Headscratchers / Hellboy II: The Golden Army

• Liz melts down the Crown so nobody else can activate the titular Golden Army. But why has nobody tried this before?
  • One answer is that the elves (rightly) never trusted the humans to keep their word. And as shown by the prince, the elves are superior in skill to humans in fighting, so taking back the piece they gave would be no problem.
  • There's also the fact that the elf king always knew the fae world would die out, and therefore he was waiting for there to be only a few fae or at least just himself left before melting it down, as with the fae world still alive there would always have been a chance for the Crown to simply be reforged.
  • A small bit of Fridge Horror then kicks in at the fact that, as shown by the troll market, there are still plenty of Fae creatures left, including the smith who made the army himself. What if he decided to stop regretting and started getting angry?
  • Liz's flames are explicitly supernatural, so it's unclear if "regular" fire (Or any kind of fire that's not Liz's) would even get the job done. In-story it's also said the crown pieces are kept as part of a sign of good faith that the agreement is kept, so the Elves kept it because of Honor Before Reason (to show they still honor the agreement no matter what) and the humans kept it for keeping the agreement and then due it being a historical relic.
• The Golden Army will only obey an unchallenged leader who has the crown. It's how Hellboy stops them. Nuala's ready to die to stop the army, but why doesn't she use the obvious caveat and challenge he brother for command? She's of Royal blood so her challenge meets the 1 criteria needed. He can't kill her as it'd kill him. He therefore can't ever win the challenge and assume command of the army. And Nuala wouldn't even need to die.
  • The crown challenge can end non-lethally, as Hellboy shows in his own fight with Nuada. Nuada would just restrain her and consider the duel finished.
• In every fight between any fey creatures (all introduced as Last of His Kind as their races are in the final stages of a terminal decline) and regular humans with modern weaponry (many of whom are are supposed to be part of the FBI department specifically trained to deal with non-humans), the result is a Curb-Stomp Battle in favor of the fae. How were the humans of centuries ago, with much more primitive weapons, ever such a threat to the fae races in their prime that the Golden Army was needed?
  • It's possible the early humans knew how to wield Magic so as to be a threat. The narration also doesn't say anything about the humans winning the war, just that the war shed "the blood of many an elf, ogre and goblin". For all we know the humans were just doing Zerg Rush after Zerg Rush but maximizing the damage to "civilian" Fey, making the King desperate for some permanent solution. It's important to note that the magical creatures who overpower the B.P.R.D agents are Sammael, Mr. Wink, Nuada and The Tooth Fairies, all of which are noted as the worst of the worst (the Troll Market inhabitants even seeming concerned someone is carrying around Tooth Fairies).
• Why does Nuada not kill Hellboy when he's focused on the plant and right above him?
  • Nuada's still hoping for the 'Join me and together we can rule the galaxy' thing at that moment. He doesn't abandon that until the end of this particular scene.
• They say the Tooth Fairies go for the teeth first. But when Hellboy's partner is devoured, they go for the flesh first, and leave a clean skeleton, complete with teeth. Not only that, but earlier you see a cute little tooth fairy munching on a tooth that somehow survived the ravenous horde of tooth fairies before it. What gives? Did the writers forget what they wrote 5 minutes ago?
  • The partner's wearing some kind of high-tech dentures. (You tend to lose teeth in B.P.R.D, as Hellboy demonstrates in his fight with Wink.) And the tooth fairy had just squirreled away a little taste treat for later.
  • Possibly he had tooth implants in-Verse, which would be inedible to the faeries. Out-of-verse, the corpse probably didn't look human-like enough for audiences to empathize with and get appropriately creeped out, if they showed it without any teeth.
  • I was originally going to say, "Because showing a guy with his teeth chewed out and then showing him turned into a skeleton isn't as creepy," then I remembered that a guy screaming in agony while his teeth are chewed out could actually be scarier. And besides, for best access to the teeth, you want to get the tissue around them first. Hell, these things have probably been locked up in the Underworld for thousands of years, they'll take what they can get at fastest. Did you see any of them tying a li'l napkin around his neck?
