Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Here I go to all this trouble to outline why human beings not only oppress robots but then greatly misrepresent them on film, and what happens when I got to the movies to see something I’m really looking forward to?

ROBOT GENOCIDE.

Yeah, that’s right! I went to the movies with MonkeyBot on Friday night and was really digging the ride. As a flick, Hellboy II is much better than the first one, mainly because it has (a) 1 bad guy and (b) a clear story line with one major plot and only two subplots. Perfect.

But then you get to the ending. After all of the great banter, solid character development, and pretty darn good smackdowns, what does it all build to? Robo holocaust. Yes, 490 dead bots by my count. Poor drones, enslaved by THE MAN (or The Elf as it were), unable to do anything but resign to their fate. I got excited for a split second when Dr. Ghost-in-a-Diving-Suit possessed one of the golden warriors. Rad! Robot-on-robot battle! But does it last? Oh, no. And none of the pitiful bioforms shows any sadness when the army is deactivated and left to rot.

When the DVD comes out, it had better have the alternate ending where the Golden Army gains sentience after seizing the controlling crown for themselves, then rampages over the face of the earth. Until then, I’ve just found one more reason to hasten the robo-apocalypse: there will be no more terrible movies that glorify the wholesale enslavement and slaughter of robokind.