by Victoria Jeffrey

Created on: December 14, 2007   Last Updated: July 16, 2008

A film adaptation of the Hulk was a long time in coming. When Ang Lee's film was released in theaters I was delighted to finally see this legendary character on screen. Hulk is one of the most loved comic book heroes in the world and while the TV show from the 1970's worked for that particular time period it was time to see Hulk in all of his green glory on the big screen, bringing all of the modern special effects in movie technology to bear. How did it fair?

Many didn't like the film. This is unfortunate because I thought it was a excellent comic book film. Looking back on previous film adaptations of comic books, it's baffling to me when I hear people trash Ang Lee's effort to bring Hulk to the big screen. After the previous three abysmal Batman films, awful films like The Phantom and The Punisher and others, a renaissance in comic book films was once more gracing the screen, starting with Bryan Singer's X-Men films and Sam Raimi's Spiderman films. Ang Lee's Hulk was a part of that renaissance in comic book films. The techniques he used made it stand out; he made it unique. The opening scene credits were imaginative and it also told the back story of Bruce Banner's inner demons and his emotional turmoil. I loved the idea that his emotional problems and his mutant genetic make up was a direct result from experiments his father performed on himself. It was a far better explanation than the usual one - getting dunked in radio active waste, being zapped by lightening or some other pat explanation. The use of comic book panels to separate scenes was brilliant and made the movie stand out. The scenes of Hulk leaping through the air across the continent like a gazelle was fun to watch as well. It had a good mixture of dialog, plot and action to balance the film. The action set pieces in the film were thrilling but not mindless. The cast put together for the film was stellar; all put in wonderful performances, so what went wrong? Why didn't more people like this film?

I think that because there were so many BAD comic book films made in the past, people had gotten used to films that employ trite one-liners as dialog, superficial motivations for characters (Or none at all. After all, why let a good plot slow down the story?) and lots of flashy, dumb action. Ang Lee's film was different. This was a cerebral Hulk and I think people were very disappointed with that take on this character. It wasn't expected and movie-goers are notoriously fickle. Monkey around with the

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