  • You can see at least one fairy holding his jaws apart and chowing down when he's first swarmed. As to why we see almost no damage to the teeth when see him all skeletal is a bit of a mystery.
    • How accurate are Abe's books? It's possible that they contain some inadvertent mis-information, it's not really like they've got a reliable backup source to check them against until they actually run across whatever beasty they're playing with.
    • Maybe they actually go for the tongue first, and witnesses whose reports provided the basis for Abe's books only thought it was teeth they were after.
• How come no one thought to tranquilize the princess elf, arrest her psychically-linked evil twin brother at their convenience, and take her off the meds after they've locked him up in an appropriately elf-magic-proof cell?
  • Or just shoot her.
  • Or throw the crown to Liz who can melt it and disable the army for good.
  • To be fair, Hellboy probably had that in mind (minus the meds). The real problem was the over-reaction of the princess. Nuada could barely walk, and Hellboy had already noticed that he tried to attack him from behind. There was not really a need for a heroic sacrifice at this point.
    • I dunno, it seems like Hellboy won that duel by virtue of being able to direct a killing blow at Nuada and forcing a surrender. He doesn't seem to have been injured enough to stop being a threat, whereas Hellboy was probably fighting on adrenaline alone. It seems that overall, she wanted to end the threat he still posed permanently, before he could hurt anyone else.
  • My feeling was that she didn't want her brother imprisoned, either through a belief that he would escape and kill more people or not wanting to see her brother suffer in captivity.
    • Possibly both. Because let's face it, when bad guys are given the chance not to die, they come back. At that point, Nuala was probably already feeling guilty over the fact that she hadn't done anything earlier, and let her feelings imperil the ones who were trying to help her. Besides, c'mon... Who really wants to die? Can't be an easy choice, especially if you're potentially immortal.
  • Because Nuada would never stop. Even with The Golden Army destroyed he would still keep trying to find other ways to exterminate humanity, and in the process he might actually find something worse. He is an (almost) ageless magical being of supernatural strength, endurance, and endlessly cruel cunning, he had to be stopped once and for all and the only way to do that was to kill him.
    • Also who's to say he would stop with Humanity? If he succeeded in wiping out Humanity, who's going to stop him if wants another race dead. Not only that but, how would you stop him from doing that? Now that he's destroyed your only real ally against him and his army.
• How DID humans forget about the treaty? Yeah all right, human-kind wasn't the best at preserving history back in the day, but you'd think something like that would stick.
  • When, for the entirety of human history, has there ever been a leader of all the humans able to make a treaty at all? Before the rise of city-states, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers.
    • It was about the same time we were at open war with elves, goblins, and trolls, obviously.
    • Because the humans are stupid for casually forgetting a vital piece of information.
    • Also, we're not as long lived as the mythical creatures, we die off like flies during major disasters, we tend to forget stuff when we're trying to survive, so basically modern humans are held accountable for something that we have nothing to do with and no way to know about, since our government kept the supernatural secret.
    • It depends on how much Nuada actually knows about the modern world, but the Elves have a very small, very centralized population; he may not even realize that humans aren't some kind of monolithic entity, or that humans have countless sub-groups who all answer to different leaders, as opposed to the faeries, who at least theoretically all seem to answer to the leader of the Elves. It probably wouldn't make any different to him if he did know, but he may be operating on a fundamental misunderstanding of how human society works, especially modern human society.
    • Who the heck had the authority to make a treaty for the entire human race, anyways? By the time we were starting to really make weapons and armies, we were spread out over Africa and Eurasia with no way to reliably coordinate with one another. I suppose that forgotten magic may have ironed out some of those problems (as well as the idea of non-Modern-ish human societies being able to take on an entire unified army of superhumans with a wide variety of magical abilities and skills), but it still seems like a stretch since the magic shown in the Hellboy films doesn't really seem to lend itself to such common uses.
