Hellboy 2: The Suckening

[solarbird]

Hellboy 2 (which I ended up going to against my better judgement) would have been a lot better if 1) the wrong people hadn't won (as so far as I know only nihilistic_kid has pointed out in review form) and 2) it wasn't a sanctimonious, depressing, hypocritical, desperately derivative pile.

Looked pretty good, though. I liked the bits with the gears. But even with that I spent about 2/3rds of the movie thinking, "I hate this movie and I want to go home now," over and over and over again.

Comments

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I didn't understand that comment when NK made it, and I still don't. Prince Nuada wanted to kill All The Filthy Humans. What am I missing here?

[solarbird]

Historically, the humans had been trying to kill all the elves directly, through war. In current time, they were killing off all the elves, indirectly, through other means, mostly encroachment.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Unless humans were running trains full of elves to death camps and I missed it, Prince Nuada doesn't count as the good guys here.

Look, Prince Nuada, along with a bare handful of flunkies/bound spirits, undertook on his own to break a treaty and attempt genocide against the humans, against the consensus of his own people, and in fact murdered a whole lot of his people in the process. Meanwhile, we don't have any evidence that the humans had even been aware of the elves' existence for millenia, let alone been murdering them. The elves were going extinct for some reason; Nuada decided the humans were a good scapegoat. Basic blood and soil expansionism.

[solarbird]

Okay. You watched a different movie than I did. Hopefully yours was better.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying it was a good movie, I'm just baffled by the moral claim here.

[solarbird]

The link I described previously was clear to me, as a viewer; for you, it's not established in the slightest. If you think about the movie again accepting that link for the sake of argument, I think the moral claim will make more sense to you - at least maybe you'll understand how Nick and I are both get there.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Accepting it for the sake of argument, I can see it providing a reasonable motivation for Prince Nuada's behavior (although massacring his own people undermines that, somewhat), but I think that only shifts the nature of the struggle itself, from good v. evil to something more amoral. Nuada doesn't become the right side, just a side.