DVD Review: PLANET HULK

PLANET HULK is yet another entry in the long line of straight to DVD/Blu-ray, animated features starring famous comic book characters in stories that might be a little too big for a studio to actually pull off with a live action format. They give fans stories they want and are usually pretty good. This time around writer Greg Pak’s story PLANET HULK is translated right from the comics onto film and it’s actually pretty good.

The PLANET HULK saga was a comic book arch a few years ago about The Hulk being shot into space by a group of super heroes who thought Hulk was just too dangerous to have around. When the film starts, Hulk is already on a rocket heading out into space and is awoken with the news that Iron Man, Namor, Black Bolt, Mister Fantastic, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and even Professor X are the people responsible. Hulk of course smashes the ship, sending it off course. Hulk wakes up on a planet where he finds he’s weaker than normal and is soon captured by an imperialist society that forces him to compete in a series of  gladiatorial  games.  That’s right, PLANET HULK is pretty much Hulk meets GLADIATOR.

There’s of course more to it than that. Hulk is the main character here with Bruce Banner never showing up once during the film. This is all Hulk all the time. Hulk soon finds himself teamed up with a resistance that wants to take down the ruler of the planet known as The Red King, but Hulk wants nothing to do with it. The movie soon turns into a story of brotherhood and loyalty as Hulk finds that in order to really survive he has to team up with a group of aliens who think he might be “the chosen one” who can take down Red King.

As you can see it’s not a very deep story and mostly relies around the idea of Hulk smashing large enemies in an arena and that’s just fine. This isn’t a story that would wow people anyway. What you really want to see is the alien on alien violence and green blood spray as swords are slicing through different bug like creatures. It’s not hard core violent, but it’s enough to earn the film it’s PG-13 rating.

Director Sam Liu has a history with these kinds of films, adapting the often homo-erotic SUPERMAN/BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES and the Thor portion of Hulk Vs. He knows how to trim the fat from the source material and give you a lean story that works in the time constraints these movies have, but some how I felt like PLANET HULK was missing something. Then I realized it’s really half a story. As a movie it stands on it’s own, but as an  interpretation of a comic book it falls apart in the last act and doesn’t really finish the story. This of course leaves room for a sequel (which I am hoping for), but at only 80 minutes it feels like they could have padded this out a little bit more with the content from the books.

The animation in PLANET HULK is good, much better than some of the releases from Marvel and Lionsgate, but by no means does this film blow anything away. It’s slightly better than a Saturday morning cartoon, and below something Disney would release as a DVD. There’s absolutely no reason to get this film on Blu-ray. That would definitely be overkill. The voice acting is about par all the way across. Hulk delivers his lines gravely and is played well by Rick D. Wasserman while other characters like the alien/bug Miek is given an overly annoying and simple performance by Sam Vincent. Over all it just feels like Marvel can’t pull in the voice talent that DC can.

PLANET HULK is a good entry into this series of movies, handles it’s source material well, making smart choices by replacing some characters with others, and giving a very fun but basic story. It’s by no means ground breaking and it’s animation won’t hold up in a few years (making me wonder why they haven’t switched to CGI yet), but over all it’s not bad. It’s worth a rental for sure.