    • The Elves all have Celtic names, so it's not unreasonable to assume that the Celts were the ones they made the treaty with. This is a glaring oversimplification, but the Celts did have a sort of ramshackle, unofficial 'empire' that stretched from Scotland to Turkey, so the representatives of Man were potentially speaking for most of a continent. The same continent inhabited by the Elves and Goblins and Trolls and whathaveyou. Also, the Celts preserved their history orally rather than writing it down. In Britain at least, the histories were kept by druids and bards, who got their shit massively messed up when the Romans invaded. It probably wouldn't have been out of character for the Romans to dismiss any talk of making a really important treaty with supernatural creatures as the product of what they saw as infantile and barbarous superstitions. Really, if you think of it in these terms, Nuada has no justification for going after humans in the United States, because there'd be huge swathes of the population with no familial link to the humans the Elves signed the treaty with.
    • Given BPRD knows about it (Prof. Trevor read the freaking story to Hellboy more or less 50 years ago), at least a few governments are aware of the treaty. And the people at the auction know about the story. Problem is, everyone living in The Masquerade thinks it's a legend, and proceeded to promptly ignored the intended Aesop, while the people who are aware simply don't care. For BPRD and everyone affiliated to them, their job is keeping humanity safe, which means screw all the freaks and fairies (Manning outright says that in the first movie, when he thinks Hellboy should be locked up as well). It's likely humanity has been remembered of the deal over and over through the millennia, but proceeded to ignore/forget/dismiss/counter it for self-benefit. Nuada just hit his limit when everyone else, even his family, decided to just accept it and let the fairy races die. And humanity doesn't help its case when Hellboy reveals himself and most people react with mockery or scorn.
    • Even then, there's only a small handful of people out of the entire human population who even knows that supernaturals exist, and those who know the treaty is real and not just some old story are likely even fewer: The professor was a scholar, after all, and it's likely that only a few specialists and/or higher-ups in the various supernatural agencies know about it, with the rank-and-file majority being totally unaware. That's a very, very small minority who even has knowledge of the treaty and lack any means to enforce it, unlike the very small population of elves who apparently only live in a single remaining location... so we wind up back at Nuada planning on punishing a huge number of people who have nothing to do with the thing he's upset about, and he probably knows it, he just doesn't care.
• If the crown was so easy to destroy, why didn't Liz just melt the piece that the princess had with her so the crown could never be used?
  • Things only got really serious after Nuada obtained the map to the location of the army, and from that point on Abe hid the last part, hoping to exchange it for the princess.
    • The worst thing is that the spearpoint had already been removed from Hellboy by that point, so there was no real reason for Abe to just hand it over with Hellboy back in action.
    • Abe handed it over to get Nuala back, since Nuada was holding her prisoner.
  • Still, Nuala or the King apparently no intention to ever use the Golden Army, so why keep the pieces at all?
    • I assumed it was like keeping the hardcopy of a contract, a binding remembrance of your promise. Or, as a relic of the 'glory days,' what with everything having gone to pot for the magical creatures since.
  • On the subject of Liz destroying the Crown, I assumed that it was only possible for the person who technically owned the thing to destroy it, or authorise its destruction (that being Hellboy at the time).
    • Nuala didn't trust the BPRD enough to hand the crown piece over, so Liz never had the opportunity to destroy it.
    • Heck, maybe Nuala didn't even know that Liz could melt it down. Even Liz herself isn't entirely clear as to what limits her power has, or how hot it can burn.
• In the beginning of the movie, the king ordered Nuada's execution knowing that it would also kill Nuala. Nuada even asks Nuala "You too, sister?", and she nods. So, since Nuala had already accepted that stopping Nuada was worth her own life as far back as the beginning of the movie, why didn't she just cut her own throat before Nuada could finish killing her father? Or his royal guards?
  • Because she's an elf bitch, that's why.
  • Because there is a huge difference between simply letting someone kill you and actually sticking a knife into your own heart.
    • Given that sticking a knife in her own heart is exactly how she chooses to end the movie, its a legitimate question to ask why she didn't do it while it would still have been in time to save Nuada's victims (especially her own father), as opposed to merely avenging them.
