Hulk Smash!

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2016)

I actually missed this one when it hit the cinemas, probably because I wasn't really all that interested in superhero movies at the time. Well, come to think of it the only reason that I watch superhero movies these days is because they are entertaining, and the Marvel Cinematic movies have actually been quite good, even if it is just for a couple of hours of mindless entertainment. However, since I have decided to rewatch them again, if only to familiarise myself with the back story, I decided to include the Incredible Hulk among them.
From what I gather this is a reboot, though it actually begins in Brazil after Bruce Banner become the Hulk, suggesting that the events from the Ang Lee film occurred, just not how they happened in that film (for instance it is indicated that a lot less people where killed when Bruce Banner escaped than what happened in the Ang Lee film, which involved the Hulk smashing up a huge number of tanks). Anyway, the film starts off in Brazil where Banner is living an anonymous life working in a factory and learning to control his anger so that he doesn't turn into the Hulk and end up smashing everything up. However, things sort of go sour when a drop of his blood lands in a bottle of juice that makes its way to America and ends up getting drunk by Stan Lee. This alerts the US army, and they make their way to Brazil to try and capture him.
It's probably a good thing that Marvel didn't make another origin film with the Hulk, but rather began the film with a couple of flash backs to his origin. It sort of provides a bit of continuity, and doesn't go over old ground, something that I quite like. It also allows the creators to move into a new story without having to rehash an origin again. This is the case with this film, where we have Bruce, the super soldier, and Emil Bronsky, the special forces operative that is given the opportunity to regain some of the stamina, and agility, of his youth. However, as they suggest, power corrupts, and once he has a taste of this power he wants more. This inevitability results in him becoming a monster – thus cue the villain the Abomination.
However this sort of runs along the theme that appeared in Iron Man where the army is trying to get its hands on weapons to give them an edge in war, however these weapons are being developed in their own labs. Yet there are big differences between the films, as here we have the military developing these weapons, what are in effect genetic mutations, that inevitably turn against them. Whereas Iron Man has a weapons company playing both sides up against each other, and profiting from it, Hulk has the military developing the weapon, and then losing control of it. Actually, we see two super soldiers here, though Bruce is a scientist, not a soldier, which means that he runs from the military so that he isn't used as a weapon, whereas Bronsky embraces his new power, and inevitably becomes the enemy – the weapon that the military created turns on them, and they quickly discover that now that it is out of their control, they have no way of stopping it.
In fact this wasn't a bad film at all, and certainly doesn't deserve the bad ratings that it received. I was actually quite surprised that I really enjoyed it, moreso because I probably didn't know what to expect as opposed to expecting it to be either really good, or really bad. It probably had more to do with me not really being bothered watching it that it took me so long to get around to seeing, but I'm glad that I did.