Remember when you heard Ang Lee was going to direct The Hulk, and you thought "Hey, great, a film which will artfully manage to bring intellectual depth to an otherwise two-dimensional superhero flick"?
And remember when you went to see The Hulk, only to realise it was a lot of boring cobblers about feelings and childhood isolation? Remember how you laughed when the big finale to The Hulk was basically The Hulk getting beaten up a big lump of emotions? Remember how you just wished that The Hulk was made up of scenes where The Hulk swung tanks around? Guess what – it's your lucky day. Marvel is making The Incredible Hulk – a new Hulk movie that sounds preposterously, relentlessly both violent and dumb, directed by the nutter who made Jet Li Unleashed. And we'll admit we're a teeny bit excited.
Some superheros are able to be given an intellectual makeover. Like Batman – Batman Begins was a decent stab at grounding a ridiculous character in some kind of emotionally complex real world. But The Incredible Hulk? Intellectual? He's a massive green bastard that breaks stuff for kicks, what's intellectual about that? Perhaps, in retrospect, getting the Brokeback Mountain guy to direct the Munich guy looking all sad at a picture of his Dad for two and a half hours was a bit of a mistake – The Hulk failed to make its money back in the American box office.
We know that The Incredible Hulk TV series was a bit sad and slow, but that's because it's a TV show – if it had the budget to show a giant green monster hurling an oil tanker around a city every week, then it would have done that. But it was a rubbish TV series starring a policeman who sued his brother, and not the basis for a $150 million movie.
But now Louis Leterrier, the man who directed the ridiculous Transporter and Jet Li Unleashed movies, has signed on to make a shamelessly comic book movie version of The Incredible Hulk. Leterrier met Hulk producers Avi Arad and Kevin Feige a couple of years ago, and storyboarded some Hulk action scenes that impressed enough people for him to be allowed a crack at his own Incredible Hulk movie. Kevin Feige says of Louis Leterrier:
"His movies have humour and character depth set against fantastic action, and these aspects will be explored to the fullest extent in 'Hulk."
Louis Leterrier will be formally introduced to his public tomorrow at the Comic-Con International geekfest convention in San Diego, where it's hoped he will reveal elements of the story, as scripted by X-Men writer Zak Penn. But The Incredible Hulk hasn't started filming yet, so there's still time for everyone to suggest scenes that they'd like to see in The Incredible Hulk movie. For example, if there's not a scene where The Incredible Hulk actually cracks the world in half by hitting it with the moon, we're going to be terribly disappointed.
Read more:
Hulk Making Incredible Return To The Big Screen – Reuters
[story by Stuart Heritage]