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Oops: A look back at Ang Lee's "The Hulk" |
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Tuesday, 25 April 2006 |
By D. W. O’Dell
 Congratulations to Ang Lee, winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Director. His award-winning work in Brokeback Mountain is just the latest in a string of films that have been both artistic and commercial successes, including The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Oh, did I forget to mention Hulk?
I guess everyone’s entitled to one mistake, and Hulk stands out on Ang Lee’s resume as his biggest boo-boo. It was a $120 million film that grossed about $130 million nation-wide, which wasn’t terrible but didn’t make investors happy. It debuted at #1 at the box office, but receipts fell 70% in week two.
Compared to other recent comic book-inspired films like Spiderman and X-Men, Hulk was a critical failure, as well. It wasn’t pilloried, but critics didn’t warm up to it; Metacritic rates the critical reaction to the film at 54 out of 100.
Ang Lee wasn’t mentioned as the problem in most reviews. In fact, his direction received praised from most critics. He developed a visually distinctive style that Roger Ebert called “elegant” and “astonishing” (Ebert gave the film 3 stars). Lee worked with split screens in a way that emulated comic book panels, and improved upon them.
The film starred newcomer Eric Bana, who has gone on to become a major star in films like Troy and Munich. Oscar winner Jennifer Connolly and veteran actor Sam Elliott rounded out the cast, so acting wasn’t the problem either. The special effects featured in the film were cutting edge, the best that could be produced given the technology available at the time.
So what went wrong?
Two things, I think. The first was that the CGI effects, as cutting edge as they were, weren’t quite to the point of carrying a major big budget film. The graphic representation of The Hulk (the “The” was lost in the title) looked convincing in some shots but hopelessly animated in others. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, made 4 years before Hulk, was able to incorporate CGI characters more realistically (to annoying effect in the case of ‘Jar Jar Binks’), but the technology available to Lee wasn’t as good as Lucas’.
This sort of ties in to what I think is the main reason for Hulk’s lack of success: the movie ignored the well-known TV show based on the Hulk comics and went back to the source material. In being faithful to the source material, the film adopted the idea that the Hulk got larger as he got angrier. According to IMDb.com, the Hulk grows from 9 feet tall to 12 feet tall to 15 feet tall as his anger rises. The larger Hulk was also capable of truly superhuman feats.
This was in sharp contrast to the TV series, The Incredible Hulk, which portrayed the conversion from man into monster more realistically. Yeah, Bill Bixby suddenly got buff, but when Lou Ferrigno played the Hulk he wasn’t capable of picking up tanks with one hand. The limits of TV production required a less-incredible ‘Incredible Hulk,’ and this is what people remembered and expected.
Sometimes it is essential to return to the source material when pop culture has distorted it to the point of non-recognition. Tim Burton was right to go back to Batman’s dark roots after the character had been turned into a camp clown by the 1960’s TV show. But with the Hulk, the TV version supplanted the original concept, and people were resistant to going back to the comic book origins.
So when the Hulk changed size, people didn’t know what was happening. Combined with mediocre CGI, this meant the audience couldn’t quite get the scale right in their minds. There are a slew of giant monster movies from the 1950’s where the creature is as tall as a skyscraper in one scene, then a much different height in others. The changing size of the Hulk was seen as a mistake caused by bad CGI, not a deliberate choice by the filmmakers.
I’m sure Ang Lee doesn’t stay up nights wondering what went wrong with Hulk. He has taken on a dazzling breadth of genres, from light comedy, to action, to English “tea cozy” movies. And now he’s won an Oscar for a “gay cowboy” film. The good news is that at least he won’t be making Hulk II any time soon.
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