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Film Review: The Incredible Hulk – 2008

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Director(s)Louis Leterrier
Principal CastEdward Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Voice by Lou Ferrigno)
Liv Tyler as Betty Ross
William Hurt as General Ross
Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky / Abomination
Release Date2008
Language(s)English
Running Time 112 minutes
Report CardClick to go to Review TLDR/Summary
Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) tests his Gamma treatment on himself.
Bruce transforms into the Hulk.
He sees Betty (Liv Tyler) through the windows.
The Hulk beats Betty (Liv Tyler) viciously, giving her serious injuries.
Bruce (Edward Norton) touches Betty (Liv Tyler) tenderly.
Bruce flashes back to fonder times with Betty (Liv Tyler).
General Ross (William Hurt) looks at maps to locate Banner.
Confidential information from Stark Industries is displayed.
A metronome is shown.
The camera pushes in on Betty (Liv Tyler) in her hospital bed.
This montage qua vision fades as Bruce( Edward Norton) stops the metronome.
Bruce (Edward Norton) has a count of the number of days between his incidents next to him.
The opening montage is an narrative mess that informs the audience of very little if they don’t have context already on top of being a formal mess in the way it presents the sequence. The start of the sequence with the color tinting and longing shots of Betty would suggest that this is Bruce’s fragmented memory post incident, but shots of maps, General Ross, and confidential documents show up partway through. None of these elements are items that Bruce should be privy, so their inclusion makes it seem as though the montage is just a non-diegetic summation for the audience that has nothing to do with Bruce’s perspective. This confusion is exacerbated as the sequence ends with a push in on Betty which transforms into the ringing of the metronome that Bruce reaches out to push. It seems certain that this was his vision, but the confusion in form makes the rest of the movie harder to evaluate as a result. Case in point, the count next to him loses a lot of potential as a storytelling barometer and a way of getting the inside track of Bruce’s psyche. Instead, it just exists as a way to give the audience random updates.

The movie starts with a montage set to Craig Armstrong’s epic and triumphant score which almost tricks the viewer into thinking that the title sequence is doing something special. In reality, the 3-minute introduction sequence is a formal nightmare and makes the themes and ideas of the story hard to decipher at first. Instead of setting the film’s pace and giving it a unique voice, the introduction feels like a cheap way of getting to the “real” story.

First, the initial images of the montage make it feel like this recollection of memories is from Bruce Banner’s (Edward Norton) fragmented point-of-view. As such, the repetition of certain key scenes – namely Bruce’s partner, Betty (Liv Tyler) being injured after he transformed into the Hulk – should suggest Bruce’s pre-occupation. The scenes are even tinted in green suggesting they might be an effect of the Hulk’s influence on Banner’s brain.

However, at the halfway point of the introduction, scenes that are clearly not from Bruce’s point-of-view enter. For example, General Ross is seen looking for Bruce at one point and maps along with relevant documentation prop up on the screen to reinforce that Bruce is being hunted. Given that he’s on the run, it seems impossible that he’d be privy to this information which begs the question: why are these moments in the montage?

One could chalk it up to just quick storytelling, but the sequence ends in such a way as if to suggest that it is in fact Banner recalling his past. The montage ends as the camera pushes in on Betty’s injury before suddenly cutting to a metronome, an item featured in the montage intermittently at random moments, which Banner grabs and stops. He sits center frame and then a counter appears next to him indicating it’s been 158 days since his last “incident.” Is this counter his mental barometer now perhaps because days to him only exist if he’s not the Hulk or is it a mechanism of the movie to inform the audience of the time between transformations? Because of the sloppy nature of the montage, this determination is impossible make.

The second issue with the introduction is also an issue I expect a few readers to run into: the characters and events depicted in the montage require prior context to have any chance of being relevant to the viewer. Given that Ang Lee’s Hulk came out in 2003, it’s reasonable that Marvel and screen-writer Zak Pen wanted to avoid re-hashing the origin story and chose to truncate it; the issue is the emotional core of the story being told in The Incredible Hulk is contingent on understanding the Hulk’s origin. This issue is even more pronounced because even though The Incredible Hulk could work as a spiritual sequel to Lee’s film, there are enough differences in how Bruce gets and relates to his “Hulk” power that would justify time spent explaining the nuance to the audience.

It’s especially confusing how this movie got approved given how clear Iron Man, the first installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) , ended up being for audiences unfamiliar with the character. Coming right off the heels of one of the best super-hero movies was always going to be rough, but The Incredible Hulk doesn’t make the situation any easier for itself. The issue with the film isn’t even just the botched origin story. Unlike Marvel’s reboot of Spiderman in the form of Homecoming, which truncated the origin story which had been told twice before in the 21st century, The Incredible Hulk doesn’t try and tell a story that can ride its own coattails and get the audience invested with or without previous interest.

