Hellboy (2004 film)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The ancient war between Humanity and all the supernatural races. It's a bit of a head-scratcher that in those days of yore the humans could almost beat the Elves and their allies in open warfare, all while in present day humans with modern tech and weapons are still woefully overwhelmed whenever fighting supernatural threats (IE: The whole reason for having people like Abe and Hellboy around).
    • Elves are just one type of threat. The fact that they were secret, naturally, would limit the BPRD's desire to openly deal with threats, especially since a lot of the threats may have evolved too.
  • Is it just me, or does the king seem kinda like a Jerkass ? I mean, he's all like, "Oh kill me, I can't stop you from taking this piece...and by the way, feel free to massacre my guards, too."
    • I think at that point, he was 1) seriously world-weary, I mean barely-hanging-on, and 2) he may have still been hoping that either the guards would manage to subdue Nuada or said prince wouldn't have it in him to kill his father. Wrong on both counts, but the millenia have been hard on Balor.
      • Um...what? He's not "all like, 'Oh kill me, I can't stop you...etc'". He's ordering the guards to have Nuada executed for wanting to use the army. He's trying his damnedest to stop Nuada before he can put his plan into motion.
  • I don't know why, but for some reason I was expecting Hellboy to shoot the chain when Mr Wink got caught in the grinders.
    • So I wasn't the only one! Somehow it just seemed kind of dick to give Mr Wink lines (sort of) right before he gets offed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd just been the mindless servitor like he seemed in the earlier scenes.
      • We totally need a Fix Fic for this...
      • Not to mention what a Nightmare Fuel death it was. Would the heroes have stood by and let a more humanlike character die so horribly?
      • They did in the first movie, so yes.
      • I thought it was entirely within character. The character of Hellboy being kind of a dick. Wink is still a serious threat even with one arm.
        • Indeed, and Wink was also partially responsible for the deaths of several BPRD agents (who were probably Hellboy's friends). If some popcorn had been handy Hellboy probably would have munched it as the gears made Wink tartar, and I wouldn't blame him.
  • In TGA, why does Nuada not kill Hellboy when he's focused on the plant and right above him?
    • Nuada's still hoping for the 'Join me and together we can rule the galaxy' thing at that moment. He doesn't abandon that until the end of this particular scene.
  • Why does the movie BPRD send Red Shirts into situations at all? All they do is get killed.
    • Given the way director Manning calls Hellboy out for indirectly causing the death of three agents via his poor leadership skills, I would assume that BPRD death rates weren't that bad prior to the first movie.
      • I assume that the BRPD can handle most of the problems they come up against; but against serious Elder Gods/black-market mojo, they're still only human. Hey, the resident demonspawn has a hard time handling those threats!
      • Yeah, they didn't really seem to be too hard pressed about wrestling down the angry troll-ish monster and giant octopus monster in the background near the beginning of TGA while the metahumans were otherwise occupied. Sure they were kinda being tossed around by the latter, but Manning and Abe didn't really seem to be too concerned while they walked past.
  • They say the Tooth Fairies go for the teeth first. But when Hellboy's partner is devoured, they go for the flesh first, and leave a clean skeleton, complete with teeth. Not only that, but earlier you see a cute little tooth fairy munching on a tooth that somehow survived the ravenous horde of tooth fairies before it. What gives? Did the writers forget what they wrote 5 minutes ago?
    • The partner's wearing some kind of high-tech dentures. (You tend to lose teeth in B.P.R.D, as Hellboy demonstrates in his fight with Wink.) And the tooth fairy had just squirreled away a little taste treat for later.
    • I was originally going to say, "Because showing a guy with his teeth chewed out and then showing him turned into a skeleton isn't as creepy," then I remembered that a guy screaming in agony while his teeth are chewed out could actually be scarier. And besides, for best access to the teeth, you want to get the tissue around them first. Hell, these things have probably been locked up in the Underworld for thousands of years, they'll take what they can get at fastest. Did you see any of them tying a li'l napkin around his neck?
    • You can see at least one fairy holding his jaws apart and chowing down when he's first swarmed. As to why we see almost no damage to the teeth when see him all skeletal is a bit of a mystery.
