Iron Man started off the Marvel Cinematic Universe – but many people forget the second film that followed quickly on, as Greg D. Smith explains. In 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, Edward Norton took the lead role. Bruce Banner lives a life of isolation in South America as he quietly tries to find a cure for his gamma radiation-induced curse. But General Ross isn’t done with him yet, and the crossing of their paths leads to predictably explosive results.

I hadn’t actually realised until I embarked on this re-watch just how close physically the release of this second entry in the MCU was to Iron Man. Barely a few months separated their cinematic release, and the nascent ideas of what would grow to become the MCU are scattered throughout so plainly to see with the benefit of hindsight.

Of course, unlike Iron Man, Hulk had live action history with both the small and big screen. The beloved classic TV series ran for four years and five seasons, as well as three spinoff movies, with Bill Bixby as Banner and the mighty Lou Ferrigno doing duty as Hulk in an age before CGI was an option. Then renowned director Ang Lee had put his own spin on the character with the 2003 Hulk, starring Eric Bana as the gentle scientist and with some early (and by today’s standards fairly poor) CGI providing us with the giant green monster himself. While the TV series (and to a lesser extent its related movies) hold a lot of nostalgia value for fans to this day, Lee’s vision fared less well with critics and audiences. At over two hours, it tried to address its source material in a deeper and darker way than audiences of the time were used to. X-Men had given us fantastical mutants with complex pasts in a shorter running time, and Spider-Man had wowed audiences with bright colours, stunning camera work and excellent pacing. By comparison, Lee’s work felt slow and laboured, and shot for some extremely dark themes. Audiences wanted more smash and less angst, and though the movie had done well enough, it was not considered a major success.

Louis Leterrier then, had some awkwardly sized boots to fill. And the path he chose is one that even now, stands up well to the test of time. Viewed by many as the awkward relative of the MCU family which nobody likes to talk about, The Incredible Hulk faces multiple challenges both inherent to the character itself and related to the cinematic baggage it carried, and balances them all very well. Is it a perfect film? Not at all, but I’m here to tell you why it’s a much better one than it’s given credit for.

Let’s start at the beginning – the origin story. It was clear from the brand new cast that this film wouldn’t follow on directly from 2003’s Hulk, but to simply dismiss a film so recent in the memory would be foolish. Also, there was the rapidly developing issue of ‘the origin story’, now a major bugbear to many fans who tire of seeing the same events unfold over and over again through a slightly different filter – Batman’s parents, Uncle Ben, and so on and so on. Leterrier deals with this potential mess quite beautifully, assembling a Norton/Tyler-starring montage which plays over the opening credits and loosely recounts the events of Banner’s origins as the Hulk, simultaneously loosely recreating the events of Lee’s movie (though not exactly the same) and meaning that in the first three minutes, as background to the names of everyone who brought you this movie, you’re all caught up on who our central character is, how he came to be what he is, and why he’s living in relative poverty in the middle of Brazil.

The next issue facing any Hulk movie is a conceptual one. Superheroes generally function in their respective worlds and universes by fighting their dark mirror – their opposite, the thing they could be if they were just a little different. Favreau’s Iron Man, for example, in his opening movie, faces off against Obadiah Staines, a man just as used to the high life as Tony himself, and almost as clever, but vastly more ambitious and ruthless. But Hulk is inherently at once the hero and his dark mirror wrapped in one character. A literal Jekyll and Hyde metaphor – at once both sensitive and intelligent scientist who abhors violence and raging, anger-fuelled monster who knows nothing other than the desire to fight, smash and destroy – Hulk already is the antagonist to Bruce Banner’s protagonist. The problem of course is that people will not generally pay to sit and watch a two hour comic book film about a man having an argument with himself in a closed room. Leterrier addresses this in two ways.

Firstly, he makes his Banner terrified of his other self. This in itself may not be unique, but the extent to which Norton takes it with his iteration of the character is. Unlike Bana’s Banner at the end of Lee’s movie, Norton’s Bruce isn’t hiding out in South America distributing medical supplies and fighting off terrorists; it’s five years later and he’s making a few bucks working as maintenance in a soft drink bottling plant, as he searches for a final cure to his curse. He has no interest in helping anyone else out, other than by avoiding getting angry, and he is consumed purely by his desire to be rid of his other self, as much as he is petrified of it. Tony mentions in Avengers Assemble that Banner needs to ‘walk tall’ and not as if he is scared of himself, but Norton makes you see it. Much as I am a fan of Ruffalo’s Hulk (who we will get to in due course), a lot of his ‘mystique’ as Banner-trying-not-to-be-Hulk comes from what other people vocally observe, rather than his own actions. Here, you feel it, from the not-so-subtle audio cue of the heart monitor watch on his wrist as it tracks his racing heart rate, to the body language, the jittery insistence and the collapse every time the transformation reverses. This is a man tortured by what he knows lurks within him, in a real and philosophical sense, and it’s all there on the screen.