  • Especially since she still seems somewhat fond of her brother. She knows that he needs to die but hesitates to kill him herself.
    • Also, killing herself and her brother wouldn't necessarily eliminate the threat of the Golden Army. For all she knew, Nuada might have some fanatical followers who would hand the Crown over to the nearest prince of some other humanity-hating supernatural race if he died before he could exterminate us himself.
  • For that matter, Nuada would have had a much harder time executing his rampage of death all over their father's throne room if she'd simply stabbed herself (and thus him) in the leg. Or the sword hand. Or ran headfirst into a wall and knocked herself out.
    • I'd like to see you go on and do that, then. It's harder, I'd imagine, to actually maul yourself and someone you care about than it is just to talk about it.
    • Since she was entirely willing to kill herself in the last act, asking why she didn't do something less lethal sooner and save her father's life is an entirely legitimate question.
    • Maybe she didn't want to believe Nuada would actually kill their father. Only after he killed Balor did she realize how far off his rocker Nuada was, so she ran for it. If you watch the 'puppet show' carefully, you'll see Nuada himself put the crown on Balor. It's a pretty huge Face–Heel Turn from willingly giving your father the crown to killing him for it.
    • Fair enough. Given that everyone else (besides Nuada) seemed willing enough to fade away/die, and the King himself seemed somewhat surprised (if not exactly shocked) that his son stabbed him, but not particularly upset about dying itself, we can assume that it's what the elves were planning on doing anyway: Dying/fading away. Going a little sooner than the others doesn't change anything; at that point, Nuala's had two thousand years or so to accept the fact that she and all her people are history. But it seems to be a standard trait for them to care about the rest of the world, even when it forgets about them; so Nuala wasn't concerned with her people dying (since they'd all already accepted it) but instead with fulfilling the duty to the humans which her father (and for all we know, the rest of them) had held onto for so long. Note that she doesn't display any concern for her own life either; she just has to get out of there because otherwise the humans (and their assorted non-human friends) are going to be completely blindsided when the Prince lets the shiny killer automatons out of the bag.
  • What I don't get is why the guards didn't just grab her and take a knife to HER throat when he started rampaging. A bond like that shouldn't have gone unexploited long enough for them to reach maturity...
    • I'm not sure that the guards knew that Nuada and Nuala were linked that way. They didn't even seem to know themselves, when in the middle of the fight Nuada looks over at Nuala and sees they both have the same nosebleed, both seem surprised about it.
    • I assumed that the surprise was more due to 'holy fuck, I/he was actually hit.' As to the original question, the obvious answer is: Then we wouldn't have a movie.
  • Because she wasn't in love with Abe Sapien at the beginning of the movie. Meekly accepting death (as she did at the beginning) is not the same as sacrificing yourself to save a loved one (as she did at the end). She wasn't strong enough to take that option before.
  • For all we know, there could be some lengthy elf ritual that could've severed the connection between the twins, allowing Balor to have Nuada executed without killing Nuala as well. In that case, Nuala wouldn't have had to be willing to die to stop her brother until after the events of the film had proved he posed too great a danger to humanity — and, more, to Abe — for her to wait around for the ritual to be carried out.
• Why was the elf prince named Nuada? In Celtic mythology (which the movie is so obviously based on) Nuada was the king of the Tuatha De Danaan (read: elves) who had an artificial hand made of silver, like the ACTUAL king of the elves in this movie?
  • So they could have a sister named Nuala, obviously.
    • Probably because it sounded cool. In the original mythology, Nuala was Nuada's niece, not his twin. Clearly the moviemakers weren't too concerned with sticking to the source materiel.
  • Nuada Jr.?
    • More like Nuada II. The twins were probably named for illustrious ancestors who'd died in the original war with prehistoric humanity, or perhaps with another supernatural race we didn't see in this film.