      • How accurate are Abe's books? It's possible that they contain some inadvertent mis-information, it's not really like they've got a reliable backup source to check them against until they actually run across whatever beasty they're playing with.
  • This troper watched Hellboy II and wondered why no one thought to tranquilize the princess elf, arrest her psychically-linked evil twin brother at their convenience, and take her off the meds after they've locked him up in an appropriately elf-magic-proof cell.
    • Or just shoot her.
    • Or throw the crown to Liz who can melt it and disable the army for good.
    • To be fair, Hellboy probably had that in mind (minus the meds). The real problem was the over-reaction of the princess. Nuada could barely walk, and Hellboy had already noticed that he tried to attack him from behind. There was not really a need for a heroic sacrifice at this point.
      • I dunno, it seems like Hellboy won that duel by virtue of being able to direct a killing blow at Nuada and forcing a surrender. He doesn't seem to have been injured enough to stop being a threat, whereas Hellboy was probably fighting on adrenaline alone. It seems that overall, she wanted to end the threat he still posed permanently, before he could hurt anyone else.
    • My feeling was that she didn't want her brother imprisoned, either through a belief that he would escape and kill more people or not wanting to see her brother suffer in captivity.
      • Possibly both. Because let's face it, when bad guys are given the chance not to die, they come back. At that point, Nuala was probably already feeling guilty over the fact that she hadn't done anything earlier, and let her feelings imperil the ones who were trying to help her. Besides, c'mon... Who really wants to die? Can't be an easy choice, especially if you're potentially immortal.
    • Because Nuada would never stop. Even with The Golden Army destroyed he would still keep trying to find other ways to exterminate humanity, and in the process he might actually find something worse. He is an (almost) ageless magical being of supernatural strength, endurance, and endlessly cruel cunning, he had to be stopped once and for all and the only way to do that was to kill him.
  • I want to know why I am supposed to be cheering for the humans. Apparently we are a bunch of obnoxious and greedy treaty violators.
    • The Elves, who know full well that humanity has completely forgotten about their existence (not to mention that the treaty was most likely not really with 'humanity' but with one small portion of Northwest Europe) instead of at least trying a "Hey, we exist and would like it if you expanded your National Parks system and environmental laws, maybe we could start some commerce, we'll help you with your green technology, and Nuada here will start a 'Be Nice To the Environment and I'll Pose Shirtless' campaign," divide into a "No, don't bother, we'll just wither and die here, don't worry about us," camp and a "We're going to kill all of you for forgetting a treaty that most of you never made, and we never bothered to remind you of."
    • And Nuada's a genocidal fanatic. One of the greatest flaws of the movie is that both sides suck. Who do we root for?
      • You root for the sexy elf with the bitchin' fight scenes, that's who you root for.
      • Well, to be fair, only the fantasy creatures remembered the treaty - humans just did what humans do best, expanding and exploiting. Arguably it was the humans' fault for not finding a way to retain the treaty through the generations, but what-have-you.
      • It seems that the majority of the magical creature also seem to operate under the assumption that they've had a good run and it may be time for them to just fade from the scene and go out gracefully.
        • The fantasy creatures didn't do much to enforce that treaty really, just falling back further and further and hiding. They weren't all lining up behind Nuada to follow him either.
        • I thought it was kind of weird, just the absolute about-face that the humans do after the elemental dies. I mean, what? I know the movie was making a point, but in all honesty both sides kind of sucked. I cheered for the humans, though, because I'm one of those humano-centric supremest types.
          • This troper can tell you that it's not that much of a stretch.
        • It seems that the fantasy creatures had a bad case of Honor Before Reason, honoring their side of the deal despite the humans blatantly breaking theirs.
      • Is genocidal fanatic really the right word? His entire species were on the verge of fading way because humanity broke their end of the treaty. Attacking humanity - which is within his rights by the treaty - to save your own kind isn't as simple as being a genocidal fanatic. Mostly because everything he says about humanity is 100% right.
