Note: So we're assuming the TIH script we got hold of is genuine. (Thanks to io9 reader The Ugly aka HowlingMan for passing it along!) It certainly seems pretentious enough, starting with a Joseph Campbell quote and including references to great literature. After reading the whole thing, here's the bottom line: the second Hulk movie should have been a good 10 minutes longer, including a few crucial scenes that beef up some of the Hulk's character and flesh out his backstory. But the vast majority of the scenes were cut for very good reason, if this 2007 draft is at all close to the shooting script.

Here's our rundown of the deleted scenes from the script, including whether you can glimpse them in the movie's trailer:

1) The famous Arctic scene.

A helicopter drops Bruce Banner off in the tundra, and he shambles off alone. He drops his backpack, stopping only to retrieve an object and jam it into his waistband, then trudges off under the Aurora Borealis. He has a brief, almost indistinguishable flashback of a woman's body on the ground, and flames. The object he grabbed turns out to be a gun, and he tries to shoot himself, but turns into the Hulk instead. He catches the bullet in his palm, flattened. Then he jumps into the Arctic sea and we see a monstrous green form underwater.
Featured in the trailer? Yes. Briefly.

2) Bruce meets Samson.

After Betty spots Bruce at the pizza place where he's hiding out, she confronts him, and introduces him to her new boyfriend, Samson Adams. It's awkward. Bruce promises to meet them back at Betty's house, but then splits. That leads to the scene where Betty drives after him in the rain.
Featured in the trailer? No.

3) Samson jokes about being a shrink.

This scene is a bit painful, to be honest. Bruce, Betty and Samson have dinner together (Samson cooks) and they talk about Samson's worst psychiatric patient:

SAMSON
...and I said “Miss So-and-so, I’ve been analyzing your ‘condition’ for nearly three months and I think I can say conclusively that your issues are more Caffeinated-UnCaffeinated than Manic-Depressive... They all laugh, even Banner chuckles.

BETTY
...You’re not so much Multiple Personality as Spoiled Brat...

BANNER
Your problem isn’t ADD so much as laziness.

BETTY
It makes you sound cruel. But Samson takes a few of these to pay for all the
free work he does.

SAMSON
Pro-whiners to pay for the pro-bono...

And then Bruce suddenly starts crying. No, really. Bad shrink banter makes Brucey cry. Actually, it's because "It's been a long time since I felt... light... about anything." Awww.
Featured in the trailer? No, thank goodness.

4) Samson discusses Raymond Carver.

After Betty goes to bed, Bruce and Samson have a man-to-man talk, and Samson brings up a Raymond Carver short story he read once, which has important literary lessons that Samson's not quite clear on. And then Samson delivers a giant speech:

I’ll confess something to you if you’ll clear up some things for me...First, I confess, as a man...as Betty’s lover... that I have always hoped you were dead. Not because I didn’t like you but because I love Betty and I’ve known that unless you were really gone, or she believed you were, that there would always be three of us in this relationship. I’ve dreaded the thought of you walking through the door. But now that you’re here... I have to admit that I’m very happy about it. Because I’m also a psychiatrist. And I’m very committed to putting light into dark corners, so to speak, and I’m very good at finding my way into the places people hide their secrets. I do it primarily because I think it helps them but also frankly because I’m interested in what
people have to hide. Betty has a very dark corner that I have never found my way into, despite considerable, careful effort. And the only thing I know about her dark place is that you are in it. And I’m wondering if you’ll be honest enough to tell me: why are you something that she won’t talk about?

And then Bruce says this thing about how there are "aspects of my personality that I can't control." And he says he'd rather die than hurt Betty again.
Featured in the trailer? Yes.

5) Betty and Bruce discuss scientific ethics.

It's pretty brief, but Betty and Bruce have a whole discussion about what they thought they were doing when they created the Hulk, which I don't remember from the theatrical release. Bruce says General Ross may be the only one who was honest about what they were really doing. And humans evolved over millions of years, and maybe it was a mistake to try and tinker with human biology overnight.
Featured in the trailer? No. And at this point, it's probably been an hour since we last saw the Hulk.

