Hulk received mixed, but generally positive, reviews on its release. However, word of mouth on the film was terrible: after a reasonable opening weekend’s profits, it quickly fell and ended up being a flop. This has provoked a whole lot of theories. Hulk is a film that has a great deal of existing forensic analysis.

I thought it was a great film, and I’m still puzzled by how much some people dislike it. The most common complaint I’ve heard is that it was boring and too art-house – or worse, that it was a wanna-be art-house film, a comic-book film with pretensions and ambition but without the skills to back them up. In other words: for a film about an angry green guy with purple tights, it took itself a bit too seriously.

Well, huh. One of the significant good things about recent comic-book movies is that they take themselves seriously. They keep the knowing winks to a minimum. They treat the dilemmas and motivations of the characters as real, and make a genuine effort to involve the audience. On the “Treating the subject matter seriously” scale (which goes from Charlie’s Angels up to Unbreakable) Hulk is “Jim Carrey doing promotional interviews for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.

But yes, it has its faults. It does take an awfully long time to get going, and I don’t think it uses the time efficiently. One of the odd things about the film is that it starts with a “Story so far” kind of montage, as though there were several other movies that they are summarising. And then, when we get to Bruce’s adulthood, the first thing they do is skip over Bruce’s breakup with Betty. It is highly tempting to do a lot of messing around with the beginning of the film – it seems to be the focus of much of the criticism – and I’m a sucker for temptation. It’s just so tempting!

So. The back-story of his father’s experimentation and Bruce’s childhood can usefully be revealed as we need it, later in the story as flashbacks. Our first change, then, will be to start the film with Bruce as an adult. We’ll start with Bruce and Betty’s breakup: it presents an excellent way of showing Bruce’s unusual calmness, and we can reveal some of Bruce’s childhood memories. I wouldn’t normally think of starting a film with a breakup. It’s the “Really bad day” cliche, in which the character starts by loses his girlfriend, job, self-respect etc., hits the low point, cops some words of wisdom, pulls his way back up, roll credits. However, we have Ang Lee. He’s great at painful relationships, particularly if there’s a nice big hairball of suppressed emotions to be hacked up as well. It’s practically a crime not to let him direct a meaty break-up scene. So, at the start of the film, Betty and Bruce are talking. Betty pushes Bruce to open up. Bruce tells some stories from his childhood – we learn he is an orphan, and that his father was a scientist, and that there was some kind of accident. But he gets increasingly evasive and closed-off when she presses; and she gently breaks up with him.

Now we’re back to the existing film: the next day at the lab. One of the major problems of the first section of the film is that we don’t really get a sense of Bruce’s bottled-up anger. We could do with a few more hints of what is to come, if we’re not going to get our first Hulk-out until half an hour into the film. He’s unusually calm during the breakup, and we have a couple of scenes in which people comment on his calmness as bad things happen to the experiment. It should be a matter of pride for him. He should regard it as a gift – he can be amused and detached against almost any aggrivation.

Except that the cracks are beginning to show. The first time he snaps at someone – perhaps the snide corporate villain who comes on to Betty and threatens a hostile takeover – it should be brief and sharp, and quickly denied afterwards. As we see from his childhood, the anger mottles his skin green – at the least, we should get suggestions that he is looking a little bileous after this. And the fact that he actually raised his voice should be a matter for intense office gossip. Later, he should feel bad as well – dizzy, perhaps, weak and teary. At this point, the green skin tone would be a complete mystery to the audience: they are expecting there to be some kind of accident that turns Bruce into the Hulk – so what’s going on?

Cue a nightmare about his childhood. Hints that the secret of his state is due to what is behind the door – and what the hell, in his nightmares, it can be a green door (though he’ll be surprised when he comes across the door, later, in real life, and finds that it was white).

The lab accident duly happens, and the mystery deepens: Bruce thinks his nanobots are responsible for saving him, but as the oddly well-informed janitor explains, they’re not the whole story.

Now we start to build up some reasons for Bruce’s first Hulk-out. First, the lab is shut down for unsafe work practices. In the course of the investigation, Bruce gets accused of falsifying his results. Evidence is discovered – planted by takeover guy – and Bruce is discredited and fired. Rumours spread that it’s bad genetics: that his real father was also a scientist fired for unethical behaviour.

One of the let-downs of the film is the first transformation. Oh, the hulk-out looks good, and there is plenty good smash, but I didn’t feel like he had any pressing reason for it. It is portrayed as an accumulation of the bad things that have been happening to him over the past few days, but the actual time and place seem a little arbitary, and the reasons don’t seem quite strong enough. The cause of his first transformation should be explosive; an unbearable culmination of the intolerable, a sharp realisation or a recollection of something terrible. I would strengthen the forces against him, perhaps even have Betty leave him that evening (instead of at the beginning of the film), despite the dreadful cliche of it all. But the actual turning point should be instigated by the mysterious Janitor. Even in the existing film, he was right there at the time; and he is very interested in what has been happening to his son. He could reveal himself as Bruce’s father, which causes Bruce to become irrationally angry and Hulk-out.

