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Synopsis: Scientist David Banner has a problem. His unauthorized experiments on himself have caused him to pass on a genetic mutation to his son, Bruce, and his superiors are getting wise to the uses to which he puts his time. When General Ross, the top dog at Desert Base, shuts down his experiments and moves to throw Banner in the brig, Banner sets off a self-destruct device and heads home to clean up the loose ends in his homelife. Unfortunately for him, things don't go exactly as planned...

Several decades later, Banner's son, Bruce, has become a scientist himself. His field of research is in regenerating nano-technology. One of the toys he plays with is a gamma irradiator. His research is going badly. So is his personal life. His laboratory partner is Betty Ross, his former girlfriend, who broke up with him because he keeps his emotions bottled up inside. One of Betty's current suitors--one she apparently dislikes as much as Banner does--is Glenn Talbot, head of a research concern that wants to accquire Bruce and Betty's lab for defense research. Talbot sees their work as a means of producing a kind of super-soldier for the military. Bruce wants none of it. Meanwhile, there is a new janitor in the lab, a mysterious figure who always travels with a trio of dogs...

Soon after Talbot makes his intentiions clear, the gamma irradiator is due for a cleaning. As their lab technician, Harper, is servicing the machine, it accidentally powers up. Bruce interposes himself between Harper and the irradiator as it goes off. Much to everyone's surprise, Bruce is unharmed by the accident. But he's not unchanged. The mysterious janitor comes to visit Bruce in the hospital and tells him that there is something inside of him. Something put there by his father. The janitor is David Banner, finally released from a thirty year stay in prison and crazy as a loon. Unfortunately for Bruce, his father is right. There IS something inside of him, something that manifests itsef as a huge green monster whenever Bruce lets the anger he keeps bottled up inside of him get the better of him. Following a late-night rampage that destroys his lab, Bruce comes under the scrutiny of Betty's father, General Ross. Following ANOTHER late-night rampage, Ross incarcerates Banner at Desert Base, where Glenn Talbot maneuvers his custody away from Ross for his own experiments. Unfortunately for everyone, Talbot hasn't reckoned with the monster he unleashes, and Bruce's green alter-ego goes on yet another rampage--a spectacular rampage in which he tosses tanks and helicopters around like so many toys--as he heads back to San Francisco to see Betty. And just what is Bruce's father up to, anyway...?

Finding a Happy Place: On the surface, Ang Lee seems like exactly the WRONG sort of director for this material. Lee, after all, is a ringer from the arthouses, a maker of films about the interior landscapes of emotional traumas and relationships. Oh, sure, there's an action component in Ride With the Devil, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has spectacle aplenty, but even these have a whiff of serious art. The Hulk, that most inarticulate of superheroes, seems an odd match. What Lee has done with the material is a minor miracle, since he hasn't abandoned the various concerns of his previous filmography, but neither has he radically changed the source material to suit some obscure aesthetic of his own. Lee's Hulk is all about interior landscapes that manifest themselves in the physical world as spectacular action set-pieces. This represents an elaboration on what Lee did in Crouching Tiger, I guess, but it works better here, since the title character is a walking metaphor for repressed rage.

Puny Humans: The supporting cast for Hulk is pretty good. Jennifer Connelly is better here than she was in A Beautiful Mind, playing essentially the same character (I doubt that this movie will win her an Oscar, though). Josh Lucas is properly weasly as Glenn Talbot, so weasly in fact that his cartoonish demise is one of the most satisfying things in the movie. Sam Elliot is a standout as General Ross, a character pitched just at the edge of over-acting. Nick Nolte, as the elder Banner, is on the other side of that line, chewing scenery with great abandon (including a scene near the end in which he literally chews the scenery). The weak link is Eric Bana as Bruce Banner. His performance is so internalized that it ceases to function as a sympathetic tragic character. Fortunately for Bana, the special effects department comes to the rescue. Banner's big green alter ego is surprisingly effective. As computer generated characters go, The Hulk is at the top of the game. It is signficant, I suppose, that it wasn't Eric Bana who provided the template for The Hulk's emotive expression, but his director, Ang Lee(!!). The first half of the film, and a portion of the last half of the film, is centered on these characters. The Hulk himself doesn't make an appearance until the movie is nearly half over. The storyline they inhabit is a variant of Lee's The Ice Storm, in which alienated children deal with the sins of their fathers. It works. The movie is never dull as it builds to an explosion of rage, and even in its quietest moments, Lee has put images of great beauty on screen. Unfortunately, this will be lost on a large portion of the audience who are expecting wall to wall action, but it will guarantee the film a life beyond the temporary derby for instant box-office returns

Hulk Smash!: When the action explosion comes, though, the film provides a particularly rich action environment. Watching the Hulk tossing tanks and helicopters around is a pleasure that anyone who ever read the comics will enjoy. There is a shot where the Hulk has ripped off the barrel of an M1 tank and is tapping it in his hands as he contemplates new mayhem that is one of the purest translations of a comic-book image into film that has ever come down the pike. A lot of the success of this portion of the movie comes down to the bold composition of the film frame, with elaborate split screen designs and a variety of wipes and screen-in-screen film transitions intended to replicate the look of a comic-book page. While I wish that Lee had incorporated more of the language of comics in his film--which would have dramatically improved his use of these techniques--the mere fact that Lee is interested in this at all elevates the films somewhat over the relatively mundane stylistic execution of Spider-Man (the fact that Lee--primarily known as a director of contemplative dramas--is upstaging Sam Raimi--primarily known for gonzo pulp movies--is an irony that is not lost on me).

The last act of the film functions as a kind of a microcosm for the rest of the film in general. After he is becalmed in San Francisco, Banner is confronted by his father--himself altered in interesting ways--in a scene that reveals just what most action films miss by having workman-like directors at the helm. There is an emotional violence in this scene that is striking, especially given the way it is filmed. It's a scene you might find in a Bergman movie, closer to Cries and Whispers than it is to Batman, but the way the scene builds to a climax within the logic of the film is wholly unique. The Oedipal conflict that results once the source of the Hulk's rage is allowed to expiate itself rampages into the metaphysical, in much the same way that the best of the comics probe questions beyond the frame of mere wish-fullfillment power-fantasy. It's an ending worthy of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, strange and wonderful. Much like the film itself.