Betty (Liv Tyler) and Bruce (Edward Norton) reunite in the rain.
Bruce (Edward Norton) laughs about putting on large purple pants that Betty (Liv Tyler) tries to get him to wear.
Betty (Liv Tyler) and Bruce (Edward Norton ) argue about todo with a medal that belongs to a “her” that’s never specified.
Even though it should be one of the driving forces of the film, Betty and Bruce’s relationship is anything but electric. Their scenes feature nothing but quips, meaningless banter, or references to events alluded to in the flashback montage at the start of the film that are never shown. Even after watching the film, I could not tell you why either character was in love with the other, the nature of what their relationship dynamic used to be, or why they were so willing to get back together after years of separation (especially in Betty’s case) . The movie constantly tells the audience that the couple is in love, but the duo never acts or moves in a way that suggests any real chemistry. This becomes a problem when the movie so obviously wants to rest its emotional heft on this thread and spends the screen-time on the couple that would be capable of achieving the same if done more rigorously.

For example, one of the primary driving forces behind Banner’s desire to control his Hulk state is his desire to eventually get back with Betty. This motivation is his primary purpose for any and all action within the story, outside of some vague ethical concerns about his research which are never explained. The movie tells us as much with the montage which features a moment where Banner flashbacks within the sequence qua memory recall to an even more intimate encounter with her.

Yet, when the couple finally get to talking and meeting with one another there’s absolutely no chemistry between them. Their conversations devolve to quips, useless chitter-chatter, and verbal reminders that they love each other. They’re seeing each for the first time in years and the director and screenwriter can’t think of any possible things they would want to mention to one another again? It feels more like they’re acquaintances running into one another than lovers who have been forcibly separated for years on end. The golden rule is to show and not tell, and The Incredible Hulk never shows; instead, it prefers to reiterate what was shown in the montage and use the shallow scaffolding created off those minute impressions to leverage interest in where the story goes. The couple loves each other because they love each other. The push just doesn’t work and the emotions are missing which makes caring during any of the tense sequences that much harder.

Just to give context, within 15 minutes Iron Man manages to explain its protagonist’s, Tony Stark’s motivations, relationships with key persons in the movie, primary character arc, and foreshadow the eventual final battle. In that same time frame, The Incredibly Hulk explains that Bruce has been trying to figure out to control his anger since his incident, that he thinks about Betty a lot, and then just gets to the first chase sequence in a series of many. Even by the end of the movie’s run-time, the amount of information learned doesn’t actually increase by a meaningful margin. The plot is nothing more than a vehicle to get Banner from point A to point B in the hopes for a Hulk transformation and fight.

The Hulk looks menacingly from the shadows.
The Hulk looks agitated as the flames go off behind him and the water pelts. down.
The Hulk sits with Betty (Liv Tyler) and is barely noticable from the background rocks.
Despite showing visually arresting close-ups of the Hulk that emphasize his dangerous nature and dual personality in relation to Banner, the movie never manages to nail a fantastic long Hulk scene. The psychological divide between the angry, malicious looking Hulk and the calm and timid banner is never explored in the transformation or discussion of the phenomenon. The action and drama set-pieces that feature the Hulk often fail because the color contrast in them de-emphasizes the importance and presence of the Hulk. For example. when the Hulk is watching over Betty on the mountain ranges, he blends in with the rocks surrounding him. Even though the camera spends time on the duo, the image itself leaves very little impact.

Now, this approach would work if they either showcased the Hulk in such a way as to develop Bruce’s character and dynamic or, in a more visceral sense, just let their CGI monster go wild in dynamic action set pieces. Instead, Banner’s transformations are always marred by some other visual distraction and/or a color grading that makes it hard to distinguish his figure. He’s on the screen but doesn’t pop out and get to actually show off. Banner makes fun of the iconic purple pants his character normally wears in a meta-comedy moment, but the reason purple is a great color with the Hulk is because it lets his green shine.

This is made all the more frustrating because it’s clear that Leterrier wanted to go for a green aesthetic. Plenty of shots feature green in the set design; the issue is these greens make the contrast between Hulk and the environment even worse and end up crowding the hulking green mammoth out of the frames he should be a star in. There are a few moments where the camera lingers on a Hulk’s face in a close-up and we get to see beautiful contrasts in his face and a rich texture in the colors. Unfortunately, these moments are few and far in between; the movie usually showcases its showstopper poorly.

Thankfully, the movie spends a decent amount of time on developing Emil Blonsky(Tim Roth). We get to know him as a veteran player who takes the mission seriously and early conversations even set him as the soldier to Banner’s scientist. While the movie does very little with Banner’s scientist storyline, choosing both not to investigate why he would test the “Hulk experiment” on himself or what he wanted, it does go deeper into Blonsky’s motivations and ties his eventual transformations to his character’s’ motivations. It doesn’t matter that the character is shallow; Roth is so amped up about being cruel, militaristic, and bloodthirsty beyond reason that we can get behind his character. Woefully, the movie throws away this saving grace in the third act by replacing Roth with a CGI creature; one less performance capable of galvanizing interest in the fights to come.

