Lee and company get credit for trying, but the flop sweat shows.
Hulk
Rated: PG-13
Starring: Eric Bana. Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliot and Nick Nolte
Directed by: Ang Lee
140 minutes
GRADE: C
By Erik Pepple
210 west Pop Culture Editor [send email]
Generally, the first rule of thumb when it comes to adaptations is that those involved in the adapting should not be ashamed of the source material. To see room for improvement or to rigorously develop subtexts and supratexts is one thing; but to harbor a seeming disdain for the source is another.
In interviews, director Ang Lee and co-screenwriter James Schamus (both of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame) have tried hard to separate the movie version of the Hulk from the comic books. It’s not a piece of pulp art, they infer, it’s a tragedy, it’s Shakespearean, and it’s a deeply serious meditation on the inner rage of the contemporary man. And, certainly, those interpretations of the Hulk exist and are built into the structure of the comics. But primarily it’s pulp art, and pulp art, even at its most serious, lets the air in to let its characters breathe. With their eagerly awaited film version of the Hulk, Lee and Schamus have stifled and choked all the fun and lightness out of their source material.
The cast and crew of the Hulk are certainly making an admirable effort to beef up the Hulk story, but in attempting to make the story of this post-modern Prometheus edge into Greek tragedy, they have forgotten that the reason most folks want to read a comic or see a comic adaptation is to have fun. The subtexts of all great comic adaptations (namely Batman, Spider-Man, Ghost World and Superman) all speak for themselves, they are not forced down the viewer’s throat; they simply float about in the ether of the storytelling. The directors and writers of those movies were not scared to let the fun sidle up to serious themes. Lee and his crew are so determined to make sure that the audience “gets it” that the movie becomes as cumbersome and top-heavy as the Hulk itself.
Visually, the picture is (no pun intended) a marvel. Lee and his editors have adopted a style inspired by everyone from Fritz Lang to Hal Ashby’s editorial work on the original Thomas Crown Affair to television’s 24, and it works ingeniously. The screen splits into panels that offer different perspectives on con-current scenes and gives the film a sense of life that it desperately lacks. In fact, the Hulk looks more like a comic book than most comic adaptations have. Even the CGI Hulk looks pretty good -- especially in close-up; he’s detailed and has a nice range of expression; even if at a distance he tends to look like Shrek with a hemorrhoid. It’s a shame then that Lee and company didn’t follow through with their visual scheme and tailor the script in the same fashion.
What we get are lots of scenes of people standing around looking concerned and dropping their voices an octave to say things to the effect of “I have a rage I do not understand,” and “Tell me Bruce, tell me what happened in that room so long ago?” Bana and Connelly, gifted actors each, do what they can, but they can’t do much as they are so burdened by the script’s extremely one-dimensional characterizations. The characters are so stifled and repressed it becomes a chore to watch them, except for Nolte and Elliot who inject what human life there is into the picture. For the most part, the characters are given no moments of humor or lightness. And let’s face it a movie about a 15-foot-tall green giant has an inherent humor about it. The image of a not-so-jolly green giant trundling down a thoroughfare is funny. But the hermetically sealed style of Lee keeps any levity at arm’s length.
Certainly, it’s clear that Lee’s ambitions are laudable. He wants to make a contemporary Universal Pictures monster movie a la Frankenstein. But what is missing, the thing that made those movies so good, is a sense of humanity. Frankenstein and King Kong only attacked when provoked, and even then they seemed racked by guilt. On top of that, they seemed real; they didn’t look like an avatar from a video game. With the Hulk, he just stomps about; paying no mind to the innocents he may destroy. He is focused on a self-centered quest for a dame who left him. Furthermore, the Hulk as imagined by CGI is certainly detailed, but it’s cold. We’re watching a video game character yearn, and where’s the humanity in that?
By the two-hour point, though, the Hulk’s painfully slow pace and ponderous dialogue become so stuffy that even watching Sam Elliot and Nick Nolte ham it up becomes dull. Nolte and Bana finally get a lovely moment toward the end where they confront past and present demons. Staged like a play, it generates a genuine warmth and emotion, but only to have the rug pulled out from under it in an effort to turn the climactic battle into the shittiest wrestling match that never made it on the WWE.
When the Hulk reaches its ridiculous epilogue in the rain forests of Brazil, Lee has piled on themes of Oedipal rage, contemporary angst, male confusion, daddy rage, questions about genetics, man playing God, even going so far as to almost turn into a big, green version of the Celestine Prophecy. While it’s great that Lee wants to try something different, his approach seems to be to all but superficially separate the Hulk from its origins in the world of pulp art. By making the subtext into text, he creates a textual distance that puts an unneeded tension between its themes and ideas and in the end it ultimately collapses under its own weight.