Only One Hulk Movie Has Nailed This Important Part Of The Marvel Character

Will there ever be another Hulk movie? Oh, I'm sure Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner will pop back up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe soon, probably in "Avengers: Doomsday" and/or "Secret Wars." But due to Universal Pictures maintaining ownership over some Hulk movie rights, Marvel Studios can currently only feature him as a member of an ensemble.

Marvel Studios' first and only solo Hulk film wasn't a big success. 2008's "The Incredible Hulk" got a middling response and still stands as the series' earliest black sheep. That movie's star, Edward Norton, was recast and the film only got a direct sequel recently in, of all pictures, "Captain America: Brave New World." But the not-so-"Incredible Hulk" wasn't the first Hulk movie.

"The Incredible Hulk" emerged out of plans for a sequel to Ang Lee's 2003 movie, "Hulk." That film also got unenthused responses on release (for different reasons than "The Incredible Hulk" would, being too talky instead of too shallow). So "The Incredible Hulk" was meant to be a soft reset, with a new cast and more focus on action.

That's why "The Incredible Hulk" skipped the origin except as a title sequence, beginning with Bruce Banner (Norton) on the run in South America (not coincidentally, where "Hulk" left Eric Bana's Banner). The film felt like "The Fugitive" in the way the Bill Bixby-starring "Incredible Hulk" TV series did, with Bruce on the run from a dogged General Ross (William Hurt). But in skipping over material "Hulk" had previously covered, the Marvel Cinematic Universe left its canonical Hulk an incomplete character.

What Ang Lee's "Hulk" understood, and what the MCU has never quite touched on, is that the Hulk was inside Bruce Banner long before he got hit by gamma radiation.

1962's "Incredible Hulk" #1 (by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) introduces Bruce Banner as a scientist working on a "G-Bomb" in New Mexico, before he's caught in its blast and becomes the Hulk. It was a nifty, timely B-science-fiction premise: J. Robert Oppenheimer cursed with the power of his destructive creation. The cover of "Incredible Hulk" #1 asks, "Is he man or monster or ... is he both?" suggesting Banner and the Hulk are two halves of a whole. Yet the story itself sets up a firm wall between them. The shtick of the character is the contrast between a meek scientist and a muscular brute.

Before the internet gave people the ability to read practically any comic at a whim, older Marvel issues could easily fall out of print or reach. That meant famous issues would be reprinted, or new issues would retell the origins of the characters. For example, "Amazing Spider-Man" #50 is most famous as "Spider-Man No More," but it also retells Peter Parker's origin when he remembers why he became Spider-Man in the first place.

1985's "Incredible Hulk" #312 by Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola (future creator of Hellboy) retold the Hulk's origin — but it opened further back than the original issue. Bruce Banner's father, Brian, was a nuclear plant worker. He was paranoid that his job had mutated his genes and so was wary of having children in the first place, only being talked into it by his wife Rebecca. From the second Bruce was born, Brian looked on him as a monster. His fears seemed to be confirmed when Bruce showed abnormally high intelligence as a boy, and Brian turned physically abusive towards him and Rebecca.

Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics

"Incredible Hulk" #377 (by Peter David and artist Dale Keown) returns to Bruce's childhood, when Dr. Leonard Samson gives the Hulk hypnotherapy. It turns out Brian was even worse: Rebecca grew fed up with him and tried to leave him with her son, so Brian beat her to death in front of Bruce.

Peter David's "Hulk" run lasted over 100 issues, and one of his key innovations was writing Bruce Banner as afflicted with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The original Hulk, who had grey skin and average intelligence, was retconned as a separate alter ego from the later and more famous Green Hulk. Bruce developed these personas in childhood as people who could protect him from his father's abuse; that's why the Hulk desires most to be left alone, and rages when people attack him (and Bruce). Why does the Green Hulk have the intelligence of a child? It's because mentally, he is one.

Now, this is a retcon, and clearly not something Lee or Kirby thought of when creating the Hulk. But it's a good retcon, like Magneto being a Holocaust survivor, one that deepens the Hulk's character and makes his tragedy deeper than mad science. Ang Lee certainly thought so.

Ang Lee's "Hulk" centers its story on Bruce's relationship with his father, renamed David Banner (Nick Nolte). In this film, David was a scientist researching gamma radiation as a way to improve cellular regeneration (and thus human healing). Barred from human test subjects, he experimented on himself and passed his altered DNA onto Bruce. He eventually came to regret this, but after being fired and left unable to cure his son, decided to kill him and spare Bruce (and the world) from a monstrous fate. Bruce's mother (renamed as Edith) tried to protect Bruce, and David accidentally stabbed her.

