The Netflix Superhero Flop That Isn’t As Bad As You Think

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way right off the bat, because there’s a lot.

The dialogue in Ang Lee’s Hulk is often stilted and unnatural. His choice to periodically split the screen into “panels” like a comic book is distracting and comes off as gimmicky. The quality of the CGI is wildly inconsistent, ranging from laughable to, in rare moments, stuff that still holds up well today.

Ang Lee keeps the Hulk hostage. We don’t even meet the green guy for over 40 minutes.

One way in which Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk is unquestionably superior is the way the eponymous man-monster sounds. In the later movie, Hulk sounds like he should–like a T-rex right out of Jurassic Park. In Lee’s movie he sounds like a large man choking on yogurt.

Unlike just about every superhero movie ever, Hulk does not pit the hero against any of his major adversaries from the comics like The Abomination or The Leader.

Instead we get a kinda-sorta version of The Absorbing Man, a villain more closely associated with Thor. It would be like if for 1989’s Batman, Tim Burton chose The Cheetah or Captain Boomerang for the chief antagonist.

Even before I get into the “next level” things Ang Lee tried to do with Hulk, there were some other great things about the film.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of Sam Elliot playing Thunderbolt Ross, but whoever it was should get some kind of medal.

As both a loving an overly protective father and a ruthless general obsessed with taking down the Hulk, I do not think any actor has surpassed his performance. William Hurt certainly nailed the obsessed general part, but not so much the loving father.

When Ang Lee finally does give us some Hulk smashing, it’s spectacular. The action sequence in the desert is amazing, and a lot more indicative of what we’ve seen from the character in the comics power-wise than in Incredible Hulk.

There is one moment in Ang Lee’s Hulk that, as a lifelong fan of the character, I’m not ashamed to say still brings tears to my eyes.

No screen adaptation so far has really done justice to the source material’s origin of the Hulk, particularly not when it comes to the abuse he endures at the hands of his father.

But in Hulk, when Bruce’s dying mother reaches out and in the distance we see the gamma explosion and the resulting green cloud, it is as heartbreaking and powerful a homage to that origin as I think any director could make.

Part of what’s so frustrating about Ang Lee’s Hulk is that it’s clear the director was trying to do some very intriguing things with the film, like setting up the man-monster up as a modern day Hercules.

There’s the Hulk’s battle with three gamma-powered dogs, which brings to mind the three-headed beast Cerberus–guardian of the gates of Hades in Greco-Roman myth.

There’s Hulk’s final conflict with his father (Nick Nolte), which starts off with the villain transforming himself into a giant, bearded lightning god–reminiscent of Zeus, father of Hercules and leader of the gods.

In fact, before his transformation, Bruce’s father says his son will die and be reborn as “a hero of the kind that walked the Earth long before the pale religions of civilization infected humanity’s soul!”

There’s also a lot of music in the film score, particularly in the action sequence in the desert, inspired by music from areas in which gods like Zeus were worshipped.

I believe the mythic imagery in Ang Lee’s Hulk was in service of making the hero something of a herald of the natural world.

We see this early in the film when we learn that in his experiments, Bruce Banner used samples from certain amphibians and certain aquatic creatures.

At the end of Hulk when it’s clear Banner is going to make the soldiers stealing his medical supplies regret what they’re doing, there’s a frog crawling on his hat and a green parrot perched on the table behind him. Before we hear the Hulk’s roar, the camera zooms way out and the screen is filled with nothing but the green of the jungle.

It’s as if Ang Lee’s Hulk isn’t powered by gamma radiation, but by the Earth itself.

GFR SCORE

Unfortunately, like most, I don’t think Ang Lee’s loftier ideas for Hulk outweigh the things about the film that simply did not work.

I don’t get the sense that Lee was ever completely clear on what he was trying to say–it had something to do with nature and ancient myth, but those ideas in the film come off like a very intriguing sentence he forgot to finish.

At the same time, I think what Ang Lee tried to do with Hulk is more commendable than simply hitting all the bullet points in the average superhero movie formula which, for better or worse, is what we get with Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk.

If you’re willing to reconsider Ang Lee’s Hulk, it’s streaming on Netflix until July 31.