At Indy.com, Maruice Broaddus reviews Hellboy 2 and finds more than a little religion in it:
"Augustine spoke of a God-sized hole within each of us - essentially we are relational beings hard-wired with a need for intimacy. Hellboy and his friends are no different. They are a bunch of loners and misfits, alone in the world, searching for love and meaning. They are looking for acceptance or, realizing that they might be the last of their kind, striving to not be alone. In the process, they look out for each other. With each other, they have found people to be with one another on their journeys, to encourage, mentor, chastise, their own entourage of misfits.
"The movies [Guillermo] del Toro crafts are myth for adults, with all of its attendant elements - woven with death and loss, courage and love and sacrifice. Drawing on the primal urgency of the original fairy tales before they were cleaned up for mass consumption, his lush and imaginative Pan's Labyrinth was pure magical realism - fantasy firmly rooted in reality, both gruesome and spell-binding. He understands the underpinnings of faith, the symbolism inherent in religion, as faith and spiritual concerns are essentially magic."
Read the full review here.
I saw HELLBOY 2 yesterday. So far, its my favorite film of the summer.
It will be interesting, once I buy the DVD (as I'm sure I will), to analyze it more thoroughly. There are so many influences being drawn on in the Hellboy Mythos. The most obvious and most interesting to me is the Lovecraftian/Cthulhu element.
I wonder, though, what do you make of the fact that we see much of the diabolic in Hellboy but little or no evidence of the divine. There was what appears to be a fallen angel---but no good angels, no good deities---any such beings seem much less in your face than their evil counterparts. I wonder if that was deliberate on the part of Mignola and Del Toro.
Posted by: DB Ellis | July 13, 2008 at 04:26 PM