America suffered through a bitter presidential election on the road to a globewrecking financial crisis.
In theaters, cinematic generations were rising and falling.
This week: Hellboy learns a valuable lesson about how life begins when life ends.
Credit: Everett Collection
InHellboy II: The Golden Army,everything is a ruin.
The prologue sinks into lost eras, American nostalgia fading toward global myth.
Father tells him about the dawn of Man.
Like all Creation sagas, its really an ending, innocence fading to blood and tears.
Anyone who saw the firstHellboymovie watched Hurts character die.
So this flashback already has the whiff of dead-dad melancholy.
And we see cultural artifacts from bygone days.
Young Hellboy, watchingHowdy Doodyon an old black-and-white TV set.
Young Hellboy, crawling into bed holding a toy six-shooter.
This happy era doesnt last another sentence.
In an animated sequence, a faceless human army starts destroying everything.
The blood of many an elf, ogre, and goblin was spilled, says Father.
You know right away this is a Guillermo Del Toro movie.
He weeps for the ogres.
After the title sequence, we move to the present.
But modernity looks strange inHellboy II, a clash of dead worlds.
An immortal elven king, old as time itself, holds court within a decaying rail station.
COMING NEXT SUMMER, a sign outside promises, THREE POINTS SHOPPING MALL.
Maybe that wont hold either.
Its as grand as any of the various Elf coalitions from theHobbitmovies Del Toro almost directed.
And here in the trash of yesteryear, golden leaves still fall, sun-dappled glitter from high-above nowhere.
Scenes like this make other Hollywood fantasies look postcard-plastic.
And past a certain point,Hellboy IIonly has scenes like this.
Hellboycreator Mike Mignola co-wrote the sequels story with Del Toro, and is credited as a visual designer.
Is Hellboy even the hero of this movie?
In his first action scene, the innocent bystanders he kills are auctioneers peddling his fathers old crown.
Killing is wrong, but you feel his enthusiastic mood: Take that, cultural appropriators!
Nuada dismisses the human race as a plague, building parking lots and shopping malls.
The elemental being is the last of its kind, pitiful and helpless against Hellboys giant-sized gun.
Dying, the god bleeds Eden, terraforming a city block into a green wonder.
Murdering a god really drives up the housing costs.
Pay attention to the billboard behind Hellboy, pausing before he fires the killshot.
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE, the advertising promises.
Consider the final act, which takes the characters to a true lost civilization.
Its an underground kingdom called Bethmoora, that name taken from a Lord Dunsany short story.
Dunsany influenced the influencers, predating J.R.R.
But Del Toro sharpens this vision, giving us a guide to Bethmoora who also seems tobeBethmoora.
For Del Toro, grotesquerieishumanity.
Sometimes I wish Id never created them, he admits.
So hes an Oppenheimer long since become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, moaning over his greatest work.
All worth pondering, but the storytelling is never ponderous.
The goblin guides the heroes to their final duel but leaves them at the stairway.
Im not very good with steps, he admits.
At the core ofHellboy IIis a personal story.
Shes not sure if Hellboys ready to be a father.
Has he grown up yet?
Cusping on 60 whenHellboywas made, Perlman wonderfully plays Red as a kind of demigod twentysomething.
Hes less an adult than a kid pretending to be an adult.
Hes a lover and a fighter, sure, but his rooms a mess.
Heres his perspective on the relationship with Liz: I would give my life for her.
But she also wants me to do the dishes.
In the movies, superheroes dont really ever get around to having kids.
And the exceptions prove the rule.
Other children serve a symbolic purpose, which means theyre symbolically introduced far from the banal reality of childcare.
(See also: Hit-Girl from theKickassmovies, raised to be a murder goddess.)
You could readHellboy IIas the thematic prologue to theIncredibles family dynamics.
These crazy kids got pregnant, so what happens next?
Its a question that haunts Liz the most.
Hellboy himself only gets the news late in the film.
But Del Toros teasing visuals keep babies on the mind.
Im not a baby, says the cute little monster.