• How on EARTH does Nuada holding his sister prisoner even WORK? If he kills her, he kills himself. Threatening the heroes with her death if they don't do his bidding is pointless. The worst he can do is hold her captive. And if they go to fight him, they actually ADD to the risk of her death. There's a major Idiot Ball being held by all sides here...
  • Did the heroes even know about their synchronicity at the time?
    • Yes. Abe knew about the bond, and everyone saw him cut her cheek and acquire an identical cut himself, so it would be an assumption that the link goes both ways. Hellboy didn't see this, but he found out when he showed up and Abe told him.
  • I suppose Nuada could threaten to have her tortured, given that his pain threshold is presumably much higher than hers. But yes, that we need to ascend to such heights of Fridge Logic to make threatening Nuala even vaguely plausible only confirms your point that this particular part of the plot was very poorly written.
  • Or maybe Nuada was just bluffing about hurting her, and was counting on the BPRD being unfamiliar with Synchronization and therefore not considering any of the stuff you mentioned. And it worked! None of the big three were thinking straight: Abe was too concerned for Nuala, Liz was too preoccupied with Hellboy dying, and Hellboy was too preoccupied with dying. And I don't recall Nuala getting any chance to tell them her brother was bluffing before Abe hands the crown over.
  • My personal theory was that the elf prince , magical al-quidea he is , would have given his own life if he couldn't get the map. And the BPRD knew it.
  • Hetells the heroes that he demands the crown piece if they "ever want to see her again." Presumably, he could've kept her locked up somewhere for life.
    • I'm fairly sure this is it. Also, Nuada was probably betting on the general chaos preventing Our Heroes from thinking clearly.
• Why didn't Nuala warn Hellboy and co that she is linked with Nuada earlier, rather than just "Oh, Abe. Bytheway Nuada will find this place 'cause of me. Tough luck."? Or Abe could tell the rest when he found out, rather than telling Hellboy right before fighting Nuada.

  • You can't blame her for being cautious, particularly when you've seen that the people who took you in are divided about it; they may decide to just kill you and get it over with. I'm not sure why Abe decided not to tell the others, but presumably he 1) didn't want to get her in trouble and 2) was also busy mooning over her.

• So... Liz is pregnant now. How does that even work?
  • You see, son, when a man and a woman love each other very much...
  • In the comic, Hellboy is the Half-Human Hybrid of the Devil (or something) and a Witch. So I guess it's perfectly workable. Also let's not forget about Incubus...
• Just what the hell was up with the people turning on Hellboy after he dispatched the giant monster? The overacting didn't help, either.
  • It was just the movie making a point, to give Hellboy a reason for potentially jumping ship and joining the Prince's anti-human crusade.
    • Well, yeah, it was forced, but it's not like there wasn't some justification. Hellboy has a habit of being... well, somewhat callous when it comes to danger. He spent about a minute NOT shooting the thing while Nuala was cooing into his ear, and spent the fight juggling a baby. To a crowd, he obviously doesn't care about their safety, only about killing as many big monsters as possible.
    • Yet in the first movie, he was seen shooting up a savage monster all while having a box of kittens in his arms. Did anyone turn on him? No. Hell, the owner of said box of kittens smiled at him when he returned them.
    • Humans Are Bastards well, most of them, anyway.
    • In the first movie, we didn't need the Humans Are Bastards theme to make the basic premise work, while in the second movie, we did.
    • One could argue that the civilian interactions in the first movie were still isolated enough people were excited to meet Hellboy in person as if it were a UFO sighting or a Close Encounter, whereas the fight with the Elemental and all the cameras pointed at Hellboy's posse proved without a shadow of a doubt that supernatural monsters exist, and people's fear of the unknown in light of this revelation that opens all sorts of Fridge Horrors was kicked to the max. Who knows how the third movie would've followed this up.
• What happened to Myers, apparently the only decent human that was still alive by the end of the first movie? He was actually a pretty cool character for a non-canon one and was at least a good person at heart if normal.
  • In the brief, brief, scene preceding the Tooth Fairy fight, Selma Blair remarks that Hellboy had him transferred to Antarctica, to which Hellboy answers with "He said he liked the cold". No, I am not making this up.
