The Hulk, why do we love this big green menace?
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Was This Hulk Really Necessary?

Before I begin, I should note that it's generally bad form to comment on a movie before having seen it. Writing this before The Incredible Hulk opened leaves me open to a lot of sticks and stones. But almost since the announcement of production, a sense of "why bother" hung over this one like alcoholic fumes. So as Hulk 2.0 crashes into theaters, it behooves us to take a little whiff and ask what prompted the creation of a film that no one was exactly clamoring for. Edward Norton? Great. More action? Fantastic. Not strictly a sequel to Ang Lee's less-than-beloved 2003 original? Fine and dandy.

So why does all of that feel like a reason not to hate The Incredible Hulk rather than a reason to love it?

Frankly, the Lee film has been unjustly maligned over the past five years, and I think this new Hulk knows it. Lee's deviation from canon and philosophical approach left a number of fans decidedly cold, and yet those very qualities helped set the 2003 Hulk apart from the rest of the comic adaptation pack. It took a genuinely original look at the superhero genre, marked by Lee's inventive split-screen visuals and an intensity to the violence that proved downright shocking at points. The Hulk himself made an ideal fulcrum for such a deviation. He was never a typical superhero, after all, with his Jekyll and Hyde origins and penchant for mindless destruction. Why not use him to shake up the format a little bit instead of just aping the X-Men or Spider-Man franchises? Though far from perfect, Lee's version remains genuinely unique, and its recent appearance at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival suggests a growing number of people have discovered its previously ignored strengths.

Moreover, while the Edward Norton non-sequel promises a clean break from all that, it still retains the thick sheen of its predecessor. Norton and director Louis Leterrier reportedly clashed with Marvel over elements that were deemed "too cerebral"—the same accusations that dogged Lee's film—and Norton has declined to participate in promotion based on differences over the final cut. Marvel vetoed a lengthier version of the movie over Norton's and Leterrier's objections, apparently rejecting the artists they hired to escape Lee's thoughtfulness… because they were too thoughtful.

A second similarity is more difficult to avoid considering the nature of the character. Like Lee's film, this new Hulk is a CGI effect: big and scary, yes, but also remarkably artificial. The 2003 version suffered a devastating PR blow when an early print featuring sub-par effects was leaked on the internet. The final product looked much better, but people still complained about an unduly cartoonish appearance to the character. That 's clearly carried over to the new version—a necessity perhaps, but further illustrating that its ballyhooed changes are more cosmetic than they would have us believe.

It also causes a certain detachment, presenting the Hulk as more of a cool image than a figure we can identify with. Similar CGI characters can get around that with good dialogue, but the Hulk never speaks except in enraged howls, reducing his emotional palate and further reminding us that we're looking at an image rather than a performer. Many of us still think of Lou Ferrigno as the definitive Hulk because we can better connect to the human face beneath that green make-up. The Incredible Hulk apparently uses Ferrigno's voice for their monster—a classy move, if true—but the principle remains unchanged. If you want to escape that horrible stinky Lee version, why follow the same means of generating the character?

The film's apparent villain falls into the CGI trap as well. As great a superhero as he is, the Hulk never had a sterling rogues gallery. The U.S. Army seemed the best foil for him: a threatening industrial system which he could bash real good. For The Incredible Hulk, they've brought out the Abomination to spice things up: basically just a bigger, meaner, uglier version of the Hulk. The concept can work—Iron Man did okay with Jeff Bridges' War Monger—but it further reduces the equation to special effects pounding on each other, with comparatively little human involvement.

That implication reaches its most troubling ends with a wholesale swapping out of the cast—replacing every performer from Lee's version with new ones. Why? To distance themselves, of course, and to reiterate the notion that this is, in essence, a reboot without actually coming out and calling it such. It's a solid cast, to be sure—Oscar winners and Oscar nominees abound, and that Liv Tyler is awful cute—but it also suggests that the producers at Marvel feel their characters are essentially interchangeable. Few actresses can conjure soulful vulnerability the way Jennifer Connelly did in the first film, and while William Hurt is a terrific performer, he doesn't hold a candle to Sam Elliot in the don't-tread-on-me military prickliness department. Such a massive changeover loses the benefits they bring to the table, and none of the cast names attached to The Incredible Hulk conjures a huge amount of enthusiasm. (Yes, Batman Begins made a similar switch, but only after its predecessor, Batman and Robin, had laid such a hideously stench-filled egg that people still speak of it in hushed tones. I don't think even the biggest detractors of the Lee film would lump his work alongside such a disaster.)

Perhaps it’s the tentative nature of the re-imagining that makes The Incredible Hulk so puzzling. They don't wish to reject the Lee version completely the way Christopher Nolan did previous Batman entries. Yet neither are they comfortable acknowledging it beyond the most perfunctory ways… even as they appear to wrestle with the same issues that Lee did. Their primary selling point—beyond the big green guy himself—seems to be that they're not Lee. And yet they haven't displayed anything of their own to accentuate that difference beyond new faces and a promise of more action. It's hard to generate excitement for a soup so seemingly thin. None of this matters if the film itself delivers the goods of course. I sincerely hope it does, if for no other reason than to give opponents of the Lee film a Hulk they can love. But as the release date draws closer, The Incredible Hulk still feels like its trying to justify itself… and the answers it's providing have yet to ring true.