Jennifer Connelly Celebrates The 20th Anniversary of Ang Lee's HULK
Ang Lee’s 2003 Marvel film Hulk celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and to celebrate, Jennifer Connelly shared a post on social media with a clip from the film and the following caption: “20 years!!! Happy film anniversary to Hulk (2003).” It’s so crazy that it’s been 20 years since this movie was released!
Hulk is an incredible Marvel movie and was way ahead of its time, especially with what he was doing with visual effects at the time to bring The Hulk to life on the big screen. There was also the visual style of the film, which was so cool! Josh Lucas, who played Talbot in the movie, previously talked about the brilliance of Lee as well as the technological limitations they were working with at the time, saying:
"If people ask me who my favorite directors are, I almost invariably will tell you my number one is Ang. I don't use this word genius, but I think he's truly up there as a, if not brilliant, genius filmmaker. Like you say, he was swinging for the rafters on [Hulk]. I don't think the technology was quite where his brain was. And if you look at what he did with Life of Pi, he was able to hit it out of the park."
He went on to expand on his thoughts, saying Lee was frustrated that the filmmaking CGI tech wasn’t where he wanted it to be when making Hulk:
"I think the technology evolved, and he's one of the people who pushed the technology to evolve. I know he was pushing the team of people who were on the CGI of Hulk to make something that, technically, maybe wasn't capable of being at the level he wanted it yet. And so I think he was very frustrated with that movie by not being able to get what he wanted and what was in his brain."
The actor also talked about the visual style of the film and how it was made to look like a comic book. This movie really is a true comic book adaptation. He said:
"The way he was morphing, the way pages were flipping. I mean, he was creating a visual comic book, and I haven't seen anybody do it quite the same way he was doing it -- think about it, that's 20 years ago, right? So, there's an incredible auteur filmmaker beneath this monster, an early Marvel movie. I have nothing but respect for it."
I think Lee’s Hulk is a very underrated comic book movie. A lot of people don’t really appreciate what Lee did with this movie. Sure, it wasn’t as crazy polished as it could have been due to the limited special effects, but the whole storytelling aspect of the film was top-notch filmmaking.
If you haven’t watched Hulk in awhile, you should revisit the movie! You might be surprised by how great it is. Also, Lucas, Eric Banner, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte, and Sam Elliott were great in the film!