HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY: I Can’t Smile Without You

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, John Hurt, and Seth MacFarlane.

It is easy to get lost in the visual splendor that is HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, because there are few films that look this gorgeous. What makes THE GOLDEN ARMY the rarest of cinematic treats is that I cannot think of any movie off the top of my head that so wonderfully blends two unique visual styles from two unique visual giants together so seamlessly and sumptuously.

Unlike the first HELLBOY and Sin City, which always strike me as Guillermo del Toro and Robert Rodriguez doing their best to bring Mike Mignola’s and Frank Miller’s comics to life, or 300 and Watchmen, where Zack Snyder’s visual style overwhelms Miller’s and Dave Gibbons’ respective styles, THE GOLDEN ARMY takes Mignola’s characters, runs them through del Toro’s universe, and both visions stay strong.

THE GOLDEN ARMY puts a smile on my face from start to finish. The film opens at Christmastime in 1955, where a pre-teen Hellboy begs his adopted father Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) to tell him a story before bed, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, he relates the story of an ancient war between humans and magical creatures. The magical creatures create the Golden Army, an unstoppable force but King Balor is horrified by what he’s done, and so forges a truce with humans. His son, Prince Nuada, is not a fan of this political move, and so he goes into exile. This whole sequence is modeled to look like the coolest Tool video ever made, as it looks like its all done with wooden puppets.

Cut to the present and things have advanced since the original HELLBOY film. Hellboy and Liz (Ron Perlman and Selma Blair) are living together inside the BPRD facility in New Jersey but Liz is feeling like she needs some space. Which is complicated by the fact that she’s pregnant. She’s not telling Hellboy because she doesn’t even realize it until after Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) senses it and tells her.

Wisely, del Toro makes the camaraderie between Hellboy, Liz, and Abe is the centerpiece of the film. While they all clearly respect and love one another, there’s all of these dual partnerships that exclude the third: Liz and Abe know Liz is pregnant but Hellboy doesn’t, Liz and Hellboy are romantically involved but Abe has no one, and Hellboy and Abe are best buddies while Liz doesn’t have a female friend anywhere. The best scene that displays this is Hellboy and Abe getting drunk together as they commiserate about women.

Abe is completely inexperienced with the opposite sex and Hellboy acts like the expert he very much is not. It’s great acting from Perlman and Jones, and when they combine to sing Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Live Without You” and get drunk on Tecate Light, they create some genuine movie magic. The song properly serves as the emotional core of the film, as our three leads all face decisions about just what they’d do without their most cherished loved one. I don’t like to tell you what to think, but if you can watch this scene and not have a smile break out across your face and don’t join in with the sing-a-long, well … you’re probably in need of your heart growing three sizes someday.

The film uses these third wheel pieces to create some tension in the narrative to work alongside the main narrative, which is the return of Prince Nuada (Luke Goss). Nuada wants to reclaim the three pieces of the magical crown that control the Golden Army, so he steals the human’s piece at an auction and then kills his dad. This gives him two pieces and his twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton), who goes into hiding until she runs into Abe and Hellboy, who bring her under BPRD protection.

The narrative is solid, and the visuals are every bit as great. There’s gorgeous sets everywhere, including the Troll’s Market, the magical beings lair beneath a bridge, and the underground city where the Golden Army waits. What’s really impressive is that these sets are rundown and kinda ugly and del Toro and his crew manage to make them look totally amazing. Part of this comes from contrasting the dull settings with bright and colorful characters, but there’s also the sheer awesomeness of the designs, which trump their conditions.

Abe ends up falling in love with Nuala, which Nuada uses to his advantage when he breaks into BPRD. It’s a quick romance, but then it’s not like they have room to stretch out Abe and Nuala’s courtship. Instead, both Abe and Nuala’s loneliness helps to create their mutual attraction, and they come off as two young people falling in love for the first time.

I was a little disappointed to see that Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) was back being a bit of an administrative prick, but the scene where he complains to Abe about Hellboy hating him is well constructed (there’s all sorts of chaos going on behind them and they just carry on a normal chat) and his anger at Hellboy wanting to let the world know of his existence is well-founded. Manning and Hellboy’s inability to get along, and Hellboy’s decision to definitively out his existence to the public during an investigation into Nuada’s destruction of the auction, forces Washington to send in Johann Strauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane and no, Strauss does not sound like Brian or Peter or Ted), a gaseous entity living inside what looks like an old diver’s suit. Strauss is a bit regimented, but he eventually joins along with our three leads to disobey orders and go after Nuada directly.

During this final sequence, Liz chooses to save Hellboy even though it means the eventual destruction of the world, and Abe does the same, giving Nuada the final piece of the magical crown that allows the Prince to raise the army out of its slumber. The final battle against the Golden Army is pretty darn great (and the largeness of the golden robots at the end of the film contrasts nicely with the battle against the small tooth fairies near the start of the film), and the army is made of what looks like large, fat, golden steampunk robots that can self-repair themselves. Del Toro uses color as well as any non-animation director working right now, and his color palette is continually changing but always rich, and making this final battle against golden robots with red energy works beautifully.