The second way in which it’s addressed is in the choice of villain. Now, many people do not rate villains generally in the MCU, but Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky/Abomination gets some particular kickings from various people. But once again, let’s consider the concept of the ‘dark mirror’. Banner is a pacifist scientist who unwittingly gets turned into a raging beast by a military experiment (which he didn’t know was military) gone wrong. All he wants is for this thing to be taken away from him so that he can return to being a normal human being. Blonsky, by contrast, is a grizzled veteran soldier who is just starting to lose his physical peak to the ageing process, and who wants nothing more than to be granted the sort of power Banner has. For every fight that Banner wants to simply walk away from, Blonsky wants to walk straight into ten more. They are perhaps less dark mirrors (Blonksy is not as intelligent as Bruce, Bruce nowhere near as ruthless as Blonsky) and more polar opposites of the type of person to whom such power should be entrusted, as well as concrete examples as to why. As Blonsky acquires more and more power, en route to his final transformation, he becomes increasingly unhinged. His training and experience combine with the accelerated aggression, which is a side effect, to make him a walking nightmare. By contrast, as Bruce’s abilities reveal themselves more and more with each transformation, he shrinks further and further away from them, wanting nothing more than to expunge them from himself altogether.

If there’s one scene which stops the viewer dead, it’s the second confrontation between the two, on the university campus. Blonsky, hopped up on the serum he’s been given and full of bravado, staggers towards Hulk, who stands surrounded by the burning wreckage of several army vehicles, and shouts out ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ Hulk’s responding kick throws Blonsky like a rag doll, to shatter every bone on the tree he hits, slumping down in a lifeless heap. For all the carnage, all the cartwheeling jeeps and smashed helicopters that the movie throws at you, it’s this one piece of stark, sudden violence that really hits home, seeing a trained and ruthless soldier simply casually discarded to lie smashed and broken on the ground. It’s the antithesis of everything Banner the man stands for, the realisation of all Thaddeus Ross’ worst estimations of him. It also contrasts nicely seconds later, as Hulk moves to protect Betty from the attentions of a helicopter gunship, before gently lifting her unconscious form in his arms and carrying her away in the rain.

Of course, arguably the real villain here is Ross himself. In this version of the Hulk story, it was Ross who instigated the experiments with gamma radiation in a secret search for the new Super Soldier formula, and it’s made clear at several points that Ross’ determination to recover Bruce – and more importantly what Bruce is the key to – trumps any and all other considerations. He puts his own daughter in harm’s way, willing to go to any lengths to get what he’s after. Of course, he also gets a redemption, of sorts, as Abomination running wild and Banner’s volunteering to transform into the Hulk to stop him forces him to reconsider his actions – not so much out of any sense of guilt for what he has put his daughter and the love of her life through, more at the carnage wrought by the monster he essentially creates in Blonsky/Abomination.

Still, for all I’m praising it, the movie has its flaws. I won’t get into any of the behind the scenes drama that has been endlessly pored over elsewhere, because I see no value in it. What is clear is that while there was an idea, even at this early stage, of attempting a ‘shared universe’, nobody involved was really 100% clear on what that meant, or even whether it would happen. In retrospect, there’s a few slips in this regard. The SHIELD symbol being awfully misused for one (why is Ross’ unit working on SHIELD computer systems?) as well as being nothing like what we now know and love. For another, there’s that cameo at the end, in which Tony nonchalantly swaggers into the bar where Ross is drowning his sorrows in order to say ‘I told you so’ and then make Ross an offer at being involved in ‘something bigger’ which can only be a reference to the ‘Avengers Initiative’ which Nick Fury turned up to talk to Stark about in the post Iron Man credits. The issue here is on multiple levels. One, as mentioned before Ross’ unit are seen working on SHIELD computers, so why would he be unaware, as a ranking officer with apparent SHIELD access, of such an initiative? Secondly, as we learn in subsequent movies, at this point in proceedings Tony has not been formally accepted as a part of the initiative. In fact, he’s actively rejected by Fury right up until the events of Avengers Assemble, which we know from Banner’s comment of having ‘broke Harlem’ last time he was in New York to have taken place after the events of this movie. These are excusable glitches – minor teething troubles in a project whose scope and scale nobody at the time could have predicted.

Then there’s the action. For all that the CGI had advanced considerably in the intervening half-decade between Ang Lee’s vehicle and this, there’s still a certain muddiness to the CGI Hulk and Abomination, which means that their fight at the end is a bit of a mess. These being the days before Man of Steel and the controversy Snyder courted by having the Big Blue and Red Boy Scout level an entire city fighting against his enemies, nobody noted at the time the level of damage and the inevitable collateral casualties of this conflict. Still, the director does the best with what he has, but it doesn’t stand up to the tools available today.

These though, are mere flies in an otherwise perfectly serviceable ointment. The director goes for a Hulk who is a raging beast caged within the nervous exterior of Doctor Banner, and when the change happens, this becomes a literal reversal, with Banner caged inside an enormous, bulletproof freight train of an angry body, unable to do much more than maybe ‘aim it’ with enormous effort. For all the difficulty in capturing the biggest struggle that the titular character faces which I referenced at the beginning, here it is pulled off with more elegance and style than it had been before. The angst and internal conflict of Lee’s film marries to the more intellectual, lab-based scenery of the TV show and the garnish is a level of action and adventure that, while far from the MCU’s best, still stands head and shoulders above previous outings of the big green guy.

As an entry in the hallowed company of the MCU then, it’s a little bit of a wobble, after the assured debut that was Iron Man. But it’s far from being a terrible movie, and it deserves a lot more love than it received. With Marvel continuing to indicate that a Ruffalo standalone Hulk movie remains unlikely, it’s surely time to start appreciating what we got.