The Incred­i­ble Hulk is Hollywood’s lat­est inci­dence of what has become known as a “reboot.” The term, I believe was orig­i­nally coined in the comic book world, with fur­ther deriva­tions in com­puter ter­mi­nol­ogy. When a fran­chise begins to show its age with stalled cre­ative energy and declin­ing sales, its own­ers may opt to check it into surgery to be refreshed with a new cast, cre­ative team, and updated plot par­tic­u­lars. Warner Bros. and DC Comics kick-started their valu­able but stag­nant Bat­man and Super­man fea­ture film prop­er­ties, mak­ing them rel­e­vant to 21^st cen­tury audi­ences, and now it’s Mar­vel Comics’ turn. Embold­ened by recent suc­cesses with Spider-Man and The Fan­tas­tic Four (and con­ve­niently ignor­ing the fail­ures Dare­devil and Elek­tra), Mar­vel has obtained fund­ing to inde­pen­dently pro­duce its own films with greater cre­ative con­trol and, pre­sum­ably, a larger chunk of the finan­cial return. The mas­sive suc­cess of 2008’s Iron Man seemed to prove their instincts correct.

Remark­ably, The Incred­i­ble Hulk comes only five years after Ang Lee and James Schamus’ Hulk, itself a reboot of the comic book, car­toon, and tele­vi­sion series. Even before Mar­vel announced it was to start over from scratch, the orig­i­nal Hulk film had already been seen as a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial fail­ure, even though the reviews were not actu­ally ter­ri­ble (54 on Meta­Critic and 61 on Rot­ten Toma­toes, both about the same as what The Incred­i­ble Hulk scored) and it earned $245 mil­lion worldwide.

NORTON SMASH!!!

This Dork Reporter fully real­izes his is the minor­ity opin­ion, but the Lee/Schamus ver­sion is a far, far bet­ter film, not only in com­par­i­son with its suc­ces­sor but also on its own terms. To para­phrase a review I recall read­ing at the time, “only the direc­tor of Eat Drink Man Woman and Sense & Sen­si­bil­ity would look at ‘The Hulk’ and see ‘sprawl­ing fam­ily melo­drama.’” Lee and Schamus saw the core story as more than a sim­ple Strange Case of Dr. Jeck­yll & Mr. Hyde retread, and instead chose to tell a deeper tale of fathers and sons. The Hulk him­self was cre­ated using motion-capture tech­nol­ogy using Ang Lee’s own body lan­guage, and real­ized on screen as a giant green petu­lant baby (which is both absurdly funny and oddly mov­ing, like the orig­i­nal King Kong). I still main­tain it is one of the most bril­liantly edited films I’ve ever seen, the clos­est in flow and visual style to a comic book a film has ever come. It’s also just really fuck­ing weird, in a good way.

With Mar­vel in total charge of its own intel­lec­tual prop­erty at last, The Incred­i­ble Hulk had low artis­tic ambi­tions and was unsur­pris­ingly crafted with comic book geeks in mind. In harsh con­trast with art­house main­stays Lee and Schamus, it was directed by action film spe­cial­ist Louis Leter­rier (of Trans­porter 2 and Danny the Dog) and writ­ten by Zak Penn, who has appar­ently cor­nered the mar­ket on super-hero scripts (includ­ing X-Men 2 & 3, Elek­tra, and the upcom­ing Avengers and Cap­tain Amer­ica). The backwards-facing film gives the fan­boys a nod with admit­tedly fun cameos from Lou Fer­rigno (who also voiced The Hulk’s few lines, and who also seems not to have aged one bit) and orig­i­nal Hulk co-creator (with Jack Kirby) Stan Lee. But the CG is sur­pris­ingly uncon­vinc­ing for a film that should have been state-of-the-art; the Hulk looks like he’s made of string cheese and quiv­er­ing gelatin.

It’s show­time at The Apollo

Truth be told, I was actu­ally rather enjoy­ing the film, until one nig­gling fault grew to an unig­nor­able degree that ruined the entire expe­ri­ence for me. Key char­ac­ter Emil Blon­sky (Tim Roth) remains trag­i­cally under­de­vel­oped. Any screen­writ­ing stu­dent (hell, any film fan) should know the sto­ry­telling mantra “show don’t tell,” and yet Blonsky’s moti­va­tions are only hinted at in one or two lines of dia­logue: he’s a career sol­dier grumpy about turn­ing forty. Blon­sky even­tu­ally evolves into the Hulk’s neme­sis The Abom­i­na­tion, a hideous beast that lives to destroy. As the two crea­tures smash Harlem to bits in the final reel, there was no sense that the Abom­i­na­tion was once a man. What drove him to this? Inter­est­ingly, Roth plays a not entirely dis­sim­i­lar char­ac­ter in Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Youth With­out Youth: a man who uses up his youth in pur­suit of an unat­tain­able goal. In each case, the oppor­tu­nity for a sec­ond chance is a mixed blessing.

Rumor has it an alter­nate, sig­nif­i­cantly longer cut of the film will even­tu­ally be released on DVD, pre­serv­ing more of Edward Norton’s reported script doc­tor­ing, so this Dork Reporter hopes he will be able to revise his opin­ion at a later date.

Must read: Peter Bradshaw’s review of The Incred­i­ble Hulk as told to him by… The Hulk (spot­ted on Kottke.org)

Offi­cial movie site: www.theincrediblehulk.net

•