f you pay any kind of attention to pop culture (and if you’re reading this, you probably do), you’re familiar with the basic contours of the Hulk story. Nerdy scientist Bruce Banner accidentally zaps himself with gamma rays, which have the effect of rendering him extremely large, extremely green, and extremely pissed off whenever he loses control of his emotions. As the latest in a seemingly unending stream of comic book adaptations, director Ang Lee decided to turn this into a summer movie blockbuster, casting unknown Aussie Eric Bana as Bruce, Jennifer Connelly as his scientist girlfriend Betty Ross, Nick Nolte as Bruce’s slightly unhinged father David, and gravel-voiced Sam Elliott as Gen. Ross, Betty’s high-ranking Army officer father. The Hulk himself was provided by those nice CGI folks at Industrial Light & Magic. In the film version, the Bruce has to fend off his nutty father, the avaricious financial designs of a military subcontractor (Josh Lucas), and the unwanted attention of the U.S. Army, which takes exception to our emerald friend running around California unsupervised and destroying things. All the while Bruce has to come to terms with the traumatic repressed memory that triggers the Hulk in the first place. Overall, Hulk is a combination of sensitive art drama and summer action spectacle. Jay Millikan and Matthew Weiner chat about just how successful Lee’s adaptation is.


JM: Just to get it out of the way-- those shorts are fantastic. One size fits all, indeed.


MW: Oh yeah: any pair of purple shorts that can stretch six- or seven-hundred sizes deserve some golden Fruit-of the-Loom award.


JM: You know, I'm not sure if it helps the movie or hinders it, but it's inevitable that you'll spend at least five minutes thinking about those shorts and their spectacular elasticity. Overall, I'm glad they chose discretion over realism-- Hulk genitalia isn't on anybody's summer movie must-see list.


MW: Well, speak for yourself.


JM: Honestly, though, the shorts demonstrate something larger (ahem) about this film. It's always problematic to marry the sense of realism that most movie audiences expect with the inherently fantastic nature of comic book stories. Particularly in Hulk, where the hero is a fifteen-foot tall green gentleman with pecs to kill for. I thought Ang Lee pulled it off by treating the whole story like it was some kind of updated Greek myth.


MW: Right, with Nick Nolte as Zeus. Man, it looked like they grabbed him right after the mug shot for his latest DUI arrest and didn't even bother to sober him up before they pointed him in the direction of the camera. Genius. Never has alcoholic delusion been so sensitively portrayed on the big screen -- though I'm still not sure if that was the intention. And what was with the dogs?


JM: Let's see. Scraggly hair and beard: check. Worn-out croak of a voice: check. Time spent in an asylum: check. Delusions of grandeur: check. Several (presumably unregistered) canines: check. Just add a shopping cart and a few overflowing trash bags, and you have yourself the kind of guy Rudy Giuliani has nightmares about.

And I wouldn't compare David Banner to Zeus as much as I would Oedipus. Freud would have a field day with this movie-- it has more repressed rage than a Log Cabin Republicans meeting.


MW: Well, we are talking about the Hulk. (Or I should say, Hulk, since the pronoun seems to have been zapped by Hollywood's public relations gamma ray team ). It's even more than repressed rage, though: it's Ang Lee's fucking obsession with parents living through their kids. I don't know where it came from -- I didn't think they even had Little League in Taiwan.

I should also note that our hero is once again going by "Bruce Banner." If memory serves, the 1970s TV version of Hulk (replete with shag 'do on star Lou Ferrigno) re-named Bruce Banner "David." I guess they didn't want people thinking Bill Bixby was a Kung Fu legend or mechanical shark or something. But don't tell me when you think "Bruce," you don't think "Man."


JM: I never thought I'd say this, but Ang Lee turned out to be the perfect director for this movie. We know he has the obsession with bottled-up emotions (and their consequences) from films like The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility. And with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he proved he's an adept action director. If you can send Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh spinning through the air on wires without breaking anyone's neck, you can certainly handle the movements of a computer-generated green guy. Most importantly, Lee can shift from psychological drama to over the top superhero movie and back again, and make it all seem natural. That takes some doing.


MW: True. It's also the first comic book movie to have been edited together like a comic book. Ever since Batman and Dick Tracy, the modern comic books that have been brought to the big screen, they've all "looked" right, but only really in an art-direction sense. This one really lays it out -- in addition to all the bright colors (green seems to be the winner here) the split-screens and cinematography are totally synergetic, with the transition scenes really feeling like you're flipping through the pages. If you're Stan Lee, you must be kind of psyched to have been a part of this development over the last decade or so.


JM: If you're Stan Lee, your head looks like an experiment with Chia Pets gone horribly awry. He and Big Lou have a cameo in this movie, too. I hope his hair doesn't frighten the children.


MW: If not, his acting might. Did you see him in Mallrats?


