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Movie Review, Hellboy II
The movie starts off far more funny than the first Hellboy. This is very much in keeping with the quirky ad campaign that has been promoting the film (the inside the actor's studio commercial for example is quite funny). Hellboy is once again Ron Pearlman- the genius bit of casting that made the first movie so great is a huge win for any sequel. He's tired of working for the BPRD in secret and is going out of his way to be spotted by the real world. But a mythos of ancient elves is working to retrieve and unify some widgets to awaken a golden army of indestructible robots, and it's up to our heroes to stop it from happening.
The elven world is very much Del Toro's designs. Likewise, an extended sequence through a secret troll market hidden under the brooklyn bridge gives him a great canvas to paint his stylistic genius. And seeing the big and clumsy Hellboy smash through it is incredibly satisfying. The action sequences are all excellent, and the final robot battle is very fun and well done.
All the while this is done with some nice plot twists for the major characters. A love interest for Abe comes along. A new good guy is sent in from the BPRD to reign in our uncontrollable hero: Krauss is voiced by Seth Macfarlane basically doing his fish char from American Dad, but inside a wacky suit controlled by ectoplasm vapors. Selma Blair is back as Liz: they give her some good lines and a few good sequences, but she's mainly a support role.
So Guillermo Del Toro was able to work within Mike Mignola's world. He put his own thumbprints all over the work, and the whole comes out better than the sum of the parts. And this makes me all the more excited for the Hobbit, where I have all the same concerns: Tolkein and Jackson will give him even bigger shoes to fill, and now I think he can do it.
Haven't read the review because it is "mostly spoiler free," which seems to me like manufacturing something that is "mostly carcinogenic free." If someone has a problem with spoilers, it's unlikely they're going to read the review on the off chance you've only spoiled the stuff they didn't care about and not the stuff they did.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Loved the visuals, and the song scene had me nearly rolling on the theatre floor with laughter.
I went into it with high hopes, but was largely disappointed. It seemed to barely be about hellboy. While the visuals, background and world were interesting and appealing, they seemed to me to be a completely separate franchise, that very distinctly left the world created in the first one.
Thought the "new" character was an epic disappointment as well.
Felt like the director wanted to make a movie primarily about something else, and dragged hellboy along for the ride in a bit role.
Give Taco a break. His spell checker wanted to spell it "SQL".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I guess he won't be doing his script for At The Mountains of Madness.
I was looking forward to the shoggoth merchandise... shoggoth keychains, shoggoth pudding...
Response to this movie is turning into two camps - love it or hate it.
I fall mildly into the 'hate it' camp. Too much of the director's vision, not enough freakin' story.
Underdeveloped characters, waaaaaaaaaaaay too much CGI, overly cluttered scenes, eco-terrorist plot. All adding up to me literally yawning my way through the movie.
The original movie appeals to me because of a strong story with supporting visual effects. This movie seems to be all about overwhelming visual effects with some story thrown in to try to pull them together.
If this is what Pan's Labyrinth is like then I'm glad I didn't waste my time in seeing it. I don't see the director as 'visionary' any more than I see M. Night Wasshisname as a visionary.
Harsh, I know. But I'm rather picky about how I spend my precious free time and wasting it on this movie just annoys me.
There's worse.
...
TOLKEIN?!
I mean seriously, that's like some sort of deadly sin of spelling. Geeks have been sentenced to geek card revocation for far lesser crimes.
6) New agent hard nosed
Hard nosed? Quite the opposite, in fact.
I didn't really care for the character though. Seemed to lack substance.
Is $7.50 the Senior discount for a Sunday morning matinee in Topeka?
The Sunday morning matinee for Wall-E cost me $9.50!
I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Iraq wasn't, Afghanistan was.
It was patriotic and "support the troops-ish" but it fit the material. Tony Stark is an arms manufacturer and those are the current wars being fought where his wares might turn up. If you're going to set this material in current events then Afghanistan and Iraq are the places you put it.
I liked the movie a lot and thought the overt patriotism fit right into the film perfectly. I don't know if I'd give it a 100 but back in my time you had to get a 93 or better to make an "A" and I'm good with that. Mid 90's seems about right for Iron Man to me.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Just to show it's all a matter of perspective, I saw it as a rather UNpatriotic don't-support-the-troops kind of movie. It seemed to show war as always bad, the defense industry as crooked and evil, the war in Afghanistan pointless (we couldn't even stop the massacre in this one small town!). Also, the Iron Man saga always starts in a war-zone; it was Vietnam in the first issue, later revised to the first Gulf War, now Afghanistan. And I don't recall Iraq being in it at all. The story may have been "cheesy", but it was faithful to the comic book, more or less.
I don't want to start an argument or anything, but it just goes to show it's all a matter of opinion.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
At one point in the last few decades it was estimated that, thanks to the human population explosion, more than half the human beings who had ever lived were still alive. (There were jokes about the expectation of eventual death being less than 50%. B-) )
I hear that, since then, the origin date for "humans" has been pushed back enough by additional evidence that the "less than half" estimate was discredited.
But it is an interesting thought.
(Why SHOULD people HAVE to die, after all? At least before the heat death of the universe? OK, so the machinery of the meat breaks down. But is there any inherent reason one couldn't, with sufficient improvements in technology and application of resources, repair it indefinitely? Or even rebuild and restart it after it fails? For some time now death has been, not a state, but a prognosis: That (with current medical technology) the body's systems can no longer be repaired (and if necessary restarted) to the point that it can again operate in a way recognizable as "alive".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way