Phase 1 Revisited: The Incredible Hulk

In which I revisit a previously explored topic with fresh eyes and an open mind.

If you had to name the best solo movie from Marvel's Phase 1, chances are that it'd be Iron Man.  It seems to be the go-to answer whenever this question crops up, and it's not without good reason.  It kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, teased The Avengers four years before it hit screens and showed that you could go light-hearted with superheroes without getting shticky with them.  For my money, though, it doesn't get any better than The Incredible Hulk.

When altruistic scientist Bruce Banner is exposed to gamma radiation in an experiment gone horribly wrong, he gains the ability to transform into a being of herculean strength when he becomes angry.  When the military wants to weaponize his transformations, he's driven into hiding: forced to look for a cure to his condition in slums half a world away from home.  But when a desperate general injects a psychopath with a would-be super soldier serum, he creates an abomination that only the Hulk can put down.

It's easy two phases into the Avengers meta-franchise to look back harshly on The Incredible Hulk.  For as great an actor as Edward Norton is, his Bruce Banner is as poor in comparison with Mark Ruffalo's as Gravity was to Interstellar.  While both are excellent, one is obviously superior to the other.  Furthermore, his loner status among the Avengers team, his lack of a sequel and the non-appearance of his supporting cast since 2008 have all telegraphed the same, albeit untrue, message: The Incredible Hulk wasn't good - or at least not good enough.

But was it really?  Its protagonist is a latter day Jekyll / Hyde duo that in no way feels derivative of its Victorian inspiration.  The dark, pseudo-horrific tone - although an outlier among the generally light-hearted nature of the MCU - is a perfect fit for its story.  Although Norton is a second-rate Banner when you consider Ruffalo's turn as the character, he is none-the-less a superior actor turning in a superior performance in an ultimately superior film.

I would go so far as to say that The Incredible Hulk has the best action scenes of any Phase 1 film not named The Avengers.  Iron Man had surprisingly little action, and most of what it did have was an ultimately forgettable smack-down with Iron Monger  Thor succeeded mostly by way of the Shakespearean dynamic between Thor and Loki, not in their climactic showdown.  Only Captain America comes close, but it really played out more as a historical drama than an action film.

Hulk vs The Abomination is an absolutely brutal fight.  You not only feel every superpowered punch, kick and slam, but you see the fatigue set into the two combatants as the battle wages on.  It's a savage, bloody spectacle of blunt force and improvised weaponry and every last second of it holds up upon repeated viewings.  Compare that with Iron Man 2's non-climax, which is ultimately just something for Tony to get through after upgrading his hardware.

What's more is that the movie understands that the Hulk transformation is its money shot and restrains itself to using it as sparingly as possible.  We see his point-of-view rampage at the Culver University lab in an opening credit montage, and an almost completely obscured sequence at a Brazilian bottling plant.  The next time that we see the Hulk is when he fights the army at Culver University - the first time that we get a good look at him.  After that there's just on induced episode that serves as a stakes-raising plot point for the climax and then his confrontation of The Abomination in Harlem.

That's not to say that the movie doesn't have its issues, just that they are far milder than anybody seems to give it credit for.  Norton is a bit too physically confident as Bruce Banner.  Betty Ross' rebound boyfriend serves little purpose and could have easily been written out of the script.  The movie bent over backwards to establish that it and Iron Man existed concurrently, which seems more than a little heavy-handed in retrospect.

That being said, however, the emotional core of Banner as a tragic hero grounds the narrative in something much more somber than anything else that Marvel has put forward.  It's a movie that desperately deserves a sequel, whether it ends up being Planet Hulk or continues with the obvious setup of Samuel Sterns as The Leader.  And with as popular as Hulk has become since The Avengers, I expect that that's something we'll be seeing sooner as opposed to later.

Rating:  9/10

Buy on BluRay:  HULK SMASH!!!  I mean, yes.

So what would you like to see in an Incredible Hulk sequel?  Would prefer to see Sterns as The Leader, adaptations of Planet Hulk / World War Hulk or another story / villain entirely?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Join the Filmquisition on Twitter (@Filmquisition) or by subscribing to this blog.