JM: True. The split-screens give you the same impression as a multi-paneled comic book. They also add to the sense that the filmmakers aren't interested in realism as much as they are hyperrealism. Everything is stylized and cartoonish up to a point, but kept grounded within a very human story.


MW: It's a story about a giant green man, Jay.


JM: Yes, but a human story all the same. Emotional baggage and all that.


MW: Sure.


JM: Anyway, it's a perfect way to film a comic book movie. Even the acting is over the top, but in a controlled way. Nolte and Sam Elliott, in particular, leave teeth marks on the scenery, and Eric Bana does the "lost, tormented soul" thing pretty well. Jennifer Connelly's performance is going be somewhat overlooked, but to be surrounded by all that primal male aggression and still emerge as a calm, sympathetic and forceful presence is no mean feat. Plus, she's super hot.


MW: She sure is. Was Jennifer Connelly in this film?


JM: She was the extremely attractive woman who got a close-up every five seconds or so. Apparently she also won an Oscar in A Beautiful Mind for playing yet another loving woman with a doomed husband/boyfriend. She needs to find someone a little less complicated. In related news, I am currently single.


MW: Oh, you mean the chick from Labyrinth. It's funny, though: for a movie about a giant green man who can leap across deserts in a single bound, this movie has some pretty deep characters. Take Sam Elliot, who, with all his scene chewery, ought to be a cliché as Connelly's hard-ass g-man dad who won't let his daughter see her mutant green boyfriend. Yet, Lee makes it more...complicated than that somehow.


JM: Indeed he does. Which brings up an interesting point-- was there really a villain in this film? Sure, Josh Lucas' yuppie defense contractor from hell was pretty nasty, but he was a secondary character at best. Sam Elliott, as you point out, starts off as the stereotypical Army guy who wants to kill Our Hero, but is presented as a man who sincerely believes he is doing what is best for his daughter and for national security, and maybe he is. And Nolte is a screwed up Freudian genius more than he is a darkly malevolent bad guy. Even Purple Pants himself isn't a classic hero-- he's just a traumatized dude with some anger management issues who tries to defend himself. He is the wounded child within all of us, hmm? These characters could make for a fascinating hour of Oprah, or even Jerry Springer.


MW: This is 2003, Jay, not 1996. Try Dr. Phil. But you make a good point: we're used to having good guys with a dark side in these movies. We're even used to having good bad guys. But no bad guys? I'm beginning to wonder whether Ang Lee's inspiration in this film was Dave Mason's "We Just Disagree."


JM: I have a book idea: "My Unleashed, Musclebound Green Id is from Mars, My Repressed Thirtysomething Human Male Scientist is from Venus." This movie is like a Bergman film, except I'm pretty sure Max Von Sydow never punched out a helicopter or picked up a tank and used it to crush another tank.


MW: No, but he did destroy a planet while Queen played in the background in Flash Gordon. That wasn't directed by Bergman (though the idea is appealing), but it has to count for something.


JM: You with your artsy-fartsy Flash Gordon references. When was the last time Flash caught a missile with his bare hands, tore the timer off with his teeth, and spit it at a helicopter? Never, that's when.


MW: Ok, fine. By the way, exactly when did comic books become legit in the eyes of, like, real artists? I'm not saying they aren't, but even though Hulk kind of spares us in this department, we've got Serious Thespians running around in leotards now. Thankfully, Marlon Brando's turn in Superman probably disqualifies him from these kind of roles today.


JM: Transportation issues alone disqualify Marlon Brando from these kinds of roles—that man needs to be removed from his house with a crane.


MW: That was my point.


JM: Noted. Anyway, Superman is actually a good contrast to the new breed of comic books. In the old days, there wasn't much need for anything other than Good battling Evil and, you know, emerging triumphant. Shades of gray were not appreciated. But now we've got characters like the X-Men, who have to deal with issues of discrimination, Daredevil, who's handicapped, Batman, who's just this strange, obsessive dude...


MW: With all these physical and emotional disabilities, I figure it's really only a matter of time before the Federal government creates an entitlement program for superheroes. Perhaps X-Men III: Mutant Health Care Guarantee.


JM: Culture warrior Bill "Hit Me Again" Bennett would probably blame these emotional fractures on society's eroding moral fabric. This brings up the old argument about nature vs. nurture...oh, the hell with it. What's your final verdict on Hulk-- dig or not dig?


MW: If you do a search in the New York Times for the word "turgid" right now, you actually come up with their review of Hulk -- as part of the phrase "incredibly long, incredibly tedious, and incredibly turgid" to be precise. You might think that reading that beforehand would have lowered my expectations. You'd be wrong. I fucking loved it.


JM: We're in agreement, then, because I thought Ang Lee nailed this one. Comic book movie as art film, with our green friend blowing shit up real good along the way. What more do you want? This is the new template for how to make these kinds of movies. And did I mention that Jennifer Connelly is hot?


MW: If not, I will.