Just came back from seeing Hulk, and here are a few thoughts.

My favourite Marvel superhero has always been the Hulk - partly because he's an anti-hero cursed, rather than blessed, with super-human powers (tragedy and darkness has always appealed to me); and partly because I can identify with both Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

Anger is something I'm very familiar with. Those who know me well know that I can get very angry - angry enough to turn big and green (unfortunately, I haven't been exposed to any gamma radiation...yet!): repressed rage, perhaps, but that's besides the point. Mostly it was Banner's - and ultimately the Hulk's - sense of isolation, loneliness, of being an outsider, a freak, that I identified with when I began reading the comic, decades ago. Growing up, I was a freak myself; disturbingly tall for my age, nerdy, a loner - and I totally understood who Banner was, and how the Hulk came to be. I got it. (Me and a million other unhappy pre-teen boys.)

So I went into the theatre today wanting to love the movie, wishing it to be as good as I'd always hoped a Hulk movie would be, needed it to be.

The Hulk TV-show always disappointed me, on a lot of levels. I'd read the comics, and Lou Ferrigno looked nothing like the Hulk that I knew. He was just a big and ugly guy painted green - you couldn't fool me. Bruce Banner was inexplicably named "David Banner", and his origin was nothing like the comic-book. There was no Betty Ross, no Thunderbolt, no Leader, no nothin'. Only a guy hitching rides and helping small town folk. Great music, yup, and a melancholy feel that appealed to me - and to be honest, the show was pretty good. It just wasn't the Hulk. And I always wanted it to be. I wanted to see the Hulk smash.

Tonight I did get to see the Hulk smash, and that in itself was reason enough to love the movie. If for no other reason than to see the Hulk toss a tank, fight a mutant poodle, and jump a mile. This was the Hulk that I grew up with, the Hulk from the comics, the Hulk that we've never seen alive and "in the flesh" before. And those parts were glorious.

Then there were bits that weren't as good - and on the whole the movie was too long - but all that's just petty criticism. There's so much dreck out there, so many wasted opportunities (read: The Matrix Reloaded) that when something like this comes along, a diamond in the rough, a movie filled with ambition and desire, exciting direction and editing, marvellous acting, and many, many great scenes, it's really not fair to pick on it too much. Yes, it had its fault - but let's look beyond that. This, to me, was a much better superhero movie than Spider-Man, Daredevil, Blade X-Men - perhaps even X2, though I'd need to see them again to make that call - and Batman. Not as good as Superman, but few things are. This was the comic embodied, the characters true, the scope both human and real and tragic and grand and...comic-book. Taken seriously. As an art-form dedicated to story, to characters, to themes, to metaphors.

For that, for all it does - rather than the things it doesn't do - you should go see it.

Heck, go see it to see the Hulk smash. Hulk smash good.  ¶ 01:01