      • Pretty much everything you say is true: however, Nuada's avowed solution to the above problem was not "make war on humanity until they surrender", it was "make war on humanity until humanity ceases to exist". Thus, 'genocidal'. As for 'fanatic', even Nuada wouldn't argue that point.
        • Did he ever actually say that? Certainly he intended to control humans, but when did he say he wanted to destroy the entire human race?
        • The humans had already been seriously killed off by the Golden Army the first time. Remember what happened after that. After all...
    • You're not supposed to root for the humans or the fair folk. You're supposed to root for Hellboy.
    • What you have is a condition called "sociopathy", for which you should seek psychiatric counseling.
  • I don't get this argument at all. HUMANITY DOESN'T EVEN KNOW THE TREATY EXISTS ANYMORE, how exactly can we be expected to keep treaty we don't know exists, to preserve mythical creatures we dont know exists, under the threat of a war we didn't even know had occurred!
    • On that note, how DID we forget? Yeah all right, human-kind wasn't the best at preserving history back in the day, but you'd think something like that would stick.
    • When, for the entirety of human history, has there ever been a leader of all the humans able to make a treaty at all? Before the rise of city-states, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers.
      • It was about the same time we were at open war with elves, goblins, and trolls, obviously.
      • Because the humans are stupid for casually forgetting a vital piece of information.
        • Also, we're not as long lived as the mythical creatures, we die off like flies during major disasters, we tend to forget stuff when we're trying to survive, so basically modern humans are held accountable for something that we have nothing to do with and no way to know about, since our government kept the supernatural secret.
        • Who the heck had the authority to make a treaty for the entire human race, anyways? By the time we were starting to really make weapons and armies, we were spread out over Africa and Eurasia with no way to reliably coordinate with one another. I suppose that forgotten magic may have ironed out some of those problems (as well as the idea of non-Modern-ish human societies being able to take on an entire unified army of superhumans with a wide variety of magical abilities and skills), but it still seems like a stretch since the magic shown in the Hellboy films doesn't really seem to lend itself to such common uses.
          • The Elves all have Celtic names, so it's not unreasonable to assume that the Celts were the ones they made the treaty with. This is a glaring oversimplification, but the Celts did have a sort of ramshackle, unofficial 'empire' that stretched from Scotland to Turkey, so the representatives of Man were potentially speaking for most of a continent. The same continent inhabited by the Elves and Goblins and Trolls and whathaveyou. Also, the Celts preserved their history orally rather than writing it down. In Britain at least, the histories were kept by druids and bards, who got their shit massively messed up when the Romans invaded. It probably wouldn't have been out of character for the Romans to dismiss any talk of making a really important treaty with supernatural creatures as the product of what they saw as infantile and barbarous superstitions. Really, if you think of it in these terms, Nuada has no justification for going after humans in the United States, because there'd be huge swathes of the population with no familial link to the humans the Elves signed the treaty with.
  • The inherit connection between the previous two complaints has to do with mine, which is the premise itself. The setting takes a modern world, but injects the fantastical into the background, thereby making the present world and humans out to be massive jerkasses. True enough, there are connections to what people have actually done in history, but nothing like what the second movie portrays. Notably, people just flat out forgetting about the treaty. Basically, our world makes little sense if the backstory of the movie is true.
  • If the crown was so easy to destroy, why didn't Liz just melt the piece that the princess had with her so the crown could never be used?
    • Things only got really serious after Nuada obtained the map to the location of the army, and from that point on Abe hid the last part, hoping to exchange it for the princess.
      • The worst thing is that the spearpoint had already been removed from Hellboy by that point, so there was no real reason for Abe to just hand it over with Hellboy back in action.
        • Abe handed it over to get Nuala back, since Nuada was holding her prisoner.
    • Still, Nuala or the King apparently no intention to ever use the Golden Army, so why keep the pieces at all?
      • I assumed it was like keeping the hardcopy of a contract, a binding remembrance of your promise. Or, as a relic of the 'glory days,' what with everything having gone to pot for the magical creatures since.
    • On the subject of Liz destroying the Crown, I assumed that it was only possible for the person who technically owned the thing to destroy it, or authorise its destruction (that being Hellboy at the time).