Banner clicks on a simple Desktop application.
He gets to a remote chat login screen where he puts in in no info.
His message is automatically encrypted.
The solution implemented to catch Banner is so simple that it reinforces just how lazy the messaging system was treated.
One of the largest culprits of lazy storytelling comes from the way Banner communicates with Mr. Blue. It’s shown that he’s sending encrypted messages and is a sleuth who can avoid detection. However, his process of security and encryption is non-existent. He’s using the defaults on a machine that has a miracle software attached to it. The design of the application raises questions on how the government didn’t easily figure out what was happening. They easily demonstrate they can parse through every message and find a location, but we’re somehow expected to believe they couldn’t find a single mention of any issue over years of parsing that would lead back to Banner?

It’s not that the story doesn’t have interesting characters or that it can’t go towards more interesting storylines. It’s just that every story decision feels like the easiest path towards the next plot beat. Case in point, Banner communicates with a secret contact to find a cure to the “Hulk” problem. The way he gets to the contact platform is literally through clicking an application, getting to a chat screen with no place to put in long in information, and then “auto-encrypting” the chat. I don’t expect a complicated encryption process, but I expect the process to be at least be complicated enough for me to believe that the antagonists cannot easily access this information.

However, in this film, the government’s crack-job solution to the messaging platform that Banner has used for apparent YEARS is to put a simple parser out to search for the code names the two are using and then coming upon the duo almost instantly. If the introductory montage didn’t stress that Banner has been sleuthing around the government for years and that the government has been actively pursuing him as per Ross’s command, the laziness wouldn’t be so apparent. Unfortunately, this example of blatantly “rushing” towards the next plot point is one of many. A few can be handled. A litany makes for an unremarkable time. The end result is a skeleton of a espionage movie that never tries to surprise the audience.

Frustratingly, the movie has all the parts necessary to do something intriguing, but it constantly chooses to underutilize them in an attempt to deliver a product that’s “good enough.” It’s a shame because a few tweaks and the movie could have been a psychological navigation of the “Hulk” condition. The opening montage is an attempt at showing how the experiment has fractured Banner’s mind. Imagine if the movie then followed Banner as he tries to figure out a way to control it as opposed to trying to get some mumbo-jumbo cure that acts as nothing more than a MacGuffin. Additionally, the cutaways to distorted green visions, if handled with regards to Banner and the Hulk’s character arcs, could be moments of progression between them. Instead, they’re just quick visuals meant to demonstrate the presence of Banner’s condition – a fact we are well aware of.

Needless to say, the psychological angle was ready and available to dive into, even within the parameters of the script. Some of the movie’s best scenes involve the Hulk showcasing a darker, and more evil disposition. Close-ups of his face showcase an intensity that’s missing from Norton’s face. The movie could have very easily used this juxtaposition to explore even the simplest ideas of good and bad if not something more complex like the Hulk as representative of id and Banner as ego. Furthermore, the movie attempts to use fragmented green-tinted memory recollection sequences as a call-back to the opening montage and as an indication of Banner’s damaged mental state. However, just like the opening, these moments showcase images and details that tells the viewer absolutely nothing of relevance regarding Bruce’s connections or motivations. At the very least, if they presented a warped perspective of scenes, an altered perspective to Bruce’s, these moments could help develop Hulk as a character and juxtapose both sides of the green hero. Instead, the technique is used to just reinforce the same points we already know.

Sadly, there’s a severe lack of effort made at letting the characters and the actors shine through. It’s hard to blame Norton for not getting the audience invested in his character, when all he has to work with are jokes and long chase and walk sequences that are adorned with Armstrong’s rich and emotionally evocative score.

The film tries so hard to use the score to carry the weight of longer A-to-B sections, but Suspiria this movie is not; The Incredible Hulk lacks the grandiose compositions, cinematography, and editing needed to let Armstrong’s music be appreciated. The visuals are safe and milquetoast and drag down the rich and riveting score which is is never given any time to rest because any dead time has to be filled with it. Music is used used to propel all the emotional momentum in the film because the story proper doesn’t give the actors enough material to imbue their characters with passions that would get us to care about their tribulations. The score attempts to generate that momentum, but the lack of any help from any other cinematic element makes the mission impossible.

Alas, this is why The Incredible Hulk marks the low-point of the MCU. It’s a film that feels and actively shows its status as nothing more than a cog in the machine. There’s no flair in it’s presentation or composition which end up making the hollow and threadbare story look all the more lazy and shoddy when on display. The actors are given such little direction on what their characters motivations are or why those desires are they way the are and this lack of guidance carries over to the narrative which often feels like its being forcefully dragged from place to place. There are brief moments of joy, especially when the Hulk is allowed to be the star of the scene, but these moments are so brief that can’t be used to justify watching the entire movie. It’s a shame for fans of the green behemoth, but you’re better off watching later MCU installments ,Thor Ragnarok especially, or even Lee’s older Hulk for nuanced and/or visually interesting story beats.

REPORT CARD

TLDRThe Incredible Hulk is a movie that exists more to push the MCU along than anything else. Outside of Craig Armstrong’s score and a few neat shots, this chronicle of the green behemoth offers very little in terms of engaging content capable. The story is predictable, lazily told, and emotionally empty. Instead of focusing on the interesting psychological angles presented by the narrative, the movie is more than satisfied with giving just enough information to move to the next point until the whole journey is over.

Only MCU completionists or super fans of the Hulk should give this a watch.
Rating4.3
GradeF

Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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