Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Written by Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola. Release Date: July 11, 2008. Country of Production: USA. Key Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien/The Chamberlain/The Angel of Death), Seth MacFarlane (voice of Johann Krauss), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning).

Guillermo del Toro returns to the screen with another wonderfully whimsical fantasy. Coming back in full force from his production of Pan's Labyrinth, he returns to the world of the B.P.R.D. to put some more meat on the rest of the characters in this glorious saga. This films has a lot more creatures in it, and if you're a costume and makeup hound then I would highly recommend it. Not to mention the wealth of other special effects that this movie so effortlessly affords its audience.

When I was watching the movie though, my dad mentioned to me the grace and poise with which the fight scenes were executed (which are also very beautiful). I had not noticed this before (or perhaps it was lost in the sea of sensory stimulation that was just short of overwhelming, at times), but in retrospect, it was incredibly well done. I'm sure that much of this was filming techniques and some of it was probably some CG and wire-fu every now and then, but according to my dad, who is an active gymnastics enthusiast, and use to compete in college, the calibur of their technique was way better than any other kung-fu stunt double he had seen before. According to him, in order to have such a great mastery of the acrobatics and the fighting styles, you would have had ot devote your entire life to training to reach that point.

I couldn't find any information on the stunts or fight scenes in Hellboy but I'd like to find out more about that. I guess the karate is not enough anymore, we wants flips and springs, tucks and kips, rather than the speed of Bruce Lee being enough to dazzle us, audiences are looking for more involvement and contortion from the human body. Which got me to thinking: as the years progress and technology and intelligence sees to have an increasingly rampant growths, it's easy to forget that the human body makes the same improvements, though with perhaps slower progress, progress just the same. I don't think there has every been an Olympic series in which at least two or three events have trumped some world record. Are there limits to the human mind and body, or will we steadily progress indefinitely?