6) If I could Hulk with the animals...

In Sam Sterns' lab, after they do the treatment that is supposed to cure Bruce of being the Hulk, Sterns reveals he's been doing experiments with Bruce's blood sample. But instead of just seeing vials of blood like in the theatrical release (as far as I remember), we actually see tons of rhesus monkeys and rats, including "Hulked-out versions." I'm pretty sure we didn't see this in the final movie, probably because nobody wanted to remind viewers of the Hulk-poodles from the first movie.
Featured in the trailer? No.

7) Bruce takes charge.

There's a lot more of Bruce in the helicopter, when he's a prisoner of the army and the Abomination is starting to trash New York. Bruce pushes his way to the front to look at the monitors, and a soldier tries to stop him. Bruce dares the soldier to try and shoot him. And then Ross and Bruce argue over what to do about the Abomination. Bruce says the only way to stop the Abomination is to unleash the Hulk. And Bruce explains why he thinks being tossed out of a helicopter will jumpstart his transformation: he tried to kill himself before (in the Arctic) and the Hulk wouldn't let him. Ross, Bruce and Betty argue:

ROSS
Forget it. If I put you down there, you won’t fight, you’ll run.
BANNER
We made that thing, you and I!! We’ve got to try something! I think you were right, it’s still me. I heard you on the table calling to me and I held on...
BETTY
You think you can control it?
BANNER
No but maybe I can aim it.
ROSS
What if you just double my problem?
BANNER
Have you got a better idea?

Featured in the trailer? Yes.

8) Harlem comic relief:

After Bruce gets dropped into Harlem and becomes the Hulk, a "Harlem loudmouth" sees the Abomination and reacts:

LOUDMOUTH
...tired of this shit! Show me some motherfuckin’ fifteen foot monster buggin’ out in the WHITE man’s neighborhood, somebody’d be...

He turns and sees HULK...stops cold...Looks back at Abomination...

LOUDMOUTH (CONT’D)
Oh, I see...it’s a family thing. I’m gonna let you all work this out.

Featured in the trailer? What do you think?

10) Betty dumps Samson:

After the giant rumble, Betty figures out that her boyfriend Samson is the one who let the Army know that Brucey was crashing at their house on campus, and she kicks his ass to the curb. He says he was frightened and he made a mistake, and she says she's not coming home. For a while, anyway.
Featured in the trailer? No.

Other differences: Instead of Stan Lee drinking the Gamma-laced guarana drink, it's a young mom. Instead, Stan Lee is an old fisherman who takes Bruce and Betty into New York on his boat.

We see more of the tough Major Cabot, a woman soldier who got a purple heart in Iraq, on the team that tries to capture Banner in Brazil. (She gets a great line later, when they confront the Hulk on campus: "They should not put this in the recruitment video.") Cabot also lets Ross and the others know that the Abomination is Blonsky, something they never seem to find out in the movie.

And we learn a bit more about General Ross' backstory: he had an accident in a "black box" R&D that injured his arm, and now he's stuck running a desk. Ross is way more of a bastard in some of the cut lines, including one after the soldiers have captured Bruce, and he says keeping his daughter close to Bruce is the best insurance against Bruce Hulking out, since Bruce knows he'd hurt Betty if he did. Also, there are hints that Ross proposed an unethical cover-up to Bruce after his first Hulk-out injured Betty. [Thanks To The Ugly]

If Iron Man was about America's power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home. It's about the impossibility of transforming young men into "super-soldiers" and then expecting them to blend back in. Banner is on a hair-trigger not just because he's pissed off, but because he's traumatized by being under attack and on the run — and because military-sponsored experiments have made him fit only for battle. The whole movie is about Banner's rejection of his fighting-machine identity, and his fight against Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who embraces that same identity.

