Hulk Vs The Incredible Hulk

Comparisons between the 2003 Ang Lee movie Hulk and the 2008 The Incredible Hulk directed by Louis Leterrier is inevitable. In essence they're both the same story, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde writ superheroically large with tincture of Mary Shelley's persecuted Frankenstein monster to add poignancy.

To begin, the differences are that Hulk was directed by a character-based movie director and The Incredible Hulk by an action movie director. Lee's interpretation of the story was almost operatic. David Banner (Nick Nolte) the father of Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) created the Hulk by experimenting on his young son, splicing genes from other animals into his DNA until his wife discovers what he is doing and he stabs her to death accidentally during a struggle. Bana/Banner is a lonely figure with disturbing memories of his childhood to plague him as he experiments with medical nanotechnology and rekindles his relationship with Betty Ross (Jennifer Connolly) just as a lab accident results in the creation of a monster fuelled by Banner's inner demons.

Hulk also has some brilliantly composed and created set pieces. The fight with the hulkdogs in the dim moonlight is incredibly brutal and powerful, the ride on the jet-fighter high into the stratosphere above San Francisco Bay fills me with awe and the desert chase sequences are utterly believable and true to the action scenes from many Hulk comics. Bana, Connolly and Nolte are fine in their roles. Sam Elliott's General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross is suitably conflicted but duty bound and the climactic struggle between Hulk and his father is like a battle between Olympian gods. The complaints heard about the film were mostly about the liberties taken with the original stories as if every comic book ever drawn and written were carved on stone tablets and handed to Moses by god. Lee's Hulk is bright, larger than life and theatrical.

The Incredible Hulk has one great weakness for me. It claims to "embrace" the 1970s tv series. This is essayed by showing a video-clip of Bill Bixby in an episode of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", having Lou Ferrigno play a security guard (as he did in Hulk), having Banner (Edward Norton) telegraph hulking out by making his eyes glow green and playing that sappy "Lonely Man" music from the tv show during a scene where Banner is hitch-hiking in the rain. *reality check* 1970s US Network TV was mostly careful, factory-manufactured, too scared to challenge the status quo crap. (See Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat for a brilliant and cogent vivisection of the banality of television during the third quarter of the 20th Century). If you embrace shit, you get your shirt dirty.

I'm no real fan of Edward Norton's work. Fine actor, but we don't connect. Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky (aka Abomination) is just wrong for the role. He's supposed to look like an ageing SAS commando but has the muscle tone and physique of someone who watches what he eats and takes some light exercise. He hits the right notes in his acting, but the physicality creates too much of a dissonance. Liv Tyler is dewy-eyed and pouty as Betty Ross. William Hurt's Thunderbolt Ross looks right but the acting is generic. There's nothing behind the facade. Tim Blake Nelson's Samuel Sterns (soon to be The Leader) has some gonzo moments that lighten things up, but not enough of them. I wanted to see more of him.

Having said that, the movie wasn't too bad. The Hulk himself is more sinewy than the 2003 version, less wide around the jaw. His leaping isn't as parabolic as the previous version but it works. There's a great establishing shot that swoops over the favelas of Rio which seem to go on forever. The bit where Hulk gets zapped with two sonic weapons at once has a great tension to it, as does his protection of Betty Ross during an attack by helicopter and the later scenes under a rock ledge during a thunderstorm. The big battle between Blonsky and The Hulk is okay. Two creations of computer coding fighting one another still has a way to go before it feels visceral enough.

Perhaps the real problem with the 2008 version is that the star, Edward Norton, had a big say in how things rolled. Yeah, he's a comic book geek but then so is Jon Favreau who directed Iron Man. Looking at the wikipedia page for the movie, the impression I get is that Norton meant well but some of his judgement calls on the direction of the film were ill-considered.

Marvel Studios, now they are making their own films, are building their franchises well. The Tony Stark cameo at the end of The Incredible Hulk is one of the bits that works really well. It creates an appetite for where things are going, just as the Nick Fury cameo did in Iron Man. But Iron Man created an expectation for TIH which it didn't quite live up to.

So overall, the Ang Lee Hulk is the better film, even if The Merry Marvel Marching Society didn't dig it. It explored the story in a new way, improvising and riffing in intriguing ways. TIH08 played it safe, which I suppose Marvel has the right to do with their own property, but they should throw us a few surprises when building their Universe, as happened in Iron Man when Captain America's shield showed up on Tony Stark's workbench. We need those eyeball kicks and bits of wonderfulness. (I know Leonard Sampson appeared in TIH08 - and Ty Burrell had a few great moments playing him, but something more was called for.)