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I, TOO,
grew up on Marvel Comics. But, unlike other fans, I
naturally outgrew the stories from that fountainhead of
fantasy. I am the impure one, therefore. Contaminated by
deconstruction and other theories that can be more
fantastic than the tales these perspectives help in
being reborn, I am not at all bothered when the team in
front of and behind the new Hulk—Edward Norton
and director Louis Leterrier—started to describe the
film as a “reboot.”
The film
was initiating a new beginning for the hero. As Norton
in an interview put it, “That was the only way I was
going to do it. Over the years I’ve had people come at
me with comic-book franchise films or things like that,
and I felt they were just woefully under-realized as
scripts. You always hear a lot of assurances and
protestations about what’s going to make them great, but
my better instincts have always prevailed and said, ‘I
don’t really see that happening...and I don’t have the
time to be the one to do it.’ But this one fell at a
moment where I actually didn’t have big plans and as I
began to noodle on it and talked to Louis Leterrier [the
director], who is great, I thought, ‘This is amazing, if
we’re really being given the chance to take one of these
things seriously on its own terms.’”
Seriously, on its own terms. That’s a serious
proposition indeed for Norton and the team from Marvel
Studio. Norton, who plays the scientist Bruce Banner in
this version of the Green Giant, sums up the mission of
the group: “We’re going to start completely with our own
version of this myth or this saga.” As the actor put it:
“Let’s start with a mystery and slowly unpeel what the
roots of it are, all the way through.”
If one
takes the work of Norton/Leterrier as a beginning of a
new story (marketing people call it the beginning of a
new franchise), and one allows one’s mind to be open to
any or all of the possibilities, the adventure should be
a fun, reckless enterprise.
In the
latest Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner is somewhere
in Brazil. He is unknown to everyone and, if there is
any sign of how exceptional he is, it is because he is
able to solve mechanical problems in the dingy bottling
company he works in. Just like any hero, he blends well
in the local community, almost like a gringo lost in the
favelas of Brazil. He encounters thugs who hate
his guts and these thugs give him rough time not knowing
how anger can transform him into a real monster. The
rest of the time, he is in an anger-management session.
Bruce is really trying to kill the monster in him. The
operation requires one thing and that is, he should not
be angered or excited. You know the implication of this
regarding Bruce being a man and falling in love?
His
pursuer, Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, finds out
where he is and launches the greatest chase in the
narrowest of alleyways. Emil Blonsky joins the search
and discovers that the man they are looking for has the
capacity to metamorphose into a form beyond any
warrior’s belief.
Discovered, Bruce leaves Brazil and because he is seen
running away as the Hulk, he finds out that he has
covered enough miles to be in a different country. He
finds himself back in the US and sees with his
girlfriend, Betty Ross, with another man, a boring
though kindly shrink. Betty also happens to be the
daughter of his archnemesis, General Thunderbolt.
The
general is looking for Bruce/Hulk because he wants to
know what is in that body of the scientist that
transforms him into a powerful being. Is the Hulk a
raging potential weapon? The obsession of the general
who is acting almost independently of the Pentagon or
any recognizable institution is one of the mysteries of
this Hulk version. This obsession goes to the point of
attempting to create another monster by tapping the
violent character of Emil Blonsky. No commentary about
the evil of violence or war is lurking in this film, but
the transformation of characters is enough to give us a
lesson about the Evil that is natural in men. And also
the Good.
The film
works on various levels, with the obvious tiers of
narratives heavily linked and propped up by the
technologies of storytelling using human forms on one
side, and animation or computer-generated images (CGI)
on the other. On the human actors’ level, Norton’s Bruce
and Liv Tyler’s Betty succeed in relaying to us the love
story of two individuals facing the most
incomprehensible metamorphosis of all time.
For all
the fantastic plot and its relatively thin origin, the
film The Incredible Hulk really succeeds because
Norton and Tyler unabashedly believe in the relationship
of their characters. Writers—fans generally of the
“original” that’s gone now—complain about Hulk being a
dyed-in-the-green animation and thus cut off from its
human connection. I am of the opposite view: the film
revels in the Hulk as a “drawing”: in that form, the
artists have managed to imbue it with emotions that were
caricatures in the previous outings. The Hulk, up close
and personal, is not anymore the extension of any human
forms. It is free to engage the altogether human form of
Betty. Two media and two technologies are now in
dialogue onscreen, I do not think that is a problem.
We need,
in fact, to connect to the Hulk because at the end when
the Green Giant battles with the Abomination, we should
know who stands for Evil and who stands for Good. That
is a dialogue that has not changed. For those of my
generation, enjoy the appearance of Lou Ferrigno, the
original Incredible Hulk during the period when reviews
like this were not at all expected.
Zak Penn
wrote the screenplay of The Incredible Hulk.
William Hurt plays General Thunderbolt, and Tim Roth is
Emil Blonsky—out to outhulk all other villains in the
future. |
