Posts Tagged hulk
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?
District 9: What’s Written On The Label
First things first: the opening act of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a thing of beauty. The faux-documentary talking heads, the alien refugees captured with 90s-news-video stylings, the alien ship that’s only half-visible, hanging silently over Johannesburg – these images put you inside the world of the film with startling economy. I settled back in my seat, ready to be wowed.
As the final credits rolled, though, I was lacking in wow. The question is: was that the film’s fault, or my own?
District 9 is a clever, well-done, and genuinely entertaining movie. It’s been described as “the world’s first autobiographical alien apartheid movie” by Chris Lee in the LA Times. Writer / director Blomkamp talks about growing up in Johannesburg with the white minority of the population in power, and how this inspired the movie:
“Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go. [...] Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.”
It was quotes like this that led me expect some kind of metaphor-laden, socio-political apartheid tale. District 9 provides exactly that for the first half an hour or so – until its fairly standard sci-fi plot cranks into motion. Afterwards, these more unusual elements just become high-concept hooks for all the usual stuff: everyman versus evil corporate machinations, a magic MacGuffin for the heroes to quest after, and kaboomy video game shooter sequences.
(These action scenes, however, are great. They’re excitingly comprehensible in a way that cinema’s current Emperor of Explosions, Michael Bay, has sadly long forgotten.)
The alien civilisation we see is disappointingly shallow: sure, we meet Christopher – the Good and Wise Alien – but the rest of the occupants seem to be the same brainless scavengers that the government propagandists say they are. I just wanted a smattering of hints to tell me that they have… community leaders? Religious meetings? Games that the children play? Anything?
As a film critic, you’re meant to be immune to hype; it’s your professional obligation to accept a movie for what it is and nothing more. Of course that’s a filthy, filthy lie. Critics absorb just as much pre-film expectation as anyone else, and the entering with the wrong expectations can destroy a movie. If you see one thing written on the label but find something else inside the box? It’s easy to feel disappointed.
Ang Lee’s underappreciated non-blockbuster Hulk (2003) is a good example of this. It was advertised as a Hulk-smash!-style extravaganza… and turned out to be a bizarre, visually experimental psychodrama about fathers, sons, and abuse. The 10-year-old Hulk fans in my screening were so angry that they would’ve turned green and trashed the cinema if they could, believe me.
But was my wow-lack in District 9 the equivalent of complaining that, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses sucked because it didn’t have any ninjas? Maybe it is. Ulysses was never going to have ninjas. District 9 was always going to be the film it is, and not the film I wanted it to be.
I have a feeling I’ll enjoy District 9 more the second time around with my expectations suitably reset. In the end, though, it feels less political than Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers (1997) – even though the latter’s bite was buried under all that soap opera beefcake and unflinching irony.
(A final admission: I’ve never read Ulysses, and man, I’m going to be so very embarrassed if it does have ninjas in it.)