THE INCREDIBLE HULK by Louis Leterrier
With The Incredible Hulk, the Marvel Studios churn out another superhero-flick with big names attached after Iron Man. Edward Norton is Bruce Banner/The Hulk, Liv Tyler is love interest Dr. Elizabeth Ross, her father General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, the man who wants to capture the Hulk by all means, is played by William Hurt, and Tim Roth is Major Emil Blonsky, the soldier who turns into the Abomination.
The Incredible Hulk is not a sequel to Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk
The origin story of the Hulk is expertly told in the opening credits (watch closely and you will see Stark Industries mentioned there as well) and some short flashbacks later on, so Leterrier can jump right into the story.
With a breathtaking aerial shot we learn that Bruce Banner hides in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where he takes breathing lessons to learn to control his emotions and works in a run-down bottling factory for a living, while he is looking for a cure to get rid of his alter ego, the Hulk, with the help of an online contact, Mr. Blue. But General Ross tracks him down when Bruce cuts himself and a drop of his contaminated blood drips into one of the bottles which turns up in the USA. A task force led by Emil Blonsky is dispatched to capture Banner, but he transforms into the Hulk and escapes. Bruce returns to the USA in search for ‘Mr. Blue’ Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) and a cure, but General Ross and Blonsky, who has convinced the General to give him a treatment with a super-soldier serum, are attacking again. And after Blonsky forces Dr. Sterns to also give him the Hulk-treatment, he turns into a monstrous creature, the Abomination, who wreaks havoc in New York. There is only one man who can possibly stop the Abomination – The Incredible Hulk.
It’s always a pleasure to watch Edward Norton, and in The Incredible Hulk he has his best scenes in the beginning, where he shows who Bruce Banner is and how desperatly he wants to get rid of his condition. Bruce is lonely because he lives in the constant fear of turning into the Hulk and hurting people – and getting discovered by General Ross and turned into a weapon. He wants to connect with people and he wants to help when he can, but he must keep low-level and he can’t risk to get too excited because “you wouldn’t like me when i’m angry”. Tim Roth is also in good form as the unscrupulous Blonsky who has seen the enranged Hulk and craves to have this god-like powers for himself, no matter what it takes.
Then there are the other two leads – the Hulk and the Abomination. And there is an inherent problem with the Hulk that doesn’t affect the other superheroes we have seen on the screen. There is only so much the Hulk can do when he appears – he is angry and he fights, smashing lots of stuff. Which gets kind of redundant when he fends off General Blonsky’s troops for the umpteenth time. And there is the Abomination – basically like the Hulk, just bigger and destroying more stuff. For a change, the Hulk can fight the Abomination instead of a small army, then we have an extraordinary guy with superhuman strength fighting an even bigger copy of himself. Didn’t we see that recently in Iron Man? And is it really necessery to move in real close to the fight just like in the Bourne fight scenes, shaky-cam and all? So all you can really see on the screen is a blur of green and grey?
And is it better than Ang Lee’s Hulk? Arguably yes, because it tries to keep it both close to reality and to the comic (The Hulk is really big but always the same size (and the Incredible Hulk looks better than the Hulk), the fights look more real – and they even care about the problem with those pants that always keep the Hulk decent even when all other clothes tear apart!), and because it has Edward Norton in it, who makes Bruce Banner a much more likeable man than Eric Bana’s wimp!
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The Incredible Hulk Movie Trailer
