Hellboy

Rating: 4

This was a cool sci-fi movie.  It had a really good message, but it doesn't really become apparent until the climax of the movie (almost at the end).  [Spoiler Alert] While Rasputin waits for Hellboy to unlock the gates of Hell, John Myer shouts to Hellboy, "You have a choice, your father gave you that choice!"  Pointing to the fact that though he was a monster brought out of Hell, he was given the freedom to choose good.  And because he was brought up and taught the difference between good and evil, understanding his accountability and freedom to choose, he breaks free of his "destiny" by tearing off his newly formed horns, exclaiming that he has made his choice to serve good, and destroys the evil that sought to destroy him.  John Myers asks us at the end of the story, "What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them."

Tarantino does a good job of depicting evil and shows how even someone whose past was dark can still have the power to choose righteously.  I really liked the emphasis it placed on the importance of our God-given gift of agency.

It's hard to say, and can even be considered cheesy for a movie (particularly one of this nature) to be inspirational, but I was made more aware of how I need to better value or act on the agency I've been given.  Too many times it seems like I have to make a certain decision only because I've made that decision in the past or because of the situations I've found myself.  When our divine potential is recognized, our destiny changes.

The dry humor helped make all the sci-fi action bearable and even enjoyable at times.  I wouldn't recommend this to the mediocre comic book movie fan, unless you like sci-fi (monsters, creatures, etc.), of which Carr doesn't seem to be much a fan.

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Carr here.  Just wanted to say that I acknowledge the moral messages apparent in the film, but it's not a see-again for me.  I felt like I was missing a lot of the story and it was never explained.  I found myself scoffing at the lines and characters, which thing I don't do too often.  I can handle cheesy; this was simply bizarre.  Not really appealing to me.