The film tries to generate some traction with the idea that Hellboy is seduced by Nuada’s urging to join the magical creatures against the humans, but it doesn’t really work, with one exception – when Hellboy kills the giant green Elemental (a gorgeously rendered creature), you feel his confusion and pain over his duty conflicting with what he feels is right. Not that it’s okay that the Elemental is flailing about the city, but the Elemental didn’t choose to be there – Nuada put him there, and Hellboy is rightly conflicted over killed the last of its kind. That scene works, but Nuada’s clumsy attempts at seduction don’t because we know that Hellboy’s heart could never seek the destruction of one side over the other.

Genocidal maniacs don’t love Barry Manilow AND Tecate Light. Fact.

Well. Probably.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY is a rich, gorgeous, fun cinematic achievement. Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Guillermo del Toro, and all the crew who contributed to the look of the film turn in high quality work, and together they produce a really fantastic movie. Now, if only they could get a third film made …

HELLBOY: There Are Things That Go Bump in the Night

Hellboy (2004) – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Starring Ron Perlman, Rupert Evans, Doug Jones, Selma Blair, Karel Roden, Ladislav Beran, John Hurt, Bridget Hodson, and Jeffrey Tambor.

During yesterday’s review of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, I lamented the fact that as much as I loved the movie, I didn’t really enjoy watching it anymore. As important as that film was in the development of the cinematic superhero genre and as much as I celebrated the movie, we’ve seen so many origin stories at this point (not to mention the origin of Spider-Man told and re-told countless times across all sorts of media), that the movie doesn’t do a whole lot for me anymore.

Such is not the case with Guillermo del Toro’s HELLBOY, which still stands as something fresh, unique, and unlike anything else. Visually, nothing comes close to the look of HELLBOY, as del Toro, Rick Baker, Mike Mignola, and the rest of the production staff use a rich, saturated palette and Lovecraftian monsters to deliver a film that still looks and feels completely amazing.

HELLBOY opens in Scotland in 1944 with the United States military stopping a Nazi plot to bring the Ogdru Jahad to Earth. The military, led by their young occult adviser Trevor Bruttenholm stop Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) and his top assassin Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), but not before a red-skinned boy with a honking big right hand and a tail comes through.

This opening sequence quickly and gorgeously sets up the film’s plot and provides Hellboy’s origin without dragging us into an elongated sequence about how he was just a boy from another dimension who got sucked through space and time and blah blah blah. It’s a gorgeously shot sequence; del Toro has a really wonderful ability to create a world that is obviously constructed and yet feels completely real, too, because it’s so consistently rendered. I love the treatment of the military here, too. These soldiers have little time for Bruttenholm’s ideas, but when they’re confronted with a reality they can’t ignore – the arrival of Hellboy – they embrace the challenge. There’s something completely heartwarming about seeing all of these military guys exchange doubt and confusion for big smiles and open hearts, and it’s one of the moments that makes me love this film.

Cutting to the present, we get introduced to the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) through new recruit John Myers (Rupert Evans). I really don’t see the need to walk us through this world – hey look, there’s a fish-looking guy in a tank who likes to read, and over here is a big red demon who likes cats – because John doesn’t really add a whole lot to the film that we couldn’t get without him. There’s a weak subplot with John romancing Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) that’s worth having around just for the great scene where Hellboy spies on them from a rooftop, taking love advice from a nine-year old kid, but after that … it doesn’t bring much. I think the film would have been better served killing John around this point in the film than keeping him around.

Rasputin has been resurrected by Kroenen and his Nazi lover Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson), and he unleashes a bunch of Lovercraft monsters on the populace. Del Toro does a fantastic job setting the action sequences in different, visually appealing places: a museum in the city, an underwater subway sequence, and an underground structure in Rasputin’s mausoleum. What combines them is that they (along with BRPD HQ) are all soaked in different colors. The museum is a rich yellow, the underwater sequence is murky green, the BRPD HQ has Bruttenholm’s (John Hurt) library on one end and Hellboy’s sloppy “apartment” on the other, and there’s plenty of ice and snow in Russia. HELLBOY is one of those films that’s just a visual joy to look at from start to finish.

Ron Perlman is fantastic as the titular character, delivering one of his very best performances. Hellboy is a big, tough dude with a soft heart, and Perlman beautifully walks that line. In battle, he wants to go in alone, while in his personal life, he desperately wants to not be alone – so long as he gets to be with Liz. He might be rough and strange looking, but he’s got that weakness for Baby Ruth candy bars that makes him come off as completely real. When he tries to tell Liz that he understands why she would want to be with Myers instead, and wishes he could do something about his face, all of the personal pain and pathos that we need to see is laid bare before us. Where Raimi’s Spider-Man kept beating us over the head with the melodrama, del Toro deploys it with much greater skill in HELLBOY.

