What Went Wrong:
The Hulk
By Shalimar Sahota
February 16, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“This is a psychodrama,” said director Ang Lee. “It has a lot of dramatic elements, and it’s different from your usual summer blockbuster.” The surprise here was that Hulk wasn’t just mindless action. It was insanely serious. “What I hope I’ve done is provide a new kind of vision, an emotional depth to this kind of movie,” said Lee. In fact, there was more emotional depth than an audience for this kind of film was really after.
Universal had been trying to get an Incredible Hulk movie up and running since the early 1990s. John Turman (a Hulk fan himself) had a stab at writing a script back in 1995, while Michael France penned a script in 1999. Ang Lee and his producer/writer John Schamus came on board the project in 2001. They had just come off of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Schamus rewrote the script at Lee’s request. The end result is three writers being credited in a strange amalgamation that tells an overly complex origin story. And then the term "Greek tragedy" was being used. “He’s making a sort of work of art,” said Dennis Muren, ILM’s Senior Visual Effects Supervisor. “This is not the normal kind of movie we get here at ILM,” he said. “It’s very spiritual…who would have thought it with a comic book movie.”
Scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) as well as fellow colleague and former girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) work in a lab, trying to work out something to do with restoring damaged skin cells. When you're a scientist, something is bound to go wrong in your life. So, when Bruce is accidentally hit by an overload of gamma rays it unleashes something, a "something" that had been passed on to him by his father, David Banner (Nick Nolte); a former scientist who worked for the military in the 1960s. When Bruce's emotions cause him to feel angry, he starts to increase in size and go all green.
Hulk’s Super Bowl spot most likely stopped some from seeing the film, as it sent shockwaves of criticism across the Internet, with many highlighting that the Hulk didn’t look very good, and that he looked like Shrek. “Those shots weren’t finished,” said ILM’s Muren in defence. Comparing the CG effects in the Super Bowl spot to what was in the final film, I can’t really tell the difference.
Most Hulk fans had grown up with The Incredible Hulk TV series, and some of those fans couldn’t comprehend why he looked so stupidly huge in the film. According to ILM he can go from 9 feet to 15 feet tall. For its time, the CG Hulk is a strange technical achievement, with the semblance between him and his surroundings all looking very believable. He growls, smashes things up and sets a new record for tank throwing. Ang Lee acted out the movements of the Hulk himself through the use of motion capture. When it comes to well-acted CG characters, that accolade still belongs to Andy Serkis’s Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
When the Hulk is on screen, cars are toppled and there's the expected explosion but on the whole, it’s light on action. The Hulk battles mutant dogs, jumps from a drop of cluster bombs, and dodges missiles and explosions, but it never really feels like he’s in any danger. There’s never any point where I thought to myself, “Oh no, how's the Hulk going to get out of this one?” Part of the problem is that there isn’t really a main (or at least threatening) antagonist. Josh Lucas’s Glenn Talbot might qualift, but he’s dispatched midway through. Only when the film reaches the final act do we realize that Bruce is against his father, David. However, this Hulk isn’t a superhero. For a comic book movie, the lead here doesn’t save the world, or fight crime. He’s pretty much the anti-hero. In fact you could say that it’s the good guys (the military) against the good guy (the Hulk). It probably wasn’t Lee’s intention, but I found the military’s reason for stopping Bruce/Hulk to be entirely justified.
The pace of the film is slow. At 138 minutes there are some long gaps that feel boring. It’s not till 40 minutes in when Bruce first transforms into the Hulk. Lee mixes in tragedy, love and some repressed emotions, using that first hour to explain a lot of background story about Bruce and his father, and even Betty and her father, General Ross.
The flashy editing has scenes going split-screen in places so you're focusing on more than one thing. It works well at times (such as when Bruce is transported to the underground base), and at one point the camera literally leaps out of the scene and we see hundreds of shots littered around the screen, like the page of a comic book. At other times it’s annoying, as Lee seems to use split-screen on scenes that could have worked just as well without it.
On the run up to the film’s release, Lee requested that no footage from the last half hour be shown in any adverts or trailers. “The end has a very shocking revelation,” said Lee. The conclusion was certainly shocking, for it was such a bizarre mess. Why is Bruce chained to a chair in a huge hanger, while the military simply watch as his father ignites his anger? Minutes later they’re flying through the air (transported via electricity), land at a lake, and fight each other in what Lee describes as, “the sub-consciousness battle.” It’s so all-out-mental and doesn’t really fit.
Also on the run up to the release, a work print copy of Hulk made its way onto the Internet. Authorities found and arrested the person responsible, Kerry Gonzalez, who pleaded guilty to his actions. Even though it was a work print copy, that still didn’t stop those who saw it from spreading more bad vibes online about the middling special effects.
The production budget for Hulk was $137 million. Universal was probably expecting the film to attain Spider-Man levels of box office. Opening in the US on June 20, 2003, it reached #1 on its opening weekend with a take of $62.1 million. It looked like Universal had a mega hit. However, any chance of a franchise was killed on its second weekend after the film suffered an enormous 69% drop, mustering only $18.8 million. Word-of-mouth must have spread that maybe the effects did indeed look a bit rubbish. “You don’t ever want to see this,” said Universal’s head of distribution Nikki Rocco of the large drop, “but you move on.” The film continued to suffer drops of over 50% every weekend, till its seventh, whereupon it wasn’t even in the US top 20 anymore. It managed to earn $132 million in the US and $113 million internationally, making for a good worldwide gross of $245 million.
Reviews at the time were mostly positive. Acting wise, it was great, with the likes of Bana (in deadly serious mode), Connelly, Nolte, and Sam Elliot. However, the film appeared to be being bashed for trying to appeal to more than the masses, as reviewers mentioned how it wasn’t what they expected from a comic book film. It was neither fun, nor comical.
Marvel brought the rights back from Universal, and attempted to reboot the franchise in 2008 with The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier. That they made a second Hulk film just five years after Lee’s effort was like their way of saying, “Okay, so we got it wrong the first time around. Think you can forgive us and give us another chance?” As a way of distancing itself, the idea was to pretend that Lee’s Hulk film never happened. It wasn’t strictly a sequel, or remake, but a completely different film with a different cast; Edward Norton was cast as Bruce Banner. The Incredible Hulk performed with similar results, maybe attracting the same crowd, with a domestic take of $134 million and an overall worldwide total of $263 million.
I'm not a big Hulk fan and the trailers looked a bit iffy. The only thing that drew me into the cinema was director Ang Lee. I first viewed Hulk at a preview screening a week before it opened. I went in with few expectations and came out with very mixed views. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the film. Even today, I neither like it, nor hate it. Parents had bought their kids to the screening I attended and even they looked bored, so they started to run up and down the aisles. It may have looked family friendly, especially with all the toys and tie-ins, and Burger King advertising a Hulk Meal Deal (a Double Rodeo Burger and Chunky Fries, with six toys to collect), but it wasn’t really for children.
Whereas credit is due for being completely different from any other superhero film in the comic book genre, it is also one of the reasons why it didn’t work. Give the audience something they’re not used to seeing, they probably won’t know what to make of it, and will most likely refuse to support it. That Lee managed to make an intelligent Hulk film is quite an accomplishment, yet it was too smart for its own good, and the majority of its target audience, defying the expectations that came with it. Plus, Danny Elfman's score is totally forgettable.