PLANET HULK (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

PLANET HULK has a distinct advantage over the comics-story it adapts: it's way shorter. 

Aside from that, it's pretty much the same as the story on which it was based...

Sorry, private joke. I have to get my jollies where I can, given that, for the sake of this review, I wasted a hour or so slogging through writer Greg Pak's tedious 2006 "epic," which like the WHAT IF story above, comes down to nothing but sticking the Green Goliath into the context of a barbarian adventure.

So PLANET HULK THE VIDEO follows Pak's basic storyline. Other heroes on Planet Earth get sick of the Hulk's dangerous rampages, so they trap him in a spaceship and program the craft to take the heroic monster to another world, one where he can live out his days in peace. Instead, Hulk ends up on Sakaar, a savage sphere whose ruler, the evil Red King, likes to shanghai warriors of other worlds and force them to fight in his gladiatorial games. There's no political analysis of the monarch's reasons for providing all these "bread and circuses;" the story's moral, like a million other gladiator-movies, comes down to, "Making slaves fight each other is bad."

Like the other gladiators, Hulk gets fitted with a device that zaps him painfully if he doesn't get with the program-- so he does, waiting for a chance to escape. (There are no inconvenient transformations into Bruce Banner, by the way, but I don't remember any reason being given.) As in the source-material, the audience is quickly introduced to Greenskin's teammates in the arena, and all are just flat and uninteresting in the video as they are in the comic. A gladiator named Korg is given, both in comic and in film, a tie-in to the Mighty Thor, since Korg belongs to the race of the Stone Men, who were the Asgardian's first opponents in his comic. PLANET dicks around with this early continuity a little to claim that for some reason Thor-in-1960s-flashbacks is accompanied by his 1980s counterpart Beta Ray Bill. This was so that the video's writers could insert the horse-headed alien into the story in place of the comic's use of the Silver Surfer in a parallel role. (Parenthetically, in the comics-series Hulk's encounter with the Surfer was one of the few things I liked.)

The only character with a tiny bit of complexity is Caiera, a female warrior who serves the Red King out of the mistaken belief that he deserves her loyalty. But her eventual heel-turn to help the slaves is underwritten, so her only real contribution is a big one-on-one fight with the Incredible One, the DTV's best fight. She and Hulk are married at film's end, so at least there's more closure than one finds in the comics-series. Though the battle between Hulk and Beta Ray Bill is just so-so, like the video's animation and voice-work, it possibly influenced the decision of MCU filmmakers to work the "Planet Hulk" continuity into THOR: RAGNAROK. As I said in that review, the resulting Thor-Hulk battle stands as one of RAGNAROK's few good points, so I guess Greg Pak can take a little indirect credit for that.