Kistler's Thoughts On Film Adaptations - Part 3
Friday, January 11, 2008 at 02:39PM To see the previous post, click on this link.
All right. We talked about getting to know the source material. And we've spoken about some of the worst ideas Hollywood had in changing the story to suit marketing needs or to suit the simple idiocy of producers who obviously didn't care about the original characters involved.
Now, let's talk about understanding what it was about the source material that people really reacted to.
With a single comic book story such as The Road to Perdition or V for Vendetta, you've got an easier task finding out what hit home with folks because you're all going to be referencing the same scenes and lines. If you read Harry Potter and liked it, you probably wanted to hug Hagrid at some point and it should be no great task to confirm that others felt the same way. Spend two hours online and you can find this out pretty easily.
But with a comic book character such as Batman, we again face the problem that this character has been around for decades under the guidance of different writers, editors and artists and inevitably has a wide variety of fans with an equally wide variety of tastes.
So you have to do a broad search at first. Check out different stories by different writers concerning the same character. Look at what character traits and story elements were agreed on. Then go online. Everywhere on message boards and the like, there are fans doing polls for the sheer fun of it. "Top ten most heroic Wolverine moments." "Top ten funniest Spider-Man jokes." "Top ten best Superman battles." Use google and see why people hold those stories higher than others.
Any story can be broken down to basic emotions, themes and imagery. When you're adapting a TV or comic book series, it's more important that you understand those elements than whether or not you know that Batman's parents died on June 26th at 10:47 pm. That's true, but it's not essential to the character. Batman would not change if you filmed his parents being murdered in a snowy winter night just a little before 1 am.
Would it be cool if the director kept those details from the comics? Absolutely. But they’re not enough to make a good movie.a
A couple of years ago, director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) did a Hulk movie starring Eric Bana and Jennifer Conolly. It wasn't a bomb, but it certainly did less money than was hoped for and while I've met people who didn't hate it, I've never met anyone who said "I liked it." So let's take a look.
The following is the basic origin of the Hulk as had been established and agreed upon for several years before Ang Lee began filming his movie.
In the mainstream Marvel comics, our character is originally a boy named Robert Bruce Banner. Bruce's father is a scientist named Brian Banner who'd been exposed to radiation before Bruce was born. When Bruce later shows prodigy-level intelligence, Brian Banner decides that his son is a monster, a freakish result of his own radiation exposure.
Brian is an abusive alcoholic. When Bruce is eight, his mother Rebecca decides they need to escape. But Brian discovers them and kills Rebecca in front of the young boy. Bruce comes to believe that base emotions are dangerous and he becomes very repressed. As he grows up, there are at least two occasions where he's seriously provoked and reacts by suddenly exploding with emotion, acting and sounding like a different person entirely for a few moments before regaining his senses, with no memory of what just happened.
Bruce doesn't realize it but he has Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder). His bottled up emotions are causing his personality to split.
Years later, Dr. Bruce Banner builds a gamma bomb for the military. When a teenager named Rick Jones wanders into the blast area, Bruce risks his life to save the kid. He succeeds but doesn't get back to safety quickly enough and is caught in the edge of the explosion.
Some x-factor in Bruce's DNA, perhaps a result of his father's radiation exposure, prevents him from dying. Instead, he's mutated and now possesses a trait that no other DID patient shares: whenever he shifts personalities, there's now a physical transformation as well. When he's provoked, he now becomes a green, hulking creature who embodies all the rage and loneliness of that eight-year-old boy who saw his mother killed.
As the years go on, Bruce becomes a fugitive. He's constantly trying to evade the military who view him as a walking
WMD, hoping he can hide long enough to find a cure for his condition, fearing what will happen if he ever loses his temper in front of an innocent person.
On the run, Bruce is forced to abandon his love Betty Ross, whose father, Air Force General "Thunderbolt" Ross, is the Hulk's most obsessive pursuer. He has a few friends, the most loyal of whom is Rick Jones, but in the end Bruce knows that he's on his own because he can't risk people staying with him, let their lives also be ruined by the military or the monster that dwells inside him.
Got it? Great. Now on to Ang Lee's version.
In the movie, Dr. David Banner is a scientist who experiments on himself, trying to create a perfect human being. It doesn't work, but later on when his son is born he realizes the child is manifesting strange qualities. Young Bruce is a very introverted, aloof child and patches of his skin become green when he's angry of afraid. David later attempts to kill Bruce, believing the boy's inherited mutation is turning him into a monster. David's wife interferes and winds up killed instead. David is taken to a mental hospital and four-year-old Bruce is sent to an orphanage. He is adopted by the Krenzlers and doesn't remember anything about his early childhood.
