My love for Marvel: The Incredible Hulk Movie Review (2008)

At the beginning of the year, I decided to redo my rankings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (better known as the MCU). I had just finished watching Spider-Man: No Way Home for the fifth time so I thought it was good as ever to do it. 

It started out as something as simple as moving the movies up and down the list. But then my cinephile persona took over and it started to qualify and grade different aspects for all of the entries of this unstoppable money maker and thrill giver. 

I even created a spreadsheet to get an accurate grade for each of them.  I also decided to rewatch every one of the movies and series to get the rankings right, and that basically took me most of January and the first weeks of February.

During that self-imposed marathon, I reflected a lot on my feelings and experience with each of these projects. Some things have changed, and some haven’t. My excitement for Thor: The Dark World was completely different nine years ago when I first saw the trailer compared to now after rewatching it.  But at the end of the day, the joy, excitement, fun, and love are still there for each of them.

So after talking with the people with the magazine, I decided not just to rank every entry in the MCU, but share with you, the wonderful readers my thoughts, my experiences of then and now, and maybe even my feelings for each one of these projects. So that’s why I’m creating this series, My Love for Marvel.

I’ll try my best to deliver all 32 “episodes” before the arrival of Moon Knight or any other new MCU project coming out this year. And if you guys want to do the same in the comments, go right ahead; it would be my absolute pleasure to read your thoughts and experiences. 

First, stop in the list at…

The Incredible Hulk

If the question is “is it good?” then I think it will depend on who you are asking, and you might also get different answers. If you ask me, my answer would be: it’s not the best that Marvel Studios has come out with, but I don’t think it matters now. 

The best thing this movie has going for is that it’s a proper adaptation of the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. When you see Hulk going full out in rage mode against soldiers or Abomination is how everybody in the world knows the character to be. I remember being very excited when I saw the first trailer for the movie because I was finally going to get the character I knew from the comics. 

Everything in this movie is ok. The performances, the simple story, most of its supporting cast, the special effects, and the overall experience you’re left with after watching it. 

The bad guys, Tim Roth’s Abomination and William Hurt’s Thunderbolt Ross, are good and solid enough that when they eventually made their return to the MCU, they were enthusiastically welcomed back by fans. More on that in a moment.

Edward Norton’s take on Bruce Banner is also just okay. I still prefer and appreciate everything Ruffalo has done with the character since he took over, but if Norton somehow returned in the future, I wouldn’t be against it. While he’s fine as Banner, everything involving his Hulk can be considered the actual highlight of the movie. Norton’s Hulk looks more dangerous and savage, and director Louis Leterrier showed this in the action sequences. 

The problem with this movie is that it doesn’t end up contributing that much to the rest of the MCU. With the exception of Hurt and Roth’s characters, everybody else has been left out of the franchise. We got a new and definitive version of the Hulk as time passed, Liv Tyler and Tim Blake Nelson never came back for their respective reasons, and you really don’t NEED to watch this movie to understand the rest of the stories and characters came along. But this is also early MCU, so I don’t blame them if they had to rethink their strategy.

But some of its elements have made a slow comeback. Just in the past year, we got Ross in Black Widow, Abomination in Shang-Chi, a recreation of the best action scene in this movie in What If…?, and later this year She-Hulk might open the doors so more characters from this movie and from the comics can take a much more solid place in the MCU.

Also, personally, this movie has one of my favorite post-credit scenes. While the first one we got was way cool and something different, this was the one that excited me for what Marvel Studios were planning.

This was the first time that the main character from one superhero movie made a crossover to another main superhero movie, before that this was unheard of. 

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Overall, it does a fine job with the titular hero, fine villains, cool visuals and action scenes, fun enough to get me entertained, great job at adapting the characters from the comics, but it doesn’t have a great story or supporting cast, it doesn’t contribute that much to the MCU and you don’t really need to rewatch it in order to get the other stuff that has been released.

My score: 7.65