John Hurt, Doug Jones, and Selma Blair are all good, but Jeffrey Tambor steals the show as an FBI agent forced to publicly dismiss all of the reported sightings of Hellboy and disavow any knowledge of the BPRD. Tambor’s Tom Manning is a jerk, but after Kroenen kills Broom (Bruttenholm’s nickname), Manning personally leads the expedition to hunt Kroenen and Rasputin down. And even though his attitude is of the, “let’s tie up loose ends” variety more than revenge, the guy still goes along. When he and Hellboy are forced to help each other defeat Kroenen, Manning finally sees Hellboy for who he is and not what he forces Manning to have to do. There’s no heart-to-heart moment where Manning apologizes, either. These are both men who have difficulty expressing their emotions, and so instead of a thank you, Manning acknowledgment of his own past sins against Hellboy and appreciation for saving his life come in a dismissive, “What are you doing?” as Hellboy tries and fails to light his cigar with a lighter. “You’ve got to use matches,” Manning insists, lighting one for him, “otherwise you lose the flavor.”

Hellboy tries it and nods his appreciation back, and then goes off to hunt more monsters. It’s really good stuff and a clever bit of character development that the film employs.

HELLBOY takes its time to get where it’s going, moving at a steady pace to build to the big CGI climax. Rasputin wants to use Hellboy to open the portal to bring the Ogdru Jahad to Earth and has stolen Liz’s soul to get him to comply. He starts to do it and then stops himself, stops Rasputin, and gets Liz back.

Every time I watch this movie I get sucked back in to the story and the visuals, and taken with the characters. Everyone here has flaws and they’re very real, very understandable flaws. When Abe (Doug Jones) is underwater with the Lovecraft hounds, you can see the fear on his face and in his actions. It’s just a great film to watch, full of great characters to hang out with for a few hours.

I love HELLBOY.

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality

Alien (1979) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto.

Ridley Scott’s atmospheric masterpiece ALIEN is one of the most influential American films ever made.

For all of Scott’s varies success with films like Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator, it’s ALIEN that endures most strongly in the work of other film makers. Sci-fi films and slasher films are still aping Scott’s style because it relies on a minimal narrative and a dark atmosphere. That means you can do it on the (relative) cheap.

It’s a well deserved aping, however, because ALIEN is a brilliant movie about a group of working class men and women being terrorized on their ship by an alien menace that they willingly brought aboard and then spend the film trying to eliminate.

Beginning slow and quiet, ALIEN builds as it goes, becoming faster, louder, and more intense with seemingly every new sequence. I think it’s improper to call ALIEN a rollercoaster ride because it’s much less a series of action sequences linked by quieter, character and plot driven sequences than it is a rock rolling downhill, gathering steam as it gathers distance. There are a few instances where we get the action-release-action structure, but like a typical slasher film, once people start getting murdered there’s not much time for quiet reflection.

I see ALIEN as a three act play in which both the alien (designed by the legendary H.R. Giger) and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) grow in prominence, headed for the inevitable collision of their respective arcs.

In Act I, neither the alien nor Ripley play much of a role. In this first part of the film we see the crew of the Nostromo woken out of their slumber by the ship’s computer. They slowly awaken (and Scott lets his camera linger) and immediately drag themselves to the kitchen for food and smokes. It’s only once they return to duty that they realize they’ve been woken up too early. The Nostromo has intercepted a signal and the crew is required to follow up on it.

The crew is a smart assemblage of quality actors given only a few things to do, and they all do it well. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is a concerned, thoughtful man who’s willing to give his crew some rope to act on their own but doesn’t shy away from making decisions or verbally smacking them back in line. Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and the ship’s engineers, constantly complaining about their pay. After they’re reminded that they’ll get paid exactly what their contract says they’ll get paid, Parker throws it back in Dallas’ face when he asks them to do something above and beyond. Kane (John Hurt) is a curious, determined explorer and Lambert (Veronica Cartright) is his antithesis; he wants to keep investigating the distress call and she wants to go back to the ship. Ash (Ian Holm) is the science officer with plenty of secrets, and Ripley is the most well-rounded character, willing to make the tough decision, fight for herself, and still not hiding that she is occasionally scared out of her mind.

We basically learn everything we need to know about them during that eat and smoke table session, which is one of my absolute favorite sci-fi scenes of all time. I don’t love it for its science or even for its particular cleverness. I love it because it comes after a whole set of long, slow, quiet establishing shots that tell us the Nostromo is empty. I love it because it’s so full of life. But mostly I love it because it’s dirty. Blade Runner often gets cited for its dystopian aesthetic, but I prefer the functional, working class future depicted in ALIEN. We don’t see space travel as being glamorous. We don’t see a table full of heroes or moralists or philosophers.