Years later, Dr. Bruce Krenzler is working on nano-bots that can repair injured soldiers. To activate the nano-bots, you need to douse them with radiation emitted from a special "gammasphere" (in reality, gammaspheres are used to only detect gamma radiation, not produce it). Bruce's girlfriend Betty Ross is also a scientist in the movie and tries to help Bruce in the project.
During a phase of the experiment, a co-worker of Bruce and Betty's winds up in the room with the gammasphere as it's about to activate. Bruce gets him out of the way and is himself exposed to the nano-bots and gamma rays. His altered DNA prevents him from being killed like the other test subjects. Instead, he now turns into the Hulk whenever he's provoked. The army finds out about this and General Ross, who was an enemy of Bruce's father, leads the charge in trying to capture the Hulk.
Bruce's father later shows up again, eventually gaining the ability to mimic the properties of anything he touches (a nod to the comic book villain Absorbing Man). During all this, Bruce finds out about his past and he and his father are forced to have a very surreal fight.
Now, a lot of the basics of Bruce Banner are there. Seems like they hit a lot of the marks of the comic story. So why didn't people like the film when the comic was so successful that it spawned enjoyable TV shows, made-for-TV films, video games and tons of merchandise?
Because these story details aren't what really made fans enjoy the Hulk. One of the major factors that made Bruce Banner a compelling character over the years was that he was portrayed as a pretty good (if socially awkward) person who longed for the relatively normal life he took for granted and was tortured by his fear that at any moment he could get testy and transform into a destructive force of nature. He'd get angry, black out and then wake up, human again, surrounded by debris, terrified that this time he'd find out the Hulk had destroyed a school. Your heart went out to him.
In the comics, there was also the constant theme of a man on the run and we all love us a good fugitive story. As the years went on, Banner's experiences made him less of a victim and more of a hard-edged man, experienced in avoiding and combating authority figures and with little patience for those who didn't take him seriously. A lot of us can relate to situations where we've had to grow a thicker skin because of circumstances around us. We can also connect to both the Hulk and Banner's not being in control of their lives and their simple desire to be left alone to live in peace.
All of that emotion, that atmosphere and heart, was missing from Ang Lee's film. Eric Bana is a decent actor from what I've seen, but in the film he was too detached, too analytical about his situation. When he described his transformations to Betty (played by the talented 
Jennifer Conolly), Bana sounded like a scientist considering a strange problem. He didn't seem scared that he had become a horrible twist of Jekyll and Hyde. And because we didn't see or feel his concern, we had no reason to be concerned ourselves.
The lack of a real antagonist also hurt the film. In the comics, there are often scenes that are very cathartic to the reader. Bruce Banner sees a gang beating up on some kid, he "Hulks out" on them. Several of the military men who've chased the Hulk in the comics have been clearly shown as wanting the creature due to a personal agenda, seeing him as a weapon rather than a man who needs help, which makes them good antogonists. And that's not even talking about the super-villains the Hulk and Banner sometimes face.
In the film, the army weren't really portrayed as villains. They were reacting quite understandably to a giant monster that can lift tanks and is very angry. Bruce's father was semi-villainous, but his motivations weren't very clear or understandable and he wasn't all that threatening. So who is there for the Hulk to be pitted against, both literally and metaphorically?
Now you may say "but Alan, the Hulk has been portrayed drastically different at times. What about the years when Peter David was writing and he seemed pretty confident and had established a balance between his different personalities?" Yes, you're right, his was very different than a lot of other runs. There was a lot more humor
and Bruce Banner generally acted more confident and self-assured. But in the heart of Peter David's stories, there was still a constant theme of the outsider. Because even though Banner seemed to gain control over his power (at least for a while), no one ever let him forget about all those rampages of the past and all the damage he'd done. He was still a man being persecuted for reasons he couldn't really control, who still wanted to lead an ordinary life while the world left him alone.
And if you want one of the greatest Hulk stories ever done, a tale that evokes all of the themes I talked about earlier, go to your back issue bins and find Peter David's final issue of his original run, Incredible Hulk #467. Nothing shows you the heart of the Hulk and Bruce Banner more than that singularly haunting tale.
