One of the most influential pieces I’ve read in recent years was this article from Vox that talks about how Superhero movies are an endless attempt to re-write 9/11, a quiet confirmation that makes more sense the more you think about it. We’re a species that entered the new century expecting one thing and quickly became rudderless. Superheroes are agents of stability while also being symbols of progress. They’re an evolution of humanity whose sole desire is to keep things exactly the way they are. The 21st century made them a task force instead of a team. They were no longer comic books, they were living things that thought comic books were childish.
It makes perfect sense that comic book movies became popular from a visual standpoint. They’re basically scripted storyboards, they’re big, colorful, expansive stories featuring compelling action and drama all stapled together. They make great action figures, cartoons, and to a four year old they practically market themselves, and it turns out every 30 year old was four once, and nothing cuts through a demographic quite like nostalgia. Of course comic book movies are popular and green-lit constantly.
As interesting as I find that comic book intellectual property became popular when it did, I’m more fascinated at how quickly they became popular. Especially when you consider how… shitty a bunch of the movies are. The first X-Men movie was strictly fine, Daredevil was strictly not. Elektra, Ghost Rider, and the two Fantastic Four movies were particularly soulless 90 minute long commercials for the post y2k edge and angst that Hot Topic and the music channel Fuse were so good at selling to people. Like every villain in each of these movies, the audiences wanted power, and they didn’t care how mediocre the story was to get it.
It’s hard to get more powerful than the Hulk. In 2003, Academy Award winning director Ang Lee made his Marvel debut with a conflicted film that did well enough considering it was one of the first real blockbusters of the 21st century. Eric Bana starred as Bruce Banner, the scientist who through heroism and tragedy would become the titular Hulk. The film itself was stifled from by its own history. The Incredible Hulk was a popular 70’s television show that did the best it could at the time it was airing to show tension between someone who wanted to do good despite the power inside him allowing him to do anything. This was carried in the film mostly as a visual reference in terms of the technology that made Bruce become the Hulk, but it was a long-cast shadow that helped the film as much as limited it.
Lee’s visual flair is something that still stands out. Rather than translate the property from one medium to another, multiple camera angles of the same scene would be on screen simultaneously, the square framing and the shifting point of view perspective mimicked a comic book. Transitions between scenes would occasionally show a character leaping from one frame into another, not unlike the barely-animated 60’s cartoons that were essentially just rotoscoped comic panels. It was am ambitious look that hasn’t been attempted since and likely never will again, now that comic book movies are no longer a niche corner of blockbusters, and instead the engine that drives a majority of movie-going experiences. Here’s another clip from the movie just because you don’t see things like this anymore.
All the visual-identity on display in the film failed to make up for a problem that all-too often plagues the Hulk, and it’s a big problem:
The Hulk is a f’n bummer, and he makes the audience feel bad.
In almost every depiction of the Hulk ever, the one thing we know for certain is that Bruce Banner does not want to Hulk out. That’s what losing looks like. All he wants to do is live in peace and not lose his cool. It’s like seeing someone who’s 6 months sober break down and have a drink, it’s the last thing he wants. But as an audience, we don’t want to see a ninety pound physicist do breathing exercises to avoid a panic attack that triggers a post-nuclear weapon of mass destruction even though it’s in his best interest. Much like the way the Hulk is portrayed, we’re monsters and we want that thousand pound nuclear calamity who can jump across whole states and swings an oil tanker like it’s a baseball bat. We want to see ourselves on screen.
Of course we do, that sounds awesome. Why hasn’t a movie done what they did in the Hulk Ultimate Destruction video game? Let Hulk rip a car in half and use each part as boxing gloves while he takes on a 10 story tall rogue-military mech.
This was the only fun Hulk we got for like 15 years
The Hulk is a modern hero who spent most of the 2000’s wandering in a post-modern wasteland. He’s the Jekyll & Hyde dichotomy from classic 19th century literature made to make sense in a 20th century nuclear America where the future was arriving every single day. Adding to the tragedy was the fact that Bruce Banner was a hero because scientists could be heroes in the 60’s (something I’m sure we’ll see more in a post-Covid world going forward) and every time we saw the Hulk it was at the expense of Bruce and what we could provide the world.
He spent most of the 21st century trapped in the very roots he was designed to be a fresh twist on, and it wasn’t until Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame that he finally clicked for audiences because those two films each added their own spin to the Hulk mythology better than most comics have over the years.
In Thor: Ragnarok, director Taika Waititi and writers Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle & Chris Yost made a story where Hulk was necessary. You were dealing with stories so primordial they became myth to a galaxy that wasn’t sure to believe them. Space gods and devils and demons and world-ending prophecies older than time. They didn’t need a scientist so badly that they renamed the Einstein-Rosen Bridge from MCU continuity to the Devil’s Anus. Fuck your science, Bruce. We don’t need you, we need the strongest one there is, and that’s Hulk’s bread and butter.
Dude literally fought a wolf the size of a Mack truck. Bruce Banner became something the Hulk hated almost as much as audiences did because he was unnecessary in the situation, despite how awesomely charming Mark Ruffalo is. Although it should be noted, this is one of the first times we got to see the Hulk through Mark Ruffalo’s interpretation of him, while keeping the Hulk in his new sweetspot, a Tumblr-esque sense of irony and deadpan humor.
In Avengers: Endgame, someone had to use the gauntlet to bring back everyone lost in the blip. Humans can’t survive the energy, but the energy is mostly gamma, the same stuff that powers the Hulk. A Hulk that now exists with Banner’s base intelligence and has moved beyond the savagery we’re used to says something along the lines of “It’s almost like I was made for this”. That line turns the Hulk’s tragic backstory into his destiny, like his accident was our universe’s memetic immune response preparing for the future.
This has been hinted at in the comics, but sparingly. Mark Waid and Leinel Francis Yu’s Indestructible Hulk jumps to mind, as well as Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk. This scene from Indestructible Hulk is an acknowledgement that Hulk’s gonna Hulk, so let’s make sure he Hulks in the right direction.
Instead, they made it the MCU’s third act a way to sunset the Hulk that goes berserk and welcome in the world’s strongest person who wasn’t a liability. They fixed the Hulk. They presented a Hulk that the world needed, and got rid of the one that was such a bummer to look at, no matter how badly you wanted to see him.
He was a modernist hero that was simultaneously too early and too late for a post-modern world when he finally appeared on the silver screen, and one that didn’t quite fit as neatly into the turn of the century, but has since gone on to help define it two decades later. There was no way to examine the way the Hulk exists in a world that resembles our own without discussing the consequences of his existence. The Hulk is the world’s smartest bomb, and there’s no way him going off would be anything less than a State of Emergency or a PR nightmare. But that’s not fun, and these are supposed to be fun. Thankfully, the world of the MCU moved faster than our own and created a setting where the Hulk wasn’t just wanted, he was necessary. It took 16 years, but the MCU finally fixed the Hulk on the big screen.