Actually, the new Hulk movie reminded me of nothing so much as Kimberly Peirce's underrated film Stop Loss — both in its depictions of post-traumatic stress, and in the frustrating opaqueness of its actors' performances. Stop Loss dramatizes over and over again how the Iraq war has left a group of soldiers basically unfit for civilian life. They hear gunfire everywhere, they jump at anything, they get fucked up and destroy private property, and they get into fights. In the end, the only environment they're suited for is one where people are constantly trying to kill them. PTSD isn't just an injury to the psyche, it's actually a feature of the constant readiness for shit to go down. PTSD is part of what makes you a better killer.

The idea that PTSD plays a role in Bruce's struggle with Hulkdom is nothing new. In the early Hulk comics, Bruce Banner is repressing tons of unfocused rage, which explodes out of him when he becomes the Hulk. But starting in the early 1980s, writers like Bill Mantlo and Peter David started exploring the idea that Bruce was really struggling with a lot of childhood trauma (from his abusive dad) and this was making him have multiple personalities. (The Hulk being a separate personality that just happens to be able to manifest physically.) And then, of course, Ang Lee decided to take the "abusive dad" backstory and make it into the front-story of his 2003 movie — with disastrous results.

One reason I can buy that Bruce Banner is traumatized, rather than full of repressed anger, is that Ed Norton doesn't seem repressed at all. He seems constantly pissed off and yet wounded at the same time. Sure, we spend a lot of time on his various efforts to control his anger — everything from a metronome to a cute dog — but the main emotion Norton projects is pain and frustration. His Banner is Jesus and Buddha rolled into one — he meditates a lot, he wanders through South America, homeless and scruffy, depending on alms, and he learns purely defensive martial arts so he can avoid having to fight.

We learn early on in the movie that Banner became the Hulk as part of a military experiment to create a new generation of "super-soldiers" — like the boy-scouty Captain America but a zillion times more destructive — and Banner was an early failure. The military wants to capture him so they can experiment on him and make better killers. But Bruce Banner isn't interested in becoming the ultimate killing machine — and that's why the military hates him.

This is a significant departure from the comics, where the military attacks the Hulk because he's constantly going on rampages and endangering innocent people. The comics stick pretty closely to the Godzilla paradigm: the Hulk is a giant monster, and the army has to try and stop him. He Hulks out for all sorts of reasons, and things get ugly when he does. In the movie, by contrast, Banner never, ever turns into the Hulk except when the army attacks him. If the army would just leave him alone, we're told in no uncertain terms, things would be fine.

And the Hulk isn't a particularly great killing machine, even apart from the fact that he only Hulks out when you fire a rocket launcher at him. He pretty much only fights in self defence in this movie, and never just goes on a tear. Even in his totally apeshit Hulk mode, he's pretty happy to live and let live. And he's mopey as often as he's angry — I lost count of how many times the Hulk looked sad, or tired, or just sort of emo, in the new movie. That's not to say the Hulk doesn't get super-violent in the new movie — he does, as you've probably seen in the trailers. He does the thunderclap-hands, he smashes a sonic-weapon truck, he rips a car in half and uses it as brass knuckles, etc.

So the military wants to turn the Hulk into a weapon, and make a ton of slightly more intelligent Hulks, to go and thrash anybody who fucks with America. The army, as personified by William Hurt's General "Thunderbolt" Ross and Roth's Blonsky, are green with envy (sorry) when they look at the Hulk. They don't see a menace to be vanquished, they see a world-beating ubermensch that could be them. And there are various moments when both Ross and Blonsky express disdain for Banner's pacifism and disgust at his unwillingness to revel in his power.

And it's not much of a spoiler that Blonsky embarks on a quest to turn himself into the Hulk's equal. There's a weirdly unconvincing scene, after the Hulk first trounces Blonsky's soldiers, where he's talking with General Ross. Blonsky remarks on the fact that Ross sent his team in cold, without telling them what they would be facing, and didn't equip them for the situation they were going into. The next logical statement ought to be, "so screw you and your suicide missions." Instead, Blonsky gets a twinkle in his eye and says he'd like another crack at the Hulk. And that's when Ross offers Blonsky his first shot at becoming a super-soldier himself.

