Plot
In Christmas of 1955, a young Hellboy is told a bedtime story by his adoptive father, Trevor Broom, involving an ancient war between man and magical creatures, started by man's greed. After years of battle and defeat of the magical creatures' forces, the master of the goblin blacksmiths offers to build an indestructible golden mechanical army for King Balor, the one-armed king of the elves. Influenced by his son Prince Nuada, Balor orders the building of this Golden Army. Soon the humans attack again but the Golden Army devastates them; Balor creates a truce with the humans to stop the bloodshed: Man will keep his cities and the magical creatures will keep their forests. Nuada does not agree with the truce, and leaves in exile. The magical crown controlling the army is broken into three pieces, one piece going to the humans and the other two kept by the elves, so the Golden Army can never be used again.
In the present, Nuada declares war on the humans. He collects the first piece of the crown from an auction, massacring everyone at the site by unleashing tooth fairies, and kills his father for the second piece of the crown. His twin sister, Princess Nuala, escapes with the final piece. Meanwhile, Hellboy is having issues with his girlfriend Liz, and trouble accepting that their organization, the B.P.R.D., must remain undercover. While investigating the massacre at the auction, Hellboy allows himself to be revealed to the world. In the commotion, Abe Sapien discovers that Liz is pregnant. Furious about the public unveiling, the Bureau's superiors send a new B.P.R.D. agent, the ectoplasmic medium Johann Krauss, to take command. With Krauss in charge, the team tracks the tooth fairies to the troll market, an enormous merchant city hidden under the Brooklyn Bridge, to search for clues. Abe stumbles onto Nuala, who has obtained a map leading to the Golden Army, and quickly falls in love with her. She is brought under B.P.R.D. protection following an attack by Nuada's sidekick, the troll Wink, and an elemental forest god, both of which Hellboy kills. During the elemental fight, Hellboy is questioned by Nuada whether it is right to fight for the humans when he too is considered a monster.
Nuada tracks his sister to B.P.R.D. headquarters using their magical bond, which causes them to share wounds and read each other's thoughts to an extent. Nuala, sensing her brother's arrival, throws the map, along with the canister in which it came, into a fire and hides the final piece of the crown within one of Abe's books. However, the real map is on the canister. Nuada kidnaps his sister and critically wounds Hellboy with his spear. Unable to remove the spear shard, Liz, Abe and Krauss take Hellboy to the location of the Golden Army in The Giants Causeway County Antrim, Northern Ireland. They encounter a Bethmoora goblin, and he brings them before the Angel of Death, who has been awaiting their arrival. Though warned that Hellboy will doom humanity if he lives, and that she will suffer the most from it, Liz pleads for Hellboy's life. The Angel removes the shard from Hellboy's chest and tells Liz to give him a reason to live. She reveals to Hellboy that he is going to be a father, and he recovers.
The goblin leads the team to the resting place of the Golden Army, where Nuada awaits them. In exchange for Nuala, Abe gives him the last piece of the crown. With the crown reformed, Nuada awakens the Golden Army, ordering them to kill the team. The group is unable to defeat the soldiers as they magically repair themselves. Hellboy challenges Nuada for the right to the crown, and Nuada is forced to accept, since Hellboy's father was a Prince of Sheol. Hellboy defeats Nuada and spares his life, but Nuada tries stabbing him. Nuala commits suicide to stop her brother: the dying Nuada tells Hellboy he will have to choose whether humanity or the magical beings must die. Abe psychically tells Nuala his feelings for her before she and her brother die. Liz melts the crown, shutting down the Golden Army. As the team leaves the underground compound, Tom Manning reprimands them. Hellboy, Liz and Abe resign from the B.P.R.D. Hellboy contemplates his future life with Liz and their baby. Liz corrects him, saying "babies", surprising him with the fact that she is pregnant with twins.
Read more about this topic: Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)