      • Nuala didn't trust the BPRD enough to hand the crown piece over, so Liz never had the opportunity to destroy it.
  • Rasputin wanted Hellboy to open the gate to the Void. He must have needed Hellboy alive, otherwise he would have killed Hellboy while he was unconscious (following Liz's flameout). Why then did Kroenen—while working for Rasputin—attempt to drop Hellboy down a spike-filled pit?
    • Given what Hellboy is, and what we see him survive, its likely that the spikes would merely have disabled him.
    • While not made clear in the movie, it is said repeatedly in the comics that only the hand is needed to free the Ogru Jahad as it is the hand of the creature who sealed them away.
      • It's also said in "Box Full of Evil" that, if one wanted to cut off the Right Hand of Doom and use it, they have to do it while Hellboy is still alive.

Ualac: ...but the Hand must be struck off while he lives, lest his death bleed into it and poison it against us.

  • In the beginning of the movie, the king ordered Nuada's execution knowing that it would also kill Nuala. Nuada even asks Nuala "You too, sister?", and she nods. So, since Nuala had already accepted that stopping Nuada was worth her own life as far back as the beginning of the movie, why didn't she just cut her own throat before Nuada could finish killing her father? Or his royal guards?
    • Because she's an elf bitch, that's why.
    • Because there is a huge difference between simply letting someone kill you and actually sticking a knife into your own heart.
      • Given that sticking a knife in her own heart is exactly how she chooses to end the movie, its a legitimate question to ask why she didn't do it while it would still have been in time to save Nuada's victims (especially her own father), as opposed to merely avenging them.
    • Especially since she still seems somewhat fond of her brother. She knows that he needs to die but hesitates to kill him herself.
    • For that matter, Nuada would have had a much harder time executing his rampage of death all over their father's throne room if she'd simply stabbed herself (and thus him) in the leg. Or the sword hand. Or ran headfirst into a wall and knocked herself out.
      • I'd like to see you go on and do that, then. It's harder, I'd imagine, to actually maul yourself and someone you care about than it is just to talk about it.
      • Since she was entirely willing to kill herself in the last act, asking why she didn't do something less lethal sooner and save her father's life is an entirely legitimate question.
        • Maybe she didn't want to believe Nuada would actually kill their father. Only after he killed Balor did she realize how far off his rocker Nuada was, so she ran for it. If you watch the 'puppet show' carefully, you'll see Nuada himself put the crown on Balor. It's a pretty huge Face Heel Turn from willingly giving your father the crown to killing him for it.
        • Fair enough. Given that everyone else (besides Nuada) seemed willing enough to fade away/die, and the King himself seemed somewhat surprised (if not exactly shocked) that his son stabbed him, but not particularly upset about dying itself, we can assume that it's what the elves were planning on doing anyway: Dying/fading away. Going a little sooner than the others doesn't change anything; at that point, Nuala's had two thousand years or so to accept the fact that she and all her people are history. But it seems to be a standard trait for them to care about the rest of the world, even when it forgets about them; so Nuala wasn't concerned with her people dying (since they'd all already accepted it) but instead with fulfilling the duty to the humans which her father (and for all we know, the rest of them) had held onto for so long. Note that she doesn't display any concern for her own life either; she just has to get out of there because otherwise the humans (and their assorted non-human friends) are going to be completely blindsided when the Prince lets the shiny killer automatons out of the bag.
    • What I don't get is why the guards didn't just grab her and take a knife to HER throat when he started rampaging. A bond like that shouldn't have gone unexploited long enough for them to reach maturity...
      • I'm not sure that the guards knew that Nuada and Nuala were linked that way. They didn't even seem to know themselves, when in the middle of the fight Nuada looks over at Nuala and sees they both have the same nosebleed, both seem surprised about it.
        • I assumed that the surprise was more due to 'holy fuck, I/he was actually hit.' As to the original question, the obvious answer is: Then we wouldn't have a movie.
    • Because she wasn't in love with Abe Sapien at the beginning of the movie. Meekly accepting death (as she did at the beginning) is not the same as sacrificing yourself to save a loved one (as she did at the end). She wasn't strong enough to take that option before.