Or consider the all-consuming Tooth Fairies in an early action sequence.
Should Hellboy and Liz be concerned?
Is there another option?
The message is intriguing:
A BIG DECISION.
LETS MAKE IT TOGETHER, next to a pregnant couple.
But is there another big decision that Hellboy and Liz have to make?
Like maybe, RE the baby: To be or not to be?
Later, Liz and Hellboy have a fight.
says Boris Karloff on television, a monstrous offspring self-aborting.
Once you look for the baby stuff, you find iteverywhere.
When the Tooth Fairies attack, Hellboy has to turn a gigantic statue into a weapon.
He crushes these little baby-monsters… with a gigantic stone fertility goddess.
Later, when the elemental god attacks the city block, Hellboy grabs his favorite gun.
What a miserable outcome!
The old gods sad, because it dies.
The demons sad, because he does the killing.
So theres a rippling parental anxiety inHellboy II, there even when the film is absurdly delightful.
And how much more delightful can you get?
Hellboy and Abe boozily sing Barry Manilow.
Poetry andHowdy Doody, mythology and karaoke, predictions of eternal doom and sight gags about Tecate cans.
He stages Nuadas fights as martial arts swordplay, Errol Flynn by way of Yuen Woo-ping.
Its stuffed with details to make repeat viewing a pleasure.
The visual flourishes can be sly and exuberant all at once.
There was a hope for a thirdHellboymovie with Perlman and Del Toro.
One element ofHellboy IIfeels like a tease in a trilogy-concluding direction.
With the her baby daddy dying, Liz makes a deal with a strange creature.
As played by Doug Jones, this strange Angel is the absolute stuff of nightmares.
And it is not, by a long shot, the actual problem.
The Great Villain is right there in this films title.
It is his destiny, the Angel motions toward Hellboy, to bring about the destruction of the Earth.
The thirdHellboynever came to pass.
(A rebootarrives next year, directed byThe Descents Neil Marshall.)
I used to say thatHellboy IIwas my favorite superhero movie.
Ten years on, that feels like an understatement.
The notion of a subsociety seeking human extinction would power every YA series of this youth era.
(Certainly, the curious too-close sibling dynamic of Nuala and Nuada feels half-Cullen, half-Lannister.)
Many superheroes are bad boyfriends rewarded for their heroism.
Hellboys a hero learning to be a better boyfriend.
Del Toro flirted with a couple of Hollywoods biggest franchises, dedicating time toThe Hobbit, nearly directingThor.
He went his own peculiar ways, toward Oscars and big China box office.
Meanwhile, the genres of Hollywood fantasy have trended aristocratic, castles and forests, bright big-budget futurism.
I wish Del Toro couldve made his thirdHellboy.
Were lousy with comic book sequel apocalypses where the bad guy is some digital dude who needs punching.
It feels like an important corrective to have a superhero movie where the title heroisthe destroyer of worlds.
Youre left with a profound feeling of possibility.
Heres a film that begins with a dead father describing a dead civilization.
The future promises more ruin: One hero is the messiah of the void.
Another hero, his lover, will suffer more than anyone.
This, in a movie with MacFarlane doing German-accent gags!
But theres a tough-hearted to hopefulness toHellboy II.
Old life and old civilizations giving way for a new generation.
It helps to work together.
Hellboy is saved by Liz.
And then he destroys the Golden Army.
A son, destroying a bedtime story on the road to fatherhood?
Kinda, but not quite.
And Liz endsHellboy IIon a cliffhanger of epic proportions.
But its a cliffhanger in the cut-to-blackSopranosmodel, demanding you to ponder every possible future.
Liz is pregnant… with twins!
Cute, but consider the context.
Hellboy didnt win his final battle in this movie.
One pair of twins commit murder-suicide, taking with them the whole history of their race.
And then another pair of twins is born.
You worry its a cycle.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.
But maybe thats one definition of optimism, too.
That great green elemental, were told, is a giver of life and a destroyer.
So when the forest god dies, it blooms a new forest.
There is life in the ruins.
The burial ground is the garden.
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