About the only character development Blonsky gets is when we learn that he's at an age where he should have a desk job, but he just wants to keep fighting. The only thing he's good at is mayhem, and he wants to stick to what he knows. He's willing to pay the price — including some hideously painful injections, and a full-body fracture at one point — to keep kicking ass. The contrast between Blonsky's masochism and Banner's anguished trauma shows us the difference between a man who embraces his inner murderer, and one who rejects it.

There are two meta-issues that are hard to ignore when you're watching The Incredible Hulk. Ang Lee's Hulk movie only came out five years ago, and the new movie sort of acknowledges this by saying that Banner has been the Hulk for five years. It also retells the Hulk's origin very briskly in the opening credits, making some changes from the Lee version but mostly just establishing the basics. The other big meta-issue is the fight between star/co-writer Ed Norton and Marvel over the movie's edit. I went into the film thinking Marvel had probably saved us from a tedious angst-fest by slicing some of Norton's favorite scenes out of the movie, but then I was struck by how weirdly choppy it was in parts. I saw the film with someone who hadn't heard about the dispute, and she remarked afterwards that it felt as though some crucial scenes were edited out. (In particular, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) ditches her boyfriend to go off with Bruce, and it's never dealt with. We never even see the two of them talk about it at all. There are also a few individual scenes which feel jumpy.) I have a feeling the Ed Norton cut might actually be a lot more satisfying and interesting. And as fun as it is, TIH might be worth waiting to see on DVD, if your TV is big enough.

It's almost impossible to avoid comparing the Hulk to Iron Man: they're both about a guy who creates super-weapons and feels remorse. They both feature heroes whose bodies become the ultimate weapons. And they both show their main actors shirtless for long stretches as they obsess about their hearts — though Ed Norton is trying to keep his heart from speeding up, and Robert Downey Jr. is trying to keep his heart from stopping. Both heroes try to prevent anybody else from wielding the weapons they've created. And they both end up fighting an enemy who's similar to them, but more ruthless and bloodthirsty.

There are a few big differences between Iron Man and Incredible Hulk, though: Iron Man is more fun. (Iron Man has a heavy-metal score, I can barely remember Hulk's score but it was pretty standard orchestral music.) Iron Man is fairly pro-military and includes a sympathetic military character, Jim Rhodes, while the military characters in Hulk are pretty much all assholes. Iron Man transcends its comic book source material, while Hulk does justice to its comics origins without improving on them. Hulk has more random fuck-yeah moments than Iron Man, and they feel a bit more calculated — but that doesn't stop them being awesome. Bottom line: Hulk is better than 90 percent of superhero movies, but not as good as Batman Begins, Iron Man, Spider-Man 1 or 2, or the first two X-Men movies.

Norton wouldn't talk to EW, but did grudgingly issue a bland boilerplate statement saying there's no feud and everything's wonderful, which you can read below. So what was the easy-going creative difference between Norton and Marvel about anyway?

According to Leterrier, it was over the movie's running length. Both he and Norton wanted a more "meditative" movie lasting 2 hours and 15 minutes. Marvel wanted to keep the movie under 2 hours and make it more of an action film. (And then, presumably, release the longer version on DVD.) I have to admit, I'm on Marvel's side here.

Leterrier says Norton admits the shorter version is probably more commercial, and is very "zen" about the whole thing. And yet, he's not doing any interviews about the movie. (The article's explanation, that Norton is avoiding interviews because he doesn't want the press to portray him as difficult, is sort of surreal.)

