In the midst of shooting Hulk in June of 2002, writer-producer James Schamus sensed a paradigm shift. After seeing Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he left a Times Square movie theater spellbound by the origin story’s high-flying CGI, witty protagonist, and a New York City skyline filled with billowing American flags—and worried about what that meant for the film he was currently making with longtime collaborator and director Ang Lee, who he called immediately: “I think we have a problem.”
In the early days of the modern superhero boom, Raimi had made a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, essentially creating the modern Marvel movie.“You’re never smarter than popular genres,” Schamus tells GQ now. Hulk was shaping up to be something very different, he says. “Our train had already left the station.”
At the time, Lee had conceived Hulk as something much darker than Raimi’s buoyant, web-slinging world, pouring his mammoth green superhero into the mold of Universal’s rich history of monster movies such as King Kong, Frankenstein, and Jekyll and Hyde. After the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the studio was eager to capitalize on Lee’s darker and introspective vision, giving him the freedom and finances to approach its emotionally unstable IP through the lens of a Greek tragedy. “I decided that I wanted to do a psychodrama, like a sci-fi/horror film,” he told Discussing Film. “[That’s] where my head was at.” As he later clarified to Sci-Fi Online, superheroes were “just the material that we use to make movies with.”
By the time the Hulk script got to Lee’s desk, the movie had gone through developmental hell. Over the previous 10 years, numerous drafts had been revised and repurposed by various writers, but Lee didn’t connect with the material upon reading it. Like he’d done in his research developing a script for X-Men, Schamus paged through Hulk back issues and “was really struck by the oedipal resonances” in a later version of Bruce’s origin story. “Ang immediately took an interest in that,” he says. Desperate to get the project on solid ground, Universal allowed Schamus to reinvent the bones of a story credited to John Turman and Michael France and infuse it with Lee’s sensibilities.
Though Schamus originally wrote more winking and sly repartee between characters, Lee shifted the movie into a more serious place. The result was decidedly and refreshingly unconventional, an outlier in a burgeoning Hollywood era. The film follows Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) search to uncover his repressed history and determine the reasons for his rage-induced monster, but well before Bruce Banner absorbs gamma radiation that unleashes his angry green giant, we learn the source of the scientist’s rage: an unstable and abusive father (Nick Nolte) who passed down his experimental genes to his son.This paternal conflict works in tandem with Betty (Jennnifer Connelly), Bruce’s governmental lab partner and love interest, and her father, General Ross (Sam Elliott), highlighting the pair’s similar family demons. It’s an intriguing if sometimes laborious interplay, interspersed with abstract memories (a green atomic explosion, for example) from Bruce’s traumatic upbringing at a nuclear test site that fill in his father’s abusive past.
Though Hulk has a few visceral thrills and jolts of CGI action, Lee’s 140-minute origin story centers its axis on a fractured father-son foundation: psychological torment with oedipal overtones. Bana supplies an inert and emotionally-stunted energy that collides directly with Nolte’s bio-engineered, restless mania. Over the course of Bruce’s internal struggle, romantic foibles, and chartreuse transformations, Lee unspools bits and pieces of his protagonist’s repressed memories of a traumatic childhood event, which are cracked open when his father re-enters his life 30 years later.
Two decades later, Lee’s movie is an even more thrilling watch than it was in 2003—it reflects the brief window of time when filmmakers still had the freedom to approach an iconic superhero without narrative guardrails and style guides, when they could make something personal, challenging, unsettling, and polarizing. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Hulk, “this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a comic book movie.” Instead of a colorful, fist-smashing, kid-attractive spectacle, Hulk is messy and talky and scary, lacking the zippy spectacle that Marvel would soon be known for. Throughout its dialogue-heavy sequences, the movie leans into flashbacks, dream-sequences, and recurring, haunting imagery. It’s in no rush to show Bruce’s towering metamorphosis—the first big fight scene features him fending off mutant dogs under a moonlit forest.
When Hulk premiered on June 20, 2003, critics mostly approved the darker pivot, with a majority praising Lee’s ambitious style and dramatic depth. After a mild opening weekend, the movie ultimately earned $245 million at the global box office, a modest hit against a $137 million budget. But in the context of Spider-Man and that summer’s other kid-oriented superhero flicks (Daredevil and X2), Hulk turned into what Schamus calls “a bad object,” something that stuck out from the packs. That’s easy to see in retrospect. Several years later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a billions-generating, mass-appeal brand by following a formula of “bursts of action punctuated by quippy, self-referential humor,” as Michael Schulman once wrote. In other words, everything Ang Lee’s Hulk lacked.
Most of the brooding, introspective material cuts against Lee’s snappier editing style, which often splices up the frame into various panels that pay homage to his source material. Though rarely used by other directors in the years since, Lee’s visual language feels attuned to his splintered narrative structure and injects life into otherwise extended dialogues and mundane actions—instead of implementing shot/reverse-shot formatting, Lee finds creative ways to shoot simultaneous angles of conversations or microscopic blood cells that collage together. “One reason the panels don’t distract you, especially in a theater, is because the sound design is actually moving your eyes to different places on the screen,” Schamus says. “You can have a very dynamic and crowded frame, but Ang is moving your attention with sound design in ways you’re not aware of.”
Hulk doesn’t build to a natural finale with a clear villain; instead Lee’s major third-act set piece opts for something more personal and isolated: a deserted canyon, where Hulk squares off with the American military, dismantling helicopters and tanks while repelling their missiles and bullets. Still, outside of pouncing on an F-18 to prevent it from crashing into the Golden Gate Bridge, Hulk exhibits no real heroism throughout these encounters. Lee hardly has him engage with the general public at all. The final showdown with dad, which features Nolte abstractly transformed into Absorbing Man, is “basically a drug trip and a merging more than a battle between two digital things,” Schamus says. It lacks the visual coherence their confrontation deserves, but resists a conventional, tidy resolution.
Ahead of the movie’s release, Schamus remembers producer Kevin Feige, still early in his Marvel tenure, worrying about how the movie’s themes and structure would play for a younger audience—especially one anticipating another Spider-Man. “You couldn’t make a trailer of it that sold [the movie],” Schamus says. “The audience had already imprinted what this universe was going to be for the next 20 years. It was that powerful.” Five years later, when Iron Man hit theaters, Tony Stark’s cocky defense contractor was an instant and palatable hit, allowing him the runway to form the Avengers (including the third iteration of Hulk) as another patriotic avatar. It felt like an allergic reaction to Lee’s movie, which took aim at military aggression as the Iraq War had just begun. “The deep structure of Hulk as a comic book is something that acknowledges the blowback of the American empire,” Schamus says. “It was very difficult to articulate—even mildly—that kind of critique.”
Looking back, Hulk’s blemishes and bugs now seem like its best features. As Marvel keeps sanding the edges of accomplished directors and superhero fatigue ramps up, Lee’s movie feels distinctly his own, grappling with weighty ideas and philosophical questions. It’s a reminder of Hollywood’s riskier financial gambits and investments in filmmakers taking big swings with recognizable characters—a time when superhero movies could engage in comic lore without feeling tethered to specific easter eggs and post-credits teasers promising clues to forthcoming installments. “We were young and free from the multiverse,” Schamus says. “Ang prevailed with his vision.” No matter Hulk’s perception, it’s hard to argue otherwise.