  • Why was the elf prince named Nuada? In Celtic mythology (which the movie is so obviously based on) Nuada was the king of the Tuatha De Danaan (read: elves) who had an artificial hand made of silver, like the ACTUAL king of the elves in this movie?
    • So they could have a sister named Nuala, obviously.
      • Probably because it sounded cool. In the original mythology, Nuala was Nuada's niece, not his twin. Clearly the moviemakers weren't too concerned with sticking to the source materiel.
    • Nuada Jr.?
  • How I didn't realise this before is... inexplicable. How on EARTH does Nuada holding his sister prisoner even WORK? If he kills her, he kills himself. Threatening the heroes with her death if they don't do his bidding is pointless. The worst he can do is hold her captive. And if they go to fight him, they actually ADD to the risk of her death. There's a major Idiot Ball being held by all sides here...
    • Did the heroes even know about their synchronicity at the time?
      • Yes. Abe knew about the bond, and everyone saw him cut her cheek and acquire an identical cut himself, so it would be an assumption that the link goes both ways. Hellboy didn't see this, but he found out when he showed up and Abe told him.
    • I suppose Nuada could threaten to have her tortured, given that his pain threshold is presumably much higher than hers. But yes, that we need to ascend to such heights of Fridge Logic to make threatening Nuala even vaguely plausible only confirms your point that this particular part of the plot was very poorly written.
    • Or maybe Nuada was just bluffing about hurting her, and was counting on the BPRD being unfamiliar with Synchronization and therefore not considering any of the stuff you mentioned. And it worked! None of the big three were thinking straight: Abe was too concerned for Nuala, Liz was too preoccupied with Hellboy dying, and Hellboy was too preoccupied with dying. And I don't recall Nuala getting any chance to tell them her brother was bluffing before Abe hands the crown over.
    • My personal theory was that the elf prince , magical al-quidea he is , would have given his own life if he couldn't get the map. And the BPRD knew it.
    • Having watched the movie last night, I seem to remember him just telling the heroes that he demands the crown piece if they "ever want to see her again." Presumably, he could've kept her locked up somewhere for life.
      • I'm fairly sure this is it. Also, as a troper above mentioned, Nuada was probably betting on the general chaos preventing Our Heroes from thinking clearly.
    • You've struck upon the question that sets the Nuada's leather pants on fire. Nuada threatens his sister because he knows that Hellboy and the others are kinder, better, less murderous people than he is. He's betting on them wanting to keep Nuala alive more than they want him dead.
  • Why didn't Nuala warn Hellboy & co that she is linked with Nuada earlier, rather than just "Oh, Abe. Bytheway Nuada will find this place 'cause of me. Tough luck."? Or Abe could tell the rest when he found out, rather than telling Hellboy right before fighting Nuada.
      • You can't blame her for being cautious, particularly when you've seen that the people who took you in are divided about it; they may decide to just kill you and get it over with. I'm not sure why Abe decided not to tell the others, but presumably he 1) didn't want to get her in trouble and 2) was also busy mooning over her.
  • So... Liz is pregnant now. How does that even work?
    • You see, son, when a man and a woman love each other very much...
    • In the comic, Hellboy is the offspring of the Devil (or something) and a Witch. So I guess it's perfectly workable. Also let's not forget about Incubus...
    • Let's hope their kids look cuter then Shrek's (they've already been hooked up in fanfiction, haven't they).
  • Just what the hell was up with the people turning on Hellboy after he dispatched the giant monster? The overacting didn't help, either.
    • It was just the movie making a point, to give Hellboy a reason for potentially jumping ship and joining the Prince's anti-human crusade. It was damn forced, though, and probably the weakest point in the movie.
      • Nearly as bad as X-men.
        • Well, yeah, it was forced, but it's not like there wasn't some justification. Hellboy has a habit of being... well, somewhat callous when it comes to danger. He spent about a minute NOT shooting the thing while Nuala was cooing into his ear, and spent the fight juggling a baby. To a crowd, he obviously doesn't care about their safety, only about killing as many big monsters as possible.
