Hulk And Incredible Hulk

If I were a smart man, I could do a compare-and-contrast between the George Bernard Shaw play which I stole the name of this post from and the Don Juan myth, but instead I'll just do some shit about the two Hulk movies.

I'm somewhat surprised that Universal has chosen to reboot the entire Hulk franchise, rather than making a sequel. I can understand why Warners did it with the Batman movies, as Joel Schumacher did irreparable damage to that franchise. But at least they waited almost 10 years before coming out with a new Batman movie; Ang Lee's Hulk came out five years ago. And now, having seen both Hulk movies, I'm still wondering why we needed a new series.

Lee's Hulk came out to an insane amount of fanfare. Universal seemed to be tentpoling their entire business on this one. And, while it did almost make its budget back during its American release and a profit overseas, it was seen as a failure, namely because it didn't live up to the amount of hype piled upon it. But, how could it? It wasn't the kind of movie that makes $200 million.

You knew something was up from the start, when Lee chose to rewrite the most well-known origin story in comics, by making Bruce Banner the product of inherited genetic mutation and not failed radiation experimentation. And Lee wasn't interested in just making a movie about a monster destroying crap. (This is Ang Lee, after all.) No, Lee made a movie about two children, as adults, trying to come to terms with their difficult fathers (and it just happens that one of the children is The Hulk).

And it's a good movie. It's not standard-fare comic book stuff. It goes way deeper into Bruce Banner than the fact that he occasionally turns into The Hulk. And Lee actually gives his movie a comic book look, with split screens and multiple angles that replicate the layouts of comic book pages. It's all an extremely ambitious take that most people who saw it hated.

Universal must have hated it as well, because they decided to make another Hulk movie with a complete reboot of the franchise rather than a sequel. And, rather than attempt to improve upon the things they hated in Lee's version, they removed everything that made it interesting and made one incredibly boring movie.

I'm sure that if you've never seen another Comic Book Movie that The Incredible Hulk is just great. The Hulk smashing shit non-stop must just be the most awesome thing ever for people who have been living in a cave for the past 20 years. But, for those of us that have seen all the other Superhero Movies, this is just bad. It's the least original movie I've seen in a long time. There's nothing here that I haven't seen in Spiderman 1-3, Blade 1-3, Fantastic Four 1 & 2; hell, I saw an almost carbon copy of this movie a month ago when Iron Man came out. It's as though Universal has taken the screenplay from one of the aforementioned movies and replaced its main character with The Hulk. This movie is so unoriginal, it puts Lou Ferrigno in the same cameo role that he played in Lee's Hulk.

In fact, the best thing about The Incredible Hulk is that it appears to be turning out to be a bigger failure than Hulk. It's a lot stupider, it has a bigger budget, and, based on its opening-weekend numbers, is on track to make less money than Hulk. If this thing does indeed fail to make any money, we'll probably end up with yet another entirely new Hulk franchise by 2012.

I can't wait.