerous other famous hulk villains.
As much as this film is about the psychology of the hulk, it is also packs in the action. Quite a bit actually once it picks up speed (though it does take some time to get that speed up). As peculiar as it sounds, the showdown between daddy dearest’s demonic doggies and the hulk is at the same time one of the most fun moments in the film as well as one of the more disturbing. Its not everyday you see a hulk dog get torn apart on screen in a burst of neon green!
All in all, the balance of insight into the make up of what makes a man unleash years of pent up aggression and showing what the aggression, supped up with gamma radiation, can do against an army was slightly off. Couple that with absolutely inspired transitions and cinematography, and some serious over acting and you have yourself one very confused film.