        • Yet in the first movie, he was seen shooting up a savage monster all while having a box of kittens in his arms. Did anyone turn on him? No. Hell, the owner of said box of kittens smiled at him when he returned them.
  • What happened to Myers, apparently the only decent human that was still alive by the end of the first movie? He was actually a pretty cool character for a non-canon one and was at least a good person at heart if normal.
    • In the brief, brief, scene preceding the Tooth Fairy fight, Selma Blair remarks that Hellboy had him transferred to Antarctica, to which Hellboy answers with "He said he liked the cold". No, I am not making this up.
      • I'd posit that the studio was apprehensive about a film featuring a big, red, weird non-human as the primary sympathetic character (hey, it's Hollywood - they're still wrapping their heads around the fact that legions of people really like comic books and movies based on comic books), so they stuck Meyers in there to make sure the franchise would work before making Hellboy the focal point in the second film.
    • Reportedly, Del Toro wanted to bring Agent Myers back, but the actor had other commitments.
    • It worked out for his own good anyway. You have noticed what tends to happen to normal agents when they stick with Hellboy in these movies, right?
      • One might even think that Hellboy intended exactly that.
  • Wasn't the crown supposed to be indestructible? How the hell did Liz melt it?
    • Only the army was said to be indestructible, not the crown.
    • It's also possible that the crown only becomes vulnerable when it's rightful owner agrees to destroy it. By the time Liz burns it, it belongs to Hellboy and he doesn't protest too much when she melts it.
    • This. Also, Liz can burn anything. ANYTHING. Her fire was (in the comics) almost enough to free the Ogdru Jahad. She's not just Pyrokinetic, she has god-level destructive power.
  • Right after he said he needed it, Abe's breathing thing disappeared for the rest of the movie.
    • He replaced it with those contact lens things.
      • No, he sprayed this experimental stuff on his gills, to keep them from drying.
    • That bothered me too (I thought the contact lenses were aesthetic, or to keep his eyes from drying out). Were they magic? Because the breathing thing oxygenated water and kept it flowing across his gills, and the contact lenses... didn't.
    • Maybe it's more of a comfort issue, he doesn't need it but prefers it at times because it's easier only deciding until later to stop using it in order to "toughen up" so to speak.
  • The fact the elves were such wimps bugs the hell out of me. "Oh well, maybe we should fade away." WTF?! I can understand not taking the guy up on his anti-human crusade to kill everything, but resigning yourself to extinction is just stupid. Why are they keeping the Masquerade in the first place anyway?
    • I think the point is that all beings are created with strengths and weaknesses; the humans have that whole never-gonna-be-satisfied thing, the elves are destined to fade away The Lord of the Rings style. The whole reason Nuada could actually try to change things is that he was obviously off his rocker.
    • Thinking of the troll market, it seemed they still had a vibrant community, so at least some fae didn't seem destined to just fade away. What this debate needed was someone to Take a Third Option and remind humanity about the ancient treaty and push back a little. Drop the masquerade even. It would at least insure they are remembered even if they're destined to disappear.
  • What the heck were Liz's travel clothes made of? Or did her Fire Resistance have an Aura Of Invincibility extended to her clothing when either she had (slightly) better control over her powers, or when the plot didn't require Clothing Damage? (If there's a trope for the Aura Of Costume Invincibility, I couldn't find it. Do we even have this one?)
    • In the films she has an Aura of Invincibility while she keeps them under control.
    • There's a trope for this being explained in-universe (My Clothes Have Superpowers Too ?) and one for inexplicable instances of clothes staying on when they shouldn't. I think it's called Magic Pants or something to that effect. We got it.
  • Am I the only one who thought that the forest god scene was a tear jerker? I just want to know?
    • No, I cried too
    • Same here...
    • And me.

"The last of its kind. Like you and I. If you destroy it, the world will never see its kind again..."

