About the only thing less likely than a daft comicbook film scripted by James Schamus and directed by Ang Lee would be one scored by Mychael Danna, seemingly one of the least well-suited composers for this sort of thing.  But that's what we were going to get with Hulk until a few weeks before its release date, when someone at Universal thought that instead of one of the least well-suited composers for silly comicbook films they would be better-served by the most well-suited, so they turned to Danny Elfman, veteran of Batman and Spiderman.

His score has been the subject of much debate, with many fans reacting with horror at the rather peculiar approach he took.  I'm never one who likes ethnicity in a film being stressed by its score - a far more effective approach is usually to just use a standard ensemble and emphasise the drama, not the location - but Hulk goes even further, stressing a peculiar combination of ethnicity that doesn't seem to be present in the film.  Virtually ever-present percussion, live and sampled, brings to mind the jungles of Africa; Natacha Atlas's vocalisations and the occasional duduk add some sort of Middle Eastern flavour.  Exactly what either of these things has to do with a giant green monster, even one as pathetically-realised as the CGI Hulk, ravaging the streets of America is beyond me.  But still, it adds a certain unique slant to the music and certainly does it no harm on album.

Unlike the brilliant Spiderman, there is not an especially strong, dominant main theme, but instead various recurring motivic fragments that form the basis for many of the cues, the most obvious one being Elfman's most Herrmannesque music in some time, with a downward-progressing brass melody recalling Cape Fear.  A fair proportion of the album's running time is made up of frantic action music, always dominated by the percussion; it reminds me of some sort of cross between Proof of Life and Planet of the Apes, to put it in an Elfman context, but I can't say I enjoy it as much as either.  However, given the somewhat brief time he had to piece together the score (further evidenced by the use of an extraordinary eight orchestrators) it's understandable that Elfman didn't have time to create as polished a work as usual.

I fall somewhere between the lovers and the loathers on this one, and can see both points of view.  On the one hand, the score has many moments of really ballsy, exciting action music, and all the Elfman trademarks are out in force; but on the other, this time there really isn't a big, dominant theme (and I know how much some people pine for that sort of thing in every score, warranted or not) and the ethnic flavours do seem somewhat dubious.  I don't see how Elfman fans could fail to like it, but for the more casual listener who only occasionally "gets" the composer's music, I can see where problems might arise.

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