The screen splits into panels, like pages of a comic, as a scientist's quiet life starts to crack. Ang Lee's 2003 film tells the story of Bruce Banner and the gamma accident that unleashes his rage, framing it as a family drama about a father and a son.
At a Glance
Director: Ang Lee
Runtime: 138 minutes
Starring: Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte, Josh Lucas
Release: 2003
Critics Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, ambitious and uneven)
Audience Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, divisive)
Plot
Bruce Banner's father conducted illegal genetic experiments on himself before Bruce was born. Years later Bruce is exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation, and whenever his anger crosses a threshold he becomes a creature of enormous strength. His father David resurfaces after decades of absence, and the story turns on what the son has inherited.
For two acts, the screenplay is serious and absorbing, using the superhero frame to examine how childhood trauma shapes adult damage. It is closer to a psychological drama than to the blockbuster audiences were expecting, and that gap explains much of its reception.
The third act is where it collapses. David Banner's reinvention as a shape-shifting villain abandons the intimate conflict the film has built so carefully and replaces it with an abstract showdown that resolves nothing. A story about repression, so patient until then, ends in noise and spectacle.
Characters
Eric Bana's Bruce is the real triumph here. He plays emotional suppression with stillness and a sense of disconnection from his own feelings, someone who has trained himself to keep everything down, and the restraint makes the eruptions frightening.
Jennifer Connelly's Betty Ross is the warmest presence, intelligent and brave, and her relationship with Bruce is written with a complexity that makes her the audience's anchor. Sam Elliott's General Ross is conventionally effective, an authority figure whose hostility follows a comprehensible, if misguided, logic.
Nick Nolte's David Banner is the divisive turn. For some it is committed, unsettling character work; for others a collection of mannerisms that swamps the role. Both readings have merit, and the performance is never dull, though it becomes a liability once the script asks David to carry the climax on his own.
Meaning / Themes
Repressed emotion and its consequences are the subject. The Hulk is Bruce's buried rage made visible, and the film suggests that his inability to process his childhood is both the source of his power and the reason he is dangerous.
The father-son story adds a generational layer. David's own violence is the origin of Bruce's condition, so the monster is in a sense inherited, passed down like a family secret. It is a genuinely bold reading of the character, and a seriousness the genre had not attempted before. It also explains the casting logic: every central performance is pitched as drama first, and the green giant is treated almost as a symptom rather than a spectacle.
Direction
Lee pitches the whole film as drama filtered through the visual language of comic books. The split-screens and panel-like transitions are its most inventive formal choices, giving it an identity no other superhero film of its era shares, and they are better integrated than its reputation suggests.
The quieter sequences, where Bruce and Betty's relationship and Bruce's inner state are developed patiently, are the film's strongest passages. The action is the weakest, staged with a reach that the computer effects of 2003 could not support, and the creature has dated badly.
Danny Elfman's score is brooding and atmospheric, suiting the film far better than a conventionally heroic theme would have.
Hulk received mixed reviews and performed below expectations. Critics split between admirers of its ambition and those who found it inert and incoherent, and it became known as one of the genre's more interesting misfires, and its reputation has improved with time, especially for Bana.
Final Verdict: More daring than its reputation and less satisfying than its intentions. Bana's Banner is the most nuanced the screen has produced, Connelly gives it a bruised heart, Lee's comic-book grammar gives it a style of its own, and then a muddled finale throws much of that away. A misfire worth revisiting.