Smash

Doc Bruce Banner,
Belted by gamma rays,
Turned into the Hulk.
Ain't he unglamo-rays!
Wreckin' the town
With the power of a bull,
Ain't no monster clown
Who is that lovable?
It's ever lovin' Hulk! HULK!! HULK!!"

So went the lyrics to the first Hulk theme music ever, back with the Mighty Marvel Marchin' Society cartoon omnibus. Well, the gamma rays have been turned into the more contagion-like gamma blood serum, and the brand new Incredible Hulk would throw puny bull clear across the farm, and as Marvel has taken over control of their intellectual property film productions starting with the refreshing Iron Man, I think they're onto something.

Which is to say, I enjoyed the hell out of this new Hulk movie.

While it may not strive for the admirable but elusive profundity of the Ang Lee version, essentially just a quality popcorn movie with the integrity to run hard past the plot inanities inherent to the comic book genre, I felt more empathy for the protagonist in this movie than in any prior superhero genre offering, including the estimable Tony Stark by Robert Downey Jr.

The filmmakers wisely keep us in the emotional flow of Bruce Banner's journey, a large part because of how Ed Norton shaped his performance and the story, and even Liv Tyler in the thankless Betsy Ross g.f. role elicits sympathy. She owns the most human moment in the movie (and the only one that approaches the frisson of Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow's Cary Grant/Irene Dunne quality scenes in Iron Man), when they start to get down and get stopped by Bruce's racing pulse.

The Hulk fascinates because he's simultaneously the most and the least powerful of all superheroes. In a sense he's not a superhero at all, more the origin and pathology of a super villain, an accidental creation who's emergence can never be fully controlled, nor his return to human form. Bruce Banner never asked to be Hulk, although he has the ability to call on it by self-provocation, and part of the emotional realism of the film is how well it depicts the absolute bummer of being Hulk.

Since the Jekyll/Hyde nature of the hybrid means that Hulk and Banner are two entirely different people, one only barely remembering the experiences of the other, and because Hulk tends to retreat to nature (green to green) to escape or recuperate from battle, the result is not unlike amnesia or perhaps, in movies, lycanthropy. Banner wakes up in jungles, barefoot, shirtless, holding his pants up by hand, with no resources or compass. This will always be the result. There's nothing good that comes from being Hulk.

Except for the destruction.

One of the unique pleasures of cinema is indulgence in the illicit urge to destroy. That's why we keep going to see Terminator movies and dinosaurs. There's watching people make love, watching them drink and smoke and hallucinate, watching them exert power over others or come back from bottom to win, but there's nothing any other medium does better than the movies than to break things. Lots and lots of big big things.

Louis Leterrier, Zak Penn, et al get that right this time. All of the builds to the Hulk sequences are right, and the explosions of rage, of righteous rage, are deeply pleasurable. Y'see, Hulk is clear about it: all he wants is to be left alone, and for you to treat his girl right.

You mess either of those up, you pay the big green consequences.

Tonally, with the doomed man theme (Banner can never be completely cured or it's the end of the Hulk story), this version of the story is for the most part noir, at times bordering on horror (this is a much scarier PG-13 than the new Indy movie, if you're thinking of taking a kid). The story picks up in the slums of Brazil, where the last version left off but five years later, and the first act is part-City of God, part Jason Bourne. Norton does a great job of bringing us along with Banner, a good guy still paying for his original sin of creating the serum, who makes mistakes but never errs with his integrity. By relating to his concrete work on controlling his anger, it's easier to identify with the limits of his surroundings and means, staying hidden from the military force that wants him for dissection and replication.

As for the CGI, there's a few moments in the middle of a fight where I wasn't sure how Hulk and opponent got from here to there, but they've taken pains this time to give CG Hulk weight and physicality, and motion captured Norton and Tim Roth to give corresponding character to the monster movements. Most gratifying, the final battle in particular has a touch of that classic Ray Harryhausen feel, just enough stylization to embed these giants in the subconscious.

Traditionally, action movies get analyzed long after the fact, whether as phallic festivals or metaphors for social history of the time. The resonance is deep in the subtext or affect, not so much in the self-evident plot or dialogue. What always draws fans to the Hulk are his power and his anger, the sense of an avenging golem who's actually you, somehow righting the injustices visited upon you every day with the ultimate punch.

Yes, we begin to gauge Banner's mounting anxiety every time it peaks at 200 and spills over into transformative anger, but the metaphor at the heart of this picture is actually not anger but, to put a point on it, aggression. It's not a huge or particularly profound statement, but it gives the film its emotional through-line.

Bruce and Betsy are the very definition of peaceful, thoughtful, scientific people. When the movie opens Bruce is leading a monklike existence, as Zen as it gets. On the other hand, Betsy's father (William Hurt, confessed longtime Hulk fan) is deeply aggressive, and the silliest thing about the movie is how he keeps attacking when the result is pretty much always the same. Sound like any War we know?

But it's Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky, soldier by nature and rarin' for a fight, obsessed with finding a worthy opponent, who juices the latter half of the story. Hulk's anger is the MacGuffin -- it's the cowardice of aggression that the movie rails against.

Tellingly, Hulk tends to turn and run towards his attackers. When hit by powerful fire, Abomination is seen running away, trying to evade. Hulk is essentially a mensch, while those that attack him -- the General, the super villain -- don't give a damn about anyone who gets hurt in their ego-driven pursuit of peaceful Banner/Hulk. They hide behind the military machinery or their father-status or their hopped-up super power. It's the last defense their egos have.

Fitting for the past 8 years?

Ah, well, maybe it's best not to read too much into such entertainments. Maybe Hulk breaking police car in two is only Hulk breaking police car in two. All in all, it's just gratifying that the Hulk has morphed from this:



to this:



Smashing.