Anyway, here's Norton's statement, which he issued after a month of negotiation with EW and which Universal Studios and Marvel signed off on:

Like so many people I've loved the story of The Hulk since I was a kid, so it was thrilling when Marvel asked me to write and help produce an altogether new screen incarnation, as well as play Bruce Banner. I grew up reading Marvel Comics and always loved the mythic dimension and contemporary themes in the stories, and I'm proud of the script I wrote. In every phase of production, including the editing, working with Louis Leterrier has been wonderful...I've never had a better partner, and the collaboration with all the rest of the creative team has been terrific. Every good movie gets forged through collaboration, and different ideas among people who are all committed and respect the validity of each other's opinions is the heart of filmmaking. Regrettably, our healthy process, which is and should be a private matter, was misrepresented publicly as a 'dispute,' seized on by people looking for a good story, and has been distorted to such a degree that it risks distracting from the film itself, which Marvel, Universal and I refuse to let happen. It has always been my firm conviction that films should speak for themselves and that knowing too much about how they are made diminishes the magic of watching them. All of us believe The Incredible Hulk will excite old fans and create new ones and be a huge hit...our focus has always been to deliver the Hulk that people have been waiting for and keep the worldwide love affair with the big green guy going strong.

According to SEGA, here are the game's key features:

Unlimited Destruction: Become the Incredible Hulk and experience unlimited destruction. Players can demolish anything in their path and also use it as a weapon - pieces of a crumbling building...a passing car...a light standard. They can even demolish buildings with their bare hands. Damage is persistent, and gamers can use it to gain access to previously unreachable areas.
Powerful Rage: Rage is power. Build the Hulk's rage to learn powerful moves. Cause unheard-of damage to gain and upgrade his abilities.
Incredible Scale: New York City's towering skyscrapers allow for exciting vertically based gameplay, while powerful, massive enemies such as Bi-Beast and the Abomination challenge the Hulk's might.
Dynamic Open World: A realistic next-gen, open-world representation of Manhattan provides gamers with an immense playground of destruction that also contains sub-quests, minigames, and a story that reaches beyond the film to include elements from classic Marvel comics.

Among the tidbits Leterrier dropped:

• 
  
• We see Bruce transform into the Hulk in the first three minutes of the movie, so there's no long drawn-out buildup. The first Hulk fight is a brawl in a Brazilian bottle factory, with lots of soda bottles flying, and we sort of see the Hulk's sillhouette. (According to the script report we read a while back, Bruce is hiding out as a worker at that factory.) This isn't an origin story, and Bruce is already fully Hulked at the start.
• 
  
• As you may have guessed, the guy playing chess with Bruce is Dr. Leonard Samson, the shrink who tries to cure him of his Hulk-y issues in the comics (and maybe in the movie too.) But no green hair or super-strength, like in the comics. Bruce is an angsty conflicted hero, just like Spider-Man.
• 
  
• Bruce uses meditation to try and keep the Hulk under control, and also uses "Brazilian jujitsu" to try and fight people without actually getting angry. Betty is Bruce's soul-mate, at the start of the film, but she's also the reason he gets caught.
• 
  
  
• General Ross (William Hurt) not only wants to control the Hulk's power, to create super-soldiers, but is obsessed with the Hulk. He's all Ahab-ed out.
• 
  
• Tim Roth, as the Abomination, is an over-the-hill, washed-out old soldier who can't accept his failure.
• 
  
  
  
• Leterrier chose to make the Abomination less fishy looking than his comics version, and opted instead for a more massive growth of bones and muscle. His elbows can become "Chinese knives," and he's got a "tongue thing" and "heel spikes." His bones basically stick out and become an exoskeleton. He may look sort of orange in the dark street scenes, with all the fire around him, but he's actually bright green, like the Hulk.
• 
  
• The reason it took so long to release this trailer is because none of the shots were finished. A theatrical version will show a close-up of the Hulk's face crying out for Betty, but that shot isn't ready yet. The shots of the Hulk all require tons of "calculation and technique."
• 
  
  
• That scene of the Hulk and the Abomination running towards each other is really from the end of the movie, as you've suspected. But instead of a six-minute final battle like most movies, Hulk will have a 26-minute smackdown in the city between the two green behemoths. That's nearly half an hour of them kicking and throwing cars and putting craters in the asphalt.