Interestingly, the 1970's TV series The Incredible Hulk starring Bill Bixy and Lou Ferrigno did a much better job than Ang Lee. Yet, they changed so much. They completely rewrote the Hulk's origin and changed the name from Bruce Banner to David Banner. They made the Hulk significantly weaker than he was in the comics. Rick Jones, Betty and the army were nowhere to be seen. But people loved it, including comic book fans.
How come? Because while the origin was different, the essence of the character was still there. A guy we felt for, who we could see as our friend, who was on the run, afraid of his own emotions, desperate to find a solution for his problem. I can't sit through watching Ang Lee's entire Hulk film, but man, I love watching many of those Bixby episodes. In the first ten minutes of the pilot, you already feel your heart going out to the guy and that's before he even mutates!
It all stems down to one thing. After Stan Lee created the Hulk, he said that part of the fun was "Think of the challenge it would be to make a monster out of a hero." When Ang Lee was interviewed about his directing choices for the film, he said "It's a monster movie ... he's not a super-hero - He's a monster who comes out to make a mess."
See, Ang, that right there is why you screwed up.
The new Incredible Hulk movie is said to take a lot of inspiration from the 1970's TV series, so hopefully we'll soon see a better adaptation of the Green Goliath that again strikes a chord with movie goers. Edward Norton (a guy known for playing characters who shift personalities) is starring as Bruce Banner and Tim Roth will be starring as Emil Blonsky, who in the comic books became a reptilian Hulk-like villain known as the Abomination. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
Back to my original point. Reading the Wikipedia entry on a super-hero's origin is not enough to say you know the character and can make a movie. Do the leg work. Look for the broader idea behind the character, the 
spirit that lies in between the words. Because, as I said in my third point, what it boils down to is the heart of the piece. The character, his world, his themes. Learn why these made fans respond in the first place.
Otherwise, you may miss the point entirely.
- Alan Kistler ...
... says "We are the
Champions, my friends!"
Quote of the Week: "Listen! ... You smell something?"
(Last week's quote was from the TV show Weeds)
NEXT COLUMN: Ignorance of History (in the U.S., specifically)
Reader Comments (7)
Really good points on the lack of a villain. Sam Elliot was great but he didn't seem really like "Thunderbolt" Ross.
I always wondered if a comic book movie could be made where there wasn't an origin story for the character (to a degree this was done in X-Men, but it was a team book, so.... I don't think it counts).
Like no one had to create an origin for James Bond, he just was James Bond.
BTW: When you posted this article you lost the article on the history of the Second Doctor. Maybe this was intentional, but wanted to let you know if not.
KISTLER'S RESPONSE:
Thanks for the kind words, they're very appreciated.
Your mention of avoiding reliving the origin story is pretty valid. Technically, the X-Men film was able to avoid this because the team was already formed when the story started and most of the characters already had a history with each other. We just got the basic details in flashback and moved on with things. I don't see why this can't be done more often. Due to a wager, I wrote a Spider-Man script a couple of months after the first Sam Raimi film came out and one thing I did was to have the story start with Spider-Man already having been around for about five years and you got to know through flashback and throw a couple of conversations what had happened to him and why he became a hero. The reason I did that was because I wanted to immediately show how much fun Spidey is by showing you the version of him that was experienced and throwing jokes back and forth, using his powers in creative ways instead of spending an hour just realizing how far he could jump and all. It also helped me establish that his war with the Goblin had lasted years, which in my mind made it a much more heated rivalry and made their final battle really feel like a final battle.
The History of the Second Doctor is being revised slightly in order to be a little clearer and to add information behind the scenes concerning Patrick Troughton (that info will be found at the very beginning). Likewise, the pictures are being re-arranged. Hopefully this will be done by the end of today and the essay will be up again afterwards.
I just wanted to thank you for using the appropriate name for Dissosiative Identity Disorder. Its frustrating to be in the psych community and hear people constantly refering to it as MPD. DID is much more inclusive than MPD and is a more accurate description of the disorder. Also, I didn't know Bruce was diagnosed with DID before he was actually mutated. That is a fun fact for me to point out to my patients.. see, even the Hulk, with all his power has a mental disability. Thanks again!
KISTLER'S RESPONSE:
Yeah,it annoys me too.
He wasn't officially diagnosed since he never had a psychologist check him out, but he did have two brief "Hulk-outs" that we know of before he actually gained the ability to physically transform as well.
Thanks for reading!
KISTLER'S RESPONSE:
There definitely is and I'll tackle that soon. For now, I think it's best I give the subject of adaptation a break lest I make everyone think I have nothing else to talk about. :-)