It's at the forefront of one's mind during Hellboy II: The Golden Army (hereafter Hellboy II), Guillermo Del Toro's brilliant dance along an ephemeral tightrope between pop and Puccini, that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore just now influenced this remake of The Fly into a full-fledged opera: I can see the same truth happening providing a lot of Del Toro's pictures. The director's assumed too after his Pan's Labyrinth "something popped" in regards to his restraint in allowing the menagerie of horrors in his brain free rein over his imagination--and that he endeavoured to bid all the madness of Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" universe to the big display with or without a commensurately giant budget. (Of Summer '08's blockbusters, Hellboy II, losing roughly 85 million dollars, would be the several frugal.) The result is a film so crammed to the gills with invention such a a bit of background boom in a scene set at a bazaar hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (this is the second great genre film this year after Cloverfield to compose a pit moratorium at who chosen locale) wherein a creature plays a pipe made out of a tanned human corpse is left uncommented-upon and is somehow finally unremarkable. The wonders of Hellboy II as felt through our avatars Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz (Selma Blair), and Abe (Doug Jones, right now long time vocalizing the character as well)--team workforces for a covert government agency such a deals with supernatural intrusions--are the way the market is, and it is fascinatingly left for the normals in the audience to crane for a sharper look.
But it's the current separation of the mundane from the divine that marks the perfect of comic art--this wondrous, Nietzschian idea the current existence is predicated on the possibility the we pass unnoticed, lest we become the gods questioned to dispel ourselves. In Brad Bird's The Incredibles (and, to a lesser extent, his The Iron Giant), the question of tolerance in the "super"-verse is broached as a parallel to the difficulties in making a living (ditto: Raimi's Spider-Man films). Find in Del Toro's film the idea, too, that what is most threatened by being amazing is the possibility of sharing in the American Dream. The key second in a picture most likely defined by its volume is the quiet, private commiseration of two friends as they listen to bad music, drink bad hooch, and cry over such a girlfriends. Hellboy II is shot through with a vein of melancholia, a sense of details the current pass, never to return, like an choice to say to a loved one you love them for the last time. Charting which grey neighborhood between supremely silly and surprisingly poignant is a devilishly dangerous thing to attempt; I wonder about if Del Toro isn't one of the few directors now able to do overly consistently.
Hellboy, discovered in WWII and declared as a human by his adoptive father (John Hurt), is a demon initially sent to Earth to catalyze the Apocalypse--an Apocalypse great by Elvish Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who takings from a centuries-long exile to take command of the titular clockwork Golden Army. His early proclamation that his assignment is to remind humans of how it is to fear the dark is an essential, archetypical thing along the lines of Yeats' sylvan mythology, with us as the lost children in mortal peril of forgetting from whence we spawned and overly which we be sure to have dispelled in the neutral of reason and science. It's not a religious picture, it's a proto-religious picture. As one of the arch-baddies is revealed to be a blue universe elemental, the death of whom announces the extinction of something wild and savage, Hellboy II proves itself to be a terminus film about this moment moment in moment when humans come to find themselves making an attempt with the responsibility of their stewardship of the planet. In its way, the picture is Del Toro's manifestation of John Milton's "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity": a parade of pagan gods marching to their annihilation before the obliterating intolerance of Christian faith, seen here as a truce signed by critters who experience it in their nature to honour it even though it means their banishment to sewers and deep forests. The caution embedded in the picture is that the beings we elevate as saviours are the same sites who will fast be responsible for the end of times. It sounds familiar. It ought to.
The film itself is lovely, a breathless feast of fantasy anchored by an authentic humanism. It's the product of a director in complete command of his medium and its ability to transmit the contents of his subconscious. Del Toro articulates the ineffable. A late arrival by death, its wings rimmed with eyes, its teeth impossibly subtle and white, speaks to the idea that the picture is about ultimate subjects and the indelible importance of small moments. When Abe's immortal beloved Princess Luala (Anna Walton), sister of the fiend, reads from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam", the part she reports certainly isn't the side a multitude of are familiar with--but if you recognize of the piece, you appreciate there's a portion that speaks to it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Hellboy II is more than spectacle, although it is top notch spectacle--more as opposed to pop art dissertation, though it's that, too. Hellboy II is a film absolutely of this time overly speaks in timeless images of Catholic grotesquerie and pre-Christian iconography, alive in the fire of invention and flights of fancy. It's not Del Toro's masterpiece (that distinction is still Pan's Labyrinth's), but it is greater amount of model of a unusual artist white-knuckling the crest of his genius and, for a while at least, focusing it to these fine, animate points of lush colour and sentient light