One of the things that I like about Ang Lee’s films is that the characterisations are complex and subtle. So why have I gone tromping over all this complex subtlety of Bruce’s character? It’s true; I’ve changed a strong character note (his calmness) into a dominant one, and this has the potential to be thuddingly obvious and awful. But I have a reason, and it lies behind the door in Bruce’s childhood home. The secret behind the door – as it currently stands – is rather unsatisfactory. The memory he suppresses is that of his father trying to kill him, and accidentally killing his mother instead. The trouble is, none of this happens behind the door, and more importantly, the secret is rather inconsequential – it does little to throw light on the characters of Bruce or his father.

In our version, the secret is behind the door. As we will eventually reveal throughout the course of the film, his father experimented on himself, and passed the traits on to Bruce in his DNA (as with the existing film). Horrified, he realised that anger is the thing that triggers the changes, and he resolved to make Bruce immune to anger. Bruce’s unnatural calm is the result of years of abusive anger-suppressing sessions, in the room behind the “green” door.

So, Bruce’s father comes back and reveals himself, causing Bruce to turn into the Hulk for the first time (and at the time, the audience isn’t quite sure why, but that’s OK, we’ll reveal the secret behind the door later). Hulk smash! Hulk jump around city for a while, get a couple of drinks, do some karaoke, go home and sleep it off. Because, really, it’s tempting to have more to his first hulk-out than beating up the lab and going straight home. No strange reports of a giant green grasshopper leaping about the city. Only his Dad saw him. It’s not until the second hulk-out the next day that anybody sees what’s going on. However, extending this scene would certainly extend the movie. As annoyingly anti-climactic as the first hulk-out is, they probably have a point: don’t blow all the best Hulk stuff straight away.

Anyway, the army get suspicious that something odd had been happening at the lab, and they immediately suspect the son of the last crazy guy they had to lock up for doing weird experiments. His father prods things along with the dogs, and gets his son to hulk out a second time. He beats up the dogs, Betty betrays him ‘cause she’s worried about him, and they end up in the army base. This is a big meaty bit of plot, and although it’s a little wobbly in places – Betty’s motivations in particular – it moves along at a good pace and is relatively straightforward. The army guys hint at what happened with Bruce’s father, and this time it really is a mystery. Up until now, we could conceal that Bruce’s father is as nasty as he is buggo – he might have sounded like he was genuinely wanting to help Bruce when he gets him to hulk out the second time, and he could suggest that the dogs were sent by the army, possibly to kill Bruce, but that they accidentally got sicced onto Betty. But now, we start to wander, and perhaps we get to see that he genuinely sent his own dogs after Betty as a provocation.

Anyway, at the army base, Bruce and Betty start to confront the truth of what had been happening to him, and we start to get further hints of what had been going on in Bruce’s childhood. Here’s the place to put the flashbacks. To start revealing the depths of his father’s nastiness.

And then things start going bad. We have the snide corporate villain trying to provoke Bruce into hulking out, perhaps off his own bat. Bruce realises what’s going on (without the villain explaining it to him), but the anger is so very, very hard to hold in. The snide corporate villain should discover some of Bruce’s past and reveal it. Unfortunately, the way that Bruce eventually does hulk out and escape isn’t terribly clever. It’s fair enough that it’s a difficult escape, but I think we need to see something new from the Hulk, something unexpected. Perhaps this is the point at which Bruce realises what was behind the green door, and the hulk-out is so quick – so much quicker than either of the previous times – that they don’ t have time to get the drill in (and yeah, we should have had a more massive and sinister looking drill in the tank with Bruce, something that Cronenburg would look at and shudder).

So, we’re in the middle of the third Hulk bit, and Hulk is smashing tanks, and all is right with the world. This is what we came to see, and it’s violent and angry and visceral, and – what’s that? – everyone in all of the tanks is OK? And the helecopter crashes from a great hight without fatalities? What’s going on? Have we made a film that is essentially about rage into a PG rated thing for kids?

Oh, yeah. Well, fair enough, I suppose, and if you want to make an omelette without breaking eggs, I suppose the way to do it is to rename “Boiled egg” to “Omelette”. We have to work within our limitations, and we don’t get to do cool destructive stuff with the army without being reassured that nobody dies. Battle of the Planets, you have a lot to answer for. You can almost sense the frustration (which is, ironically, good) which leads to the bizarre two-man play ending, which pretty much transcends what I am able to criticise. I absolutely refuse to change anything that is so far out in the left field it barely registers as a flutter in peripheral vision: instead, I hold my breath and hope that the audience like it (they don’t, of course) and that the studios will allow this kind of thing in future (they won’t, of course). It, and the mystical ending (which actually does make more and more sense the more you watch it), perfectly sum up the film. Ambitious, brilliant at times, and frustratingly hard to grasp.

This has been an incredibly difficult film to tease apart. I do think they could have revealed the backstory throughout the film rather than frontloading it, to create a bit more mystery, and that the mystery might have carried the general audience further into the film before getting bored with it (as, apparently, they did). However, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that this really was too experimental a film for mainstream audiences. And I wouldn’t change that no matter how much of a flop it would create.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Action, Comic Book, Forensic Analysis, H, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.