This tweaks the origin of the Hulk a bit. It makes it so that Bruce's gamma dosage unlocked something that was inside him all along rather than transforming him. But it still gets the essence of the story and elegantly adds new perspective; the Hulk is the embodiment of the scars that Bruce's father left on him, so this revision only makes that more literal and ties into the story's science fiction. 

Underrated though it is, I'm still not sure "Hulk" is a great movie, but Nolte gives a great performance. David glues your eyes to the screen, particularly in the climactic scene where he and Bruce talk before they transform and clash as titans. He's creepy, but there's an aura of sorrow to him — as he talks, you can tell that while he regrets how his life turned out, he doesn't blame himself for it. David laments most not that he tried to kill Bruce, but that he failed and lost his wife instead. When David touches Bruce, it feels covetous and predatory, not like the affection of a father should.

David calls the Hulk his "real" son and Bruce only "a husk of flimsy consciousness ready to be torn off at a moment's notice," yet desires to steal the Hulk's power for himself. "I gave you life, now you must give it back to me," David demands of Bruce, just how every narcissistic parent has insisted of their child (if not always so literally).

Compare Nolte's performance in "Hulk" to his lead role in Paul Schrader's "Affliction," about a small-town New England cop named Wade Whitehouse. The titular affliction is how Wade's alcoholic father, Glen (James Coburn), abused him. As an adult, Wade has inherited his father's sins and spirals until he ends up even worse than him. Once he played an abused son, and then in "Hulk," he continued that cycle by playing an abusive father.

I get why "The Incredible Hulk" didn't revisit Bruce Banner's childhood and Brian/David Banner. If you're aiming for a fresh start, you don't want to retread the exact same ground that the last movie did. But in the 17 years of the MCU, the movies have never once looked back on who Bruce Banner was before he was the Hulk.

"The Avengers" does the strongest job of exploring how Bruce Banner lives with "the other guy" in the present. He's "always angry," he says; the Hulk isn't some dark part of him locked away, he lurks just beneath the surface, needing only a slight push — or surrender from Bruce — to come out. The movie does an excellent job building up the terror of the Hulk in its first half; everyone speaks in fear about the monster, and when he finally emerges near Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), she runs and hides from him the way a final girl runs from a slasher.

But ever since "Thor: Ragnarok," the Hulk has become more and more of a comic relief character. "Avengers: Endgame" went the furthest by revealing Bruce had merged his two personas; he now spends most of his time "as himself," but in the Hulk's body. Only, because this happened offscreen in a time skip, there's zero catharsis to the result. Bruce Banner and the Hulk being in constant struggle is why he's easily one of Marvel's most compelling and layered characters, yet the movies wrote it off as an inconvenience to do away with.

I suspect that Al Ewing, writer of acclaimed comic "Immortal Hulk," is an admirer of Ang Lee's "Hulk." The first issue of "Immortal Hulk" (drawn by Joe Bennett) ends on a page of Bruce looking in the mirror as the Hulk stares maliciously back at him. Compare it to the scene in "Hulk" where Bruce imagines the Hulk's fist crashing through the other side of a mirror he's looking into.

"Immortal Hulk" opens with a set-up evoking the TV series: Bruce is on the run and pursued by a dogged reporter. From there, though, it reoriented the basics of the Hulk into David Cronenberg-inspired body horror. The Hulk's transformations aren't so clean anymore, and the gamma-mutated characters all look much more monstrous. In one issue, the Hulk is carved up, kept in jars while still alive, and ultimately pulls himself back together.

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Ewing also redefined gamma radiation as a supernatural force and the key to the "Green Door," a gateway to Hell. The Hulk can never die because his soul will always return through the Green Door; the overarching threat of the run is that the universe's ultimate evil, The One Below All, wants to knock down the Green Door, too.

One of the earliest allusions to the Green Door is in "Immortal Hulk" #4, when Bruce's own personal Devil — his father — comes through the Green Door to possess the gamma-mutated character Walter Langkowski/Sasquatch. Hulk absorbs Sasquatch's gamma power into himself, but that only traps Brian's mind in Bruce's body. Basically, exactly what David Banner wanted back in Ang Lee's "Hulk."

The "Immortal Hulk" comics return to the question first posed in the very first Hulk comic, about whether the Hulk is a man, monster, or both. Whenever the Hulk acts like or is condemned as a monster, it's extra painful for Bruce because it means his father was right about him. The only Hulk movie that acknowledges this essential characterization is Ang Lee's ... so far.