So after watching the second BSG clip, I just have one question: How come this never happened to one of the Sharons, when Boomer/Athena was flying a Viper? Do the Cylon raiders not recognize Sharon as a Cylon? Or do they just not care, because they know she'll resurrect and there are plenty more of her back on the basestar? Or is Anders just a different type of Cylon than Sharon? I really hope they answer these questions at some point!

More spoilers:

• Not sure if this really counts as a spoiler, but Star Trek will be all about the relationship, and conflict, between Kirk and Spock. [Trekweb]
• A new X-men comic, out next week, gives away the ending of Joss Whedon's Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1, which is Joss' final X-comic. GSAXM#1 ends with Kitty Pryde "lost," probably dead, and Peter grieving for her. Also, Scott and Emma survive, but Scott has trouble controlling his powers. Joss' X-swansong is delayed until April 9. Oh, and here's our own Graeme McMillan blogging about it. [Whedonesque]
• And here's some new concept art from The Incredible Hulk, which looks much like the concept art we've seen before, except that you can see more of the Hulk freaking out. [SuperheroFlix]

February's Jumper is a Heroes-y movie from Doug Liman (Bourne Identity). Teenager David Rice tries to flee his abusive father — and then discovers he can teleport himself anywhere, instantly. As an adult (played by Hayden Christensen), David is reunited with his long-lost mother, only to see her killed. So he uses his teleporting power to search for the man he believes is responsible for the death of his mother, while dodging CIA recruiters. His Neo-esque posturing draws the attention of an NSA agent (Samuel L. Jackson) who's also a member of the ancient sect of Paladins, dedicated to wiping out teleporters like Christensen. He also meets another Jumper (Jamie Bell) who's been fighting the Paladins since he was a kid. Rachel Bilson plays Christensen's girlfriend, who learns the truth about his teleporting abilities, and becomes a hostage in the Jumper-Paladin battle. Liman says "there is no villain" in Jumper, because everyone is right in his/her own way. Here's a new still from the movie:

June's Incredible Hulk sticks much closer to the original comic than the 2003 Ang Lee version. According to the movie's official site and other sources, Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) works at a bottling plant in Brazil while he searches for the cure to the gamma radiation that turned him into the Hulk. But then General "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt) tracks him down and a battle ensues. Banner runs back up to New York and meets up with his wife, Ross' daughter Betty (Liv Tyler, and here's a pic). Also in NYC, Banner meets his super-psychiatrist, Doc Samson. The Hulk's origin is "spooled out" throughout the movie, as the characters try to learn more about what caused him to exist. And there are plenty of big splosions (see video.) Trying to find a way to beat the Hulk, General Ross doses a soldier/KGB spy named Emily Blonsky (Tim Roth) with a serum that turns him into another monster, even stronger than the Hulk. Blonsky is stuck as a monster and wants revenge on General Ross. Banner finally does find a cure for being the Hulk, but has to turn back into the Hulk anyway, to stop the Abomination's rampage. TV's Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, will have a cameo. Here's a new peek at the Norton Hulk:

U.S. audiences will see a much shorter version of August's Babylon A.D. than Europeans. In the near future, society has broken down and competing cults and militias hold sway. Refugees are "doing anything" to escape the poverty and death of Europe and Asia. A veteran-turned-mercenary named Toorop (Vin Diesel) is hired to bring a young woman named Marie (Melanie Thierry) from Russia to China, accompanied by a nun (Michelle Yeoh). But then another organization offers him even more money for the girl, and Toorop realizes there's more to Marie than meets the eye. It turns out the girl is carrying a virus that will allow humans to alter their own DNA and "create new levels of consciousness." (She's also schizophrenic.) So all sorts of criminals and fanatics want to get their hands on the girl, including a sect that wants to use the virus to create its new messiah. Diesel has to use all his mercenary skills to get the "package" through militarized zones, fight clubs and gang wars. Taking user-generated content to new heights, director Matthieu Kassovitz (Gothika) launched a MySpace contest for futuristic advertisements to appear in the background of the film. According to news reports, Diesel's egomania and problems with location filming delayed the movie and drove it way over budget. Here's a teaser trailer: