The official trailer for Ang Lee's Hulk arrived in 2003 and announced the franchise's first major screen outing with a tonal seriousness and psychological ambition that immediately signals the film's intentions as something considerably more demanding than the conventional superhero action blockbuster. The trailer's most immediately striking quality is its register: a dramatic weight and Freudian seriousness that sets it apart from the genre's more conventionally spectacular entries with real force. Lee understood that the only way to make a Hulk film worth making was to treat the character's rage as a psychological condition rather than a superpower, and the trailer is built on that understanding with a formal intelligence and brooding gravity that makes it feel like a creative statement rather than a genre exercise. Eric Bana's Bruce Banner is shown with enough emotional suppression and internal damage to establish the character's conflict as the film's primary concern, and the split-screen and panel-transition visual techniques are deployed with enough formal confidence to establish a visual identity unlike anything the genre had previously produced.
First Impressions
The trailer is immediately the most tonally serious and psychologically searching in the superhero genre's history to that point, with a dramatic register and visual language that signals the film's Freudian ambitions with real clarity. Bana's Bruce Banner is shown with enough emotional suppression to establish his internal state as the film's primary concern, and the trailer pinpoints the father-son dynamic and the repressed rage as the elements that give the film its primary selling points. Lee is not interested in a man who turns into a monster. He is interested in a man who already is one, and the trailer makes that distinction feel like the most important creative decision in the genre's history to that point.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes Bruce's damage, presents the Hulk's emergence as a manifestation of repressed rage, and glimpses the film's most spectacular sequences with enough visual scale to back its considerable production ambitions. The split-screen and panel-transition techniques are shown with enough formal confidence to establish the film's distinctive visual language, and the footage identifies the combination of psychological drama and superhero spectacle as the elements that give the film its identity. What Lee intends to deliver is clear: a superhero film whose primary mode is psychoanalysis rather than action, and whose central question is not whether the hero will win but whether he can survive his own interior life.
Music and Sound
Mychael Danna's score gives the trailer a brooding and atmospheric sonic identity that suits the film's psychological register with real appropriateness. The use of orchestration that reinforces the film's more serious and more inward-looking register gives the trailer a musical identity that immediately distinguishes Hulk from the superhero genre's more conventionally heroic entries, marking its ambitions as adult drama with a musical intelligence that makes the trailer feel unlike anything the genre had previously produced. The score does not attempt to excite. It attempts to unsettle, which is exactly the right ambition for a film about a man who is afraid of himself.
Most Memorable Moment
The first full reveal of the Hulk, shown with enough visual impact and physical menace to establish the character's destructive power, is the trailer's most striking image: a demonstration of the film's visual ambitions and a preview of the franchise's most distinctive rendering of the character. Lee makes the Hulk look like a force of nature rather than a superhero, which is the film's most important visual argument and the trailer's most resonant creative achievement.
Trailer Verdict
A tonally serious and formally distinctive trailer for a film of real intellectual reach and considerable dramatic unevenness. Hulk is a more interesting film than its reputation suggests, and this trailer captures its psychological ambitions and formal originality with a confidence and clarity that makes it among the more unusual pieces of superhero franchise marketing from its era. Lee promised something the genre had never attempted. The trailer made that promise feel like a reason to watch. Whether the film keeps it is a more complicated question, but the attempt remains admirable.