10 Reasons Why Hellboy II: The Golden Army Is Still ICONIC
5. The Sheer Originality Of It All
Please, don't get me wrong; the first Hellboy is great. It just feels so... constrained. The easiest example of which is the character of Myers, a human agent freshly recruited to the BPRD who is positioned as the main character, the central protagonist, and audience surrogate.
It also doesn't help matters that Myers is about as interesting as white bread, as it becomes painfully obvious that he was more of a studio-mandated addition than anything anyone involved with the first film actually cared about.
Which makes the fact that he's written out of Hellboy II with a singular line about being transferred to Antartica so incredibly wonderful. Similarly, you can literally feel del Toro shaking off the shackles of the first film in this sequel. In crafting an original story with comics creator Mike Mignola and being afforded greater creative freedom all-around, del Toro is able to create a film that is truly his own, rather than a compromise.
Hellboy II feels deeply personal to del Toro because it is. From it's visual language, to its themes, to its story of fantasy being killed off by the cynicism and greed of humanity, this thing has del Toro written all over it.