Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk film completely blew my mind when I first saw it. I thought that movie was freakin’ awesome and all these years later I still think it’s a great Hulk movie! I loved the way he told the story and the wild comic book visual style of it! As I look back on that movie, I think it might actually be one of my favorite comic book films.
Lee just did such a great job and it features one of the best portrayals of Hulk regardless of the CGI limitations the filmmaker was working with at the time. I also thought Eric Bana was fantastic as Bruce Banner in the movie.
Josh Lucas (Yellowstone) played Talbot in the movie, a character who was looking to take down Bruce Banner, and in a recent interview with The Playlist, he discussed the brilliance of Lee as well as the technological limitations they were working with at the time. The actor said:
"If people ask me who my favorite directors are, I almost invariably will tell you my number one is Ang. I don't use this word genius, but I think he's truly up there as a, if not brilliant, genius filmmaker. Like you say, he was swinging for the rafters on [Hulk]. I don't think the technology was quite where his brain was. And if you look at what he did with Life of Pi, he was able to hit it out of the park."
He went on to expand on his thoughts, saying Lee was frustrated that the filmmaking CGI tech wasn’t where he wanted it to be when making Hulk:
"I think the technology evolved, and he's one of the people who pushed the technology to evolve. I know he was pushing the team of people who were on the CGI of Hulk to make something that, technically, maybe wasn't capable of being at the level he wanted it yet. And so I think he was very frustrated with that movie by not being able to get what he wanted and what was in his brain."
When this movie was made, there was no formula of success for Lee to follow for superhero movies, so he just set out to tell the best story he could and did some impressive, unique, inventive things along the way. He has an ambitious vision for this movie, and when talking about what Lee brought to it, Lucas said:
"But I also agree with you, the way he was morphing, the way pages were flipping. I mean, he was creating a visual comic book, and I haven't seen anybody do it quite the same way he was doing it -- think about it, that's 20 years ago, right? So, there's an incredible auteur filmmaker beneath this monster, an early Marvel movie. I have nothing but respect for it."
Exactly! If you haven’t seen Ang Lee’s Hulk in a while you should revisit it, because it’s so damn good!
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