We see working men and women who are paid to do a crummy job at a huge distance from Earth. My dissertation is on 19th century whaling narratives, and the world of the Nostromo resonates in the same way: dirty, dangerous, decidedly unromantic. This is a hard life for hard people.

They’re really not even friends. There’s pairs of friends, of course. Parker and Brett are pals, though it’s more like Brett is the tag-a-long sidekick/Yes Man than an actual pal. There’s a small vibe of a relationship between Dallas and Lambert in the way she pleads with him. But other than that, you get the feeling that these people share the same space but beyond the Nostromo they are not part of each others’ lives.

In order to investigate the intercepted signal, they head to a planet, where they find a massive, abandoned ship. Inside the ship, they find a large dead being sitting in a chair. (And it appears Scott’s upcoming film, Prometheus, will tell a bit of this story of the ship.) The ship’s interior is pure H.R. Giger awesomeness. The settings look both familiar and alien and equally cool and menacing.

Kane finds some big eggs and then a facehugger alien forces itself through Kane’s helmet and attaches itself to his face. They haul him back to the ship where Ripley refuses to let them inside because she’s following quarantine protocol. (Scott doesn’t show any of this rescue and return, negating a potential action sequence which could throw his atmosphere for a loop before it’s even firmly established.) Dallas orders her to let them in, but she refuses. Ash ignores her, however, and lets them in.

Both the alien and Ripley, then, make a show of force that’s ultimately brushed aside by the crew. Kane doesn’t realize the threat the alien poses to his people, while Ash and Kane don’t recognize Ripley’s authority.

This gets us to Act II, when the facehugger pulls off Kane only to have a second alien come bursting out of his chest. It’s still small at this point but obviously it freaks everyone out and they decide to go hunting for it. Both the alien and Ripley begin to take a larger role in the film as they begin to assert the power they do have, and this means it’s time for the killing to start. The crew goes hunting, but it’s Brett and Dallas that end up getting taken out. Lambert wants to cut and run, but Ripley reminds her that the escape shuttle won’t hold four people, so the killing option is still their best bet. Once they take out Ash, and the alien then takes out Lambert and Parker, Ripley is left as the Last Woman Standing.

The most interesting character in this middle portion of the film is Ash, the scientist who has a secret mission to bring the alien back alive. It turns out Ash is a robot whose loyalty lies with the company, not with his fellow crew mates. (The crew has been deemed expendable by the company.) He’s impressed by the resiliency and efficiency of the alien, which horrifies Ripley. Ash describes the alien as “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Ash is, of course, also describing himself. As a robot, his actions are simply evidence that he’s fulfilling his programming, meaning he has no conscience, no remorse, no morality. In this sense, he sees the alien as a natural version of himself. For her part, Ripley’s investigation and realization of what Ash is doing, and then her physical confrontation with him firmly asserts her position in the film. It doesn’t even matter that Ripley needs help to defeat Ash because she’s clearly the force that will drive the rest of the film.

Enter Act III, which is the alien vs. Ripley showdown. This is the loudest and most intense act in the film. Ripley decides it’s time to take Lambert’s advice now that only her and the cat are alive, so she starts the self destruct sequence. She tries to stop it when the alien has blocked her path to the shuttle, but she can’t get it stopped so she has to get to the shuttle. When she returns, the alien has left the cat unharmed, allowing Ripley to jump in the shuttle and get the heck out of Dodge. As the shuttle flees, the Nostromo blows up, and then (as you might have guessed) it turns out the alien is inside the shuttle, allowing one final confrontation that Ripley wins by opening the exterior door and letting the alien get sucked into space.

ALIEN doesn’t muck around with too many clever plot twists and narrative turns. Ash being a robot who’s also willing to see the crew killed to get the alien home is it, and they come right on top of each other. Instead, Scott focuses on the dark, moody atmosphere. If you want to note that it’s a male crewman who gets raped and impregnated and the female crewman who ultimately defeats the alien you can do it, and get a lot of mileage out of it, but I am more impressed with having male and female characters who exhibit a wide range of roles and attitudes. These sorts of plots can feel formulaic, but ALIEN never suffers from this because it puts the emphasis on Act I, on the mystery and the tone.

Blade Runner is a more literary film, but I think ALIEN is every bit as brilliant.

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ALIEN / PREDATOR Review Index

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality
ALIENS: My Mommy Said There Were No Monsters. No Real Ones. But There Are.
ALIEN 3: A Bunch of Lifers Who Found God at the Ass-End of Space
ALIEN RESURRECTION: Must Be a Chick Thing
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: I Think This is a Manhood Ritual
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM: Small Town America Kills Two Franchises at Once