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This will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Hulk already… well, you’re probably not going to anyway.

“This is a psychodrama,” said director Ang Lee. “It has a lot of dramatic elements, and it’s different from your usual summer blockbuster.” The surprise here was that Hulk wasn’t just mindless action. It was insanely serious. “What I hope I’ve done is provide a new kind of vision, an emotional depth to this kind of movie,” said Lee. In fact, there was more emotional depth than an audience for this kind of film was really after.

Universal had been trying to get an Incredible Hulk movie up and running since the early 1990s. John Turman (a Hulk fan himself) had a stab at writing a script back in 1995, while Michael France penned a script in 1999. Ang Lee and his producer/writer John Schamus came on board the project in 2001. They had just come off of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Schamus rewrote the script at Lee’s request. The end result is three writers being credited in a strange amalgamation that tells an overly complex origin story. And then the term "Greek tragedy" was being used. “He’s making a sort of work of art,” said Dennis Muren, ILM’s Senior Visual Effects Supervisor. “This is not the normal kind of movie we get here at ILM,” he said. “It’s very spiritual…who would have thought it with a comic book movie.”

Scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) as well as fellow colleague and former girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) work in a lab, trying to work out something to do with restoring damaged skin cells. When you're a scientist, something is bound to go wrong in your life. So, when Bruce is accidentally hit by an overload of gamma rays it unleashes something, a "something" that had been passed on to him by his father, David Banner (Nick Nolte); a former scientist who worked for the military in the 1960s. When Bruce's emotions cause him to feel angry, he starts to increase in size and go all green.

Hulk’s Super Bowl spot most likely stopped some from seeing the film, as it sent shockwaves of criticism across the Internet, with many highlighting that the Hulk didn’t look very good, and that he looked like Shrek. “Those shots weren’t finished,” said ILM’s Muren in defence. Comparing the CG effects in the Super Bowl spot to what was in the final film, I can’t really tell the difference.

Most Hulk fans had grown up with The Incredible Hulk TV series, and some of those fans couldn’t comprehend why he looked so stupidly huge in the film. According to ILM he can go from 9 feet to 15 feet tall. For its time, the CG Hulk is a strange technical achievement, with the semblance between him and his surroundings all looking very believable. He growls, smashes things up and sets a new record for tank throwing. Ang Lee acted out the movements of the Hulk himself through the use of motion capture. When it comes to well-acted CG characters, that accolade still belongs to Andy Serkis’s Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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