  • Was I the only person who was kind of disappointed by The Golden Army? This isn't a case of Complaining About Shows You Don't Like; I thought the first Hellboy was an interesting little movie, and was expecting Mr. del Toro to really hit the second one out of the park. Now it looked spectacular, no argument there. The Elemental fight alone probably justified the cost of my ticket. But the characters, who were so well-defined in the first one, seemed . . . off. Manning, who seemed to have mellowed a little bit by the end of the last one, was back to being an obstructive jerk. Hellboy, after more or less accepting Myers, has him transferred to a frozen wasteland. Krauss looked awesome, and I wish they'd given him any sort of vaguely plausible reason for his sudden change of heart at the end of the film. I realize I'm a minority here, but The Golden Army was a very frustrating film for me.
    • As to Krauss...did you miss that whole speech he gives right before they all head out on the plane? The one where he clearly explains why he's suddenly siding with Hellboy and Co.?
  • While I loved TGA, it bugged me that, other than elves, goblins and tooth fairies, we aren't told what a single one of the fae they see is. Is Mr. Wink a Jack-In-Irons? An ogre with a magic-cyborg hand? Is the forest god an elemental (my own theory) or something weirder?
    • I actually thought that was a strength of the movie. One of the great things about film and other visual media is how the artist can convey the sense of a complete world, one that goes on ticking even when the protagonists aren't there, by portraying it in the background. Not everything gets explained, just like how in a more realistic movie, we wouldn't stop to find out the occupation of every single person on the street.
    • Yeah, do you really want the whole thing to be bogged down in exposition about each faerie you see? Does it really hurt the movie if you don't know which specific type of troll or troll-like creature Mr. Wink is?
  • Does Hellboy actually come form hell? (like in the Judeo-Christian sense) The movies seem to make out that he comes from outer space.
    • Not from space, but The Void, a place outside the universe, possibly outside any universe. (In the movie. The comics are pretty clear that HB is a prince of Hell by birth.) Bruttenholm's description of The Void as a dark place where evil beings wait isn't too far off from Hell; he probably didn't give a straight answer when asked if he believed in Hell because a simple "Yes" would have given the impression that he was talking about Fire and Brimstone Hell.
    • In the second movie he was stated as being a prince.
  • As soon as Hellboy falls out of the building with the Tooth Fairies, one of the little buggers flies at a passerby and Hellboy shoots it. First off, that was probably the least safe thing he could have done; one inch off and you kill an innocent bystander. Secondly, how did he hit the thing? He admitted in the first movie that he's not a very good shot, yet he shoots a tiny creature flying in a pretty erratic pattern in a dark setting, not to mention how he would probably be dazed from flying out of a building and falling several stories. Third, even if he did hit it dead-center, the bullet just disappears after it dies. Wouldn't such a high-caliber round pass through such a little target, again endangering the very people he's trying to protect?
    • Rule of Cool prevails again!
      • Maybe Hellboy's been to the range a few times since the last movie and improved his aim, or his line about not being a very good shot was Blatant Lies (He seems to hit Sammael, a fast, agile, moving target very easily). Also the Samaritan uses "Really big bullets" but they seem to be completely hollow (and made out of some oddly transparent material that doesn't vaporize in the barrel) in order to deliver a special payload designed to kill monsters ("Garlic, holy water, white oak, the works."), so the ammo isn't designed to go through anything, but explode on impact which is why it doesn't keep going into the crowd.
      • Heck, he's not the only one. Abe and Liz had no problem picking off those little buggers one by one as they flew around in a veritable cloud around them (thank goodness that Plot Armor prevented them from completely swarming Abe like they did to the Muggles), and Liz at least once shot one as it was flying directly into Abe's face from point blank range while standing directly in front of him. The Red Shirt was doing pretty well too.
  • The Always Save the Girl moments in the sequel bug me, even when the one being saved is a guy. As noted in the main article, Liz choosing Hellboy over 'the world' kinda makes sense because Hellboy has a proven record of avoiding his destiny. But then a few moments later Abe gives Nuada the means to commit genocide against the entire human race so he can get back the princess (not so he can save her life, mind, so he personally can have her back, given that the Prince obviously can't harm the Princess without hurting himself.) Always Save the Girl usually results in a little questionable morality; in this case it's taken to an extreme and Abe comes across as a full-blown selfish moron ready to sacrifice everyone and everything for the sake of getting his potential girlfriend back. Seriously, Abe, screw you.
