The comic book spent years establishing how Bruce Banner’s father FIGURATIVELY created the Hulk by abusing Bruce and his mom when he was a kid, thereby filling him with a rage that he was never able to harness until the gamma rays changed him. Ang Lee spent two hours literalizing that, thereby diluting all the power of the myth.

What’s more, Ang Lee made the story so complicated that we didn’t even get to SEE the Hulk until AN HOUR into the movie. Want to know when you get to see the Hulk in Issue #1 of the original comic? Page 5 — because Stan Lee understood that nobody who buys a comic with a big green (actually gray at the time) monster on the cover wants to wait until halfway into the comic to see that monster.

So there you have that. The movie wasn’t really bad from an acting perspective or anything, and parts of it are great fun to watch — Hulk smashing and all that. But the story was weak. And when there are 40 YEARS of Hulk stories to choose from, that just doesn’t seem excusable.

Hopefully, with Marvel in charge, the movies will do a better job of staying true to the source material, like this one did. But it’s such a crap shoot. So much depends on getting the right director and writer and actors. The common thread so far between Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the first two X-Men movies is that the directors were huge comic book geeks who also happened to be respected directors. But then I think Ang Lee was too. So who’s to say?

But hey, even if they have to break a few eggs now and then, at least we’ll get an occasional omelet like this one. So it’s all good.

http://snipurl.com/27a0c [www_eonline_com]

RE: Iron Man vs. Spider-Man
I said the same thing to someone on Saturday, when asked what I thought of the movie. I said I thought it was at least as good as the first two Spider-Man movies, which is to say, at least as good as the best modern superhero movies.

And yes, I’ll grudgingly admit that Paltrow is good in it, too.

Chris Moran