Hulk movie review & film summary (2003)
The film has its share of large-scale action sequences, as rockets are fired at the Hulk and he responds by bringing down helicopters. And there are the obligatory famous landmarks, real and unreal, we expect in a superhero movie; the Golden Gate Bridge, Monument Valley, and of course an elaborate secret laboratory where Hulk can be trapped in an immersion chamber while his DNA is extracted.
But these scenes are secondary in interest to the movie's central dramas, which involve the two sets of fathers and children. Banner has a repressed memory of a traumatic childhood event, and it is finally jarred loose after he meets his father again after many years. Nolte, looking like a man in desperate need of a barber and flea powder, plays Banner's dad as a man who works in the same laboratory, as a janitor. He uses DNA testing to be sure this is indeed his son, and in one clandestine conversation tells him, "You're going to have to watch that temper of yours." Connelly's character also has big issues with her father--she trusts him when she shouldn't--and it's amusing how much the dilemma of this character resembles the situation of the woman she played in "A Beautiful Mind." Both times she's in love with a brilliant scientist who's a sweetheart until he goes haywire, and who thinks he's being pursued by the government.
The movie has an elegant visual strategy; after countless directors have failed, Ang Lee figures out how split-screen techniques can be made to work. Usually they're an annoying gimmick, but here he uses moving frame-lines and pictures within pictures to suggest the dynamic storytelling techniques of comic books. Some shots are astonishing, as foreground and background interact and reveal one another. There is another technique, more subtle, that reminds me of comics: He often cuts between different angles in the same closeup--not cutting away, but cutting from one view of a face to another, as graphic artists do when they need another frame to deal with extended dialogue.
Whether "Hulk" will appeal to its primary audience--teenage science fiction fans--is hard to say. No doubt it will set the usual box office records over the weekend, but will it reach audiences who will respond to its dramatic ambition? Ang Lee has boldly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a comic book movie.