    • In all fairness, the Golden Army was kinda underwhelming. They're much stronger than a human and can self-repair to some degree, but they didn't seem too fast or agile and one wonders how their ability to pull themselves back together would hold up to being melted into seventy times seventy golden puddles from a hail of ICBMs from across an Ocean, or what would happen to them if the very arrogant prince who was controlling them was sniped from a rooftop a quarter mile away. And that's not even counting nukes. And that's not even counting the ridiculous tactical advantages modern society holds in terms of communications and spy satellites, especially if BPRD figures out how to implement the glamour-breaking technology into them...
      • That would be another Just Bugs Me; I'm guessing that Golden Army was pretty impressive when the opposition was using spears and shields. In a modern context? Not so much. The Prince's plan was pretty hopeless. But that's beside the point; in story, it's treated like a terrible threat to human survival, and yet Abe Sapien potentially screws everybody over for the sake of getting back a woman he barely knows. That's less romantic and more sociopathic.
        • Neither; it's desperate, pure and simple. Love makes you stupid, after all, or at least prone to incredibly bad decisions.
      • Also, the Golden Army is indestructible. Literally, not just "somewhat". You can blow them up as many times as you like, they always regenerate. Sure it would take them time to exterminate humanity, but they can't be stopped without the crown, only slowed down. And presumably other elfkind would have joined in after the initial victories, as well.
        • It's explicitly stated in the novelisation that the Golden Army was intended to be backed up by fairy support troops, acting as the spearhead of an army rather than on its own. How well that would have worked when the fairies are all but extinct is another matter.
        • Even if they'd regenerate, how hard can it be to put them all inside a giant cage? Or for that matter, blowing them into a giant puddle of golden metal, then putting all of than into a cage without enough space to reassemble. Or launching them all into the sun while they're regenerating. Or, as a troper previously mentioned, just killing Nuada. In premedieval times, sure, the golden army would have been unstoppable, and Nuada could just have stayed with them at all times, no-one could have reached him. But against a modern-day military, they're just not unstoppable at all.
  • In the final panoramic, there are way more than 70 x 70 Golden Soldiers. Even counting only the ones we could see, there were more than 4900.
    • Do you honestly claim counting them all? Human brains generally aren't very good at accurately estimating numbers like that intuitively, especially when the subjects are placed in such an uneven manner. With pausing the Blu-Ray a few times, this troper can't honestly say for sure if we ever saw more than a few hundred soldiers, in fact.
    • Bible scholars are pretty sure now that its frequent mention of "forty days and forty nights" isn't a literal measure, but an old poetic way of saying "quite a while." So maybe "seventy times seventy" is just fancy faerie-talk for "a veritable shitload."
  • Why on earth did Johann even need a gym locker?
    • Del Toro says he was removing a polishing kit.
  • Did the movie ever explain that destroying the crown would disable the Golden Army, because if not there should have been a little thought put into what would happen if the Nigh Invulnerable Mecha-Mooks were left leaderless and became Omnicidal Maniacs.
    • The Golden Army only even move if someone is actively commanding them to. They're not just "leaderless," they're totally inert unless they're being given direct commands.
  • When Nuada is fighting his father's guards and one of them manages to pop him in the face, making he and Nuala bleed from the nose, the blood is red. Any time Nuada and/or Nuala get cut for the rest of the movie their blood is golden, like tree sap. Do they just bleed two different colors?
  • Krauss releases his ectoplasmic form to fight Golden Army, and is very effective. So why does he suddenly decide that it's not worth continuing after he learns that the robots can rebuild themselves? He could still cause a lot of useful damage and slow the robots down.
    • He might be able to slow, what, a dozen or so down, for what, 30 seconds? Fighting the Golden Army is only useful if they stay down. There's no point to keeping fighting when, at best, you're going to tie up 6 or 7 out of several hundred.
      • All several hundred can't be actively attacking the heroes at once, there simply isn't the space for them to operate. Krauss only needs to tie up the very front line of robots to buy the others time.
      • Buy them time to do what, exactly?
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