s I sat in the dark watching Batman Begins last week, I found myself hoping that director Ang Lee was also sitting in a darkened theater somewhere, learning a lesson that it would have been useful for him to have ingested before he drained most of the fun out of a certain jolly green giant. "Do you get it now?" I imagined saying to him. "This is how you adapt a comic book into a movie."
Not that the critically panned Hulk was without its charms. The attempt to recreate the effect of comic-book panels on screen through cinematography was intriguing, Nick Nolte's over-the-top performance was pure camp, and the computer-generated goliath proved not to be as silly as we all thought it was going to turn out to be. But unfortunately, considered as a whole, the film's major achievement was to take the playful and make it ponderous.
Up until the moment when Batman Begins began unspooling in the dark, I was afraid that the outcome would be the same this time. I feared that, once again, combining a classic comic-book character with a classy director was going to result in a deadly misfire of a superhero movie.
Before shepherding Hulk to the screen, Ang Lee was better known for his artful direction of such thoughtful films as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. Lee was an unusual choice for a movie based on a Marvel Comics character, but the studio obviously thought that such a director would give Hulk the gravitas it needed to be taken seriously. Instead, the film became so weighted with psychological baggage that it sank, essentially turning what everyone hoped would be a franchise launcher into a movie highly unlikely ever to merit a sequel.
Why do we fall?
Christopher Nolan came to Batman Begins after directing Memento and Insomnia, bringing with him the same sort of classy reputation as the one in which Ang Lee had been cloaked. And so I worried—would history repeat itself? Thankfully, it didn't.
Batman Begins managed to capture the dark essence of its hero, gracefully translating the guilt-ravaged avenger from two dimensions to three without mocking him. Some of the former creators who adapted the Caped Crusader to film seemed incapable of doing this, as if each were filled with a guilt of his own, embarrassed to be playing with comic-book characters. And so they made them hokey. Or made the villains more interesting than the hero, putting the focus of the films on the bad guys through stunt casting.
Or, as in the case of Batman Forever, gave us Bat-nipples.
Modern superhero films often empower the man behind the mask to the detriment of what caused us to plunk down the bucks, sometimes losing sight of the fact that we come to the theater to see the hero himself. That was one of the biggest sins of Hulk, that the psychological underpinnings overwhelmed the fun. One of the biggest differences between these two films is that peering into Bruce Wayne's psyche did not prove as deadly and distracting as the analysis of Bruce Banner. Christopher Nolan fine-tuned the Freudian introspection, so what was annoying in Hulk was moving in Batman Begins.
To quote one of the more memorable lines in the movie, spoken first by Bruce Wayne's father and then mirrored by Michael Caine's Alfred: "Why do we fall, sir? So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up." After a series of silly sequels that could have destroyed the Batman franchise, it seems that this latest film has just performed the cinematic miracle ... of picking itself up. After too long a wait, we finally have another Batman worth seeing twice.
With another superhero flick, Fantastic Four, right around the corner, let's hope that when we all sit in the dark over the Fourth of July weekend that we're reminded more of Christopher Nolan than Ang Lee.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new issue of The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives.
