Alternate Cover: Why Ang Lee's Hulk doesn't rule

With The Incredible “not a sequel” Hulk ready to hit screens this month, you can bet I’ll be paying some serious attention to the Green Goliath over the next few weeks. I thought I’d start by stretching the remit of my column and examining the first Hulk film from the perspective of a comics fan to try and explain just what Ang Lee got right, what he got, er, not so right.

Now, I’m a sucker for even the most horrible comics films. I actually watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen twice, just to make sure it was as bad as I thought it was. By contrast, I regret the time I spent watching Hulk even once, and I’m a big fan of the character. It’s good that it managed to get the film far enough away from the 60s TV series that it was able to develop its own identity, but honestly, did that identity need to be such a unique combination of pretentious and brainless?

Now, I’ll admit it. The comicbook framing elements in the direction were definitely smart. The shots were often beautifully and carefully composed with obvious respect to the source medium. That’s a good thing. The problem was that these kind of shots were the very embodiment of the phrase “style over substance.” It looked nice, but there was nothing more to it, and it made the film ponderous and uninteresting. A remarkable feat given Ang Lee’s attempts to draw out the more complicated, psychological aspects of the Hulk’s mythos and origin.

Yes, that’s right, I said psychological aspects. Time for your Incredible Hulk crash course, kiddies. As you may or may not be aware, The Hulk is merely one aspect of Bruce Banner’s multiple-personality disorder – a condition he developed as a result of childhood abuse. The gamma explosion didn’t create the Hulk – it just let him out. Over the years, various other personalities have also emerged. There’s the grey, thuggish Hulk. The savage, mindless Hulk, and the merged, intelligent Hulk who had all the smarts of Banner in the body of the Hulk – though in a genius inversion of the concept, he turned into a vulnerable, defenseless human if he lost his temper during a fight.

The Marvel Geek in me thinks it’s nice that the film incorporated the idea of the Hulk as a manifestation of Banner’s multiple personality disorder in a fairly faithful, if overly artful version of the origin. The problem is that the inclusion of that material isn’t enough to save the film. Especially when, as a result, they heavily utilise Banner’s father and he somehow turns into, er, the Absorbing Man, I guess. It’s hard to say, as the ending fight in Hulk is justifiably regarded as incomprehensible by most people who’ve seen it.

In spite of all this, perhaps the biggest crime committed by Ang Lee’s version of the film is that the Hulk takes a very, very, very, very long time to show up. For a film ultimately designed as a summer blockbuster, it made no attempt to entertain the audience in a simple, gratifying way – and that’s what the people want. There’s a good reason that when people say “Hulk” the next thing they come out with is usually “Smash” (well, since Ang Lee’s version, it’s “sucked” but you know what I mean) – some people say Hulk is a version of the Frankenstein story, some people say it’s Jekyll and Hyde, but the truth is that what people really want to see in a Hulk film is closer to Godzilla or King Kong. A misunderstood monster that can take a beating, and dish one out in return.

A Hulk film should’ve been impossible to screw up, and yet somehow, Ang Lee managed it. Reported fighting over the editing of Incredible Hulk make for some uneasy reading, but really, there’s little chance it’ll fail on every level as much as its predecessor. It might be a step backwards in some ways, but if that’s what it takes to make the Hulk franchise viable for films again, even a staunch Hulk enthusiast like me is ready to accept the watered-down, mass-market version for the sake of a good two hour’s at the cinema. See, comics fans CAN be reasonable if we want!

James will be back with another Alternate Cover next week; read his last column here.