Name: Hulk (2003)
Released: 2003-06-20
Duration: 2 h 18 min

Key Story Points

•David Banner's experiments on himself left his son Bruce's DNA altered from birth

•A gamma accident brings it out, and Bruce turns into the Hulk when he is angry

•General Ross, Betty's father, has Bruce held at the desert base where David worked, and Glenn Talbot tries to turn him into a weapon

•David gives himself the power to absorb anything he touches, and is destroyed trying to take the Hulk's

•The Incredible Hulk (2008), the MCU's first Hulk film, starts over with a new Bruce Banner rather than continuing this one

The full story

In the 1960s, military geneticist David Banner experiments on himself, trying to improve human DNA. His son Bruce is born carrying the changes. When his superior, Colonel Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, shuts the research down, David blows up the base's gamma reactor and, in the chaos, kills his wife while trying to kill the boy. David is locked away, and four-year-old Bruce grows up adopted, as Bruce Krenzler, with no memory of any of it and believing both his parents are dead.

Bruce grows up to be a scientist at the Berkeley lab, working on nanomeds, microscopic machines meant to heal living tissue, alongside his girlfriend Betty Ross, General Ross's estranged daughter. Glenn Talbot, of the private research company Atheon, wants their research to make soldiers who regenerate. A new janitor at the lab is David, out and watching his son.

When the gammasphere malfunctions, Bruce throws himself in front of a colleague and takes a dose of gamma radiation and nanomeds that should have killed him. He's fine, better than fine. David tells Bruce who he is, and that night Bruce's anger turns him into the Hulk for the first time, and he wrecks the lab. General Ross puts Bruce under house arrest. David turns three dogs into mutant monsters with Bruce's DNA and sets them on Betty; the Hulk tears them apart to save her.

The army takes Bruce to the desert base where it all began, and Talbot takes over, determined to make a weapon out of him. He frightens Bruce into changing, and the Hulk breaks out; Talbot dies when his own explosive round ricochets back at him. The Hulk fights his way across the desert, through tanks and helicopters, and bounds all the way to San Francisco, where Betty talks him back down.

David has given himself his own powers: he can absorb the properties of anything he touches. He wants his son's strength. Bruce refuses him, and David bites into a power cable and becomes living electricity. The two fight, and Bruce lets his father take everything, more than David can hold. Ross drops a gamma bomb on them; David is destroyed, and Bruce is presumed dead. A year later, he's a doctor in the Amazon rainforest, and when soldiers try to rob his medical camp, he warns them not to make him angry.