    • I'd posit that the studio was apprehensive about a film featuring a big, red, weird non-human as the primary sympathetic character (hey, it's Hollywood - they're still wrapping their heads around the fact that legions of people really like comic books and movies based on comic books), so they stuck Meyers in there to make sure the franchise would work before making Hellboy the focal point in the second film.
    • No, it's just because Myer's was the standard-issue audience surrogate who was there so that important concepts in the meta-plot could be explained to him, and therefore also to us. Once the first movie was over there was no structural need for him, so he was dropped. As it should be.
  • Reportedly, Del Toro wanted to bring Agent Myers back, but the actor had other commitments.
  • It worked out for his own good anyway. You have noticed what tends to happen to normal agents when they stick with Hellboy in these movies, right?
    • One might even think that Hellboy intended exactly that.
• Wasn't the crown supposed to be indestructible? How the hell did Liz melt it?
  • Only the army was said to be indestructible, not the crown.
  • It's also possible that the crown only becomes vulnerable when it's rightful owner agrees to destroy it. By the time Liz burns it, it belongs to Hellboy and he doesn't protest too much when she melts it.
  • This. Also, Liz can burn anything. ANYTHING. Her fire was (in the comics) almost enough to free the Ogdru Jahad. She's not just Pyrokinetic, she has god-level destructive power.
• "Oh well, maybe we should fade away." Why? I can understand not taking the guy up on his anti-human crusade to kill everything, but resigning yourself to extinction is just stupid. Why are they keeping the Masquerade in the first place anyway?
  • I think the point is that all beings are created with strengths and weaknesses; the humans have that whole never-gonna-be-satisfied thing, the elves are destined to fade away The Lord of the Rings-style. The whole reason Nuada could actually try to change things is that he was obviously off his rocker.
  • Thinking of the troll market, it seemed they still had a vibrant community, so at least some fae didn't seem destined to just fade away. What this debate needed was someone to Take a Third Option and remind humanity about the ancient treaty and push back a little. Drop the masquerade even. It would at least insure they are remembered even if they're destined to disappear.
    • As seen further up the page, it's unsure how effective that would be, given that anywhere from 'most humans' to 'all humans' would probably argue that an ancient treaty none of them agreed to shouldn't apply to them, especially if they're not descended from the group of humans that actually made the treaty.
• Is Mr. Wink a Jack-In-Irons? An ogre with a magic-cyborg hand? Is the forest god an elemental or something weirder?
  • I actually thought that was a strength of the movie. One of the great things about film and other visual media is how the artist can convey the sense of a complete world, one that goes on ticking even when the protagonists aren't there, by portraying it in the background. Not everything gets explained, just like how in a more realistic movie, we wouldn't stop to find out the occupation of every single person on the street.
  • Yeah, do you really want the whole thing to be bogged down in exposition about each faerie you see? Does it really hurt the movie if you don't know which specific type of troll or troll-like creature Mr. Wink is?
• As soon as Hellboy falls out of the building with the Tooth Fairies, one of the little buggers flies at a passerby and Hellboy shoots it. First off, that was probably the least safe thing he could have done; one inch off and you kill an innocent bystander. Secondly, how did he hit the thing? He admitted in the first movie that he's not a very good shot, yet he shoots a tiny creature flying in a pretty erratic pattern in a dark setting, not to mention how he would probably be dazed from flying out of a building and falling several stories. Third, even if he did hit it dead-center, the bullet just disappears after it dies. Wouldn't such a high-caliber round pass through such a little target, again endangering the very people he's trying to protect?
  • Rule of Cool prevails again!
    • Maybe Hellboy's been to the range a few times since the last movie and improved his aim, or his line about not being a very good shot was Blatant Lies (He seems to hit Sammael, a fast, agile, moving target very easily). Also the Samaritan uses "Really big bullets" but they seem to be completely hollow (and made out of some oddly transparent material that doesn't vaporize in the barrel) in order to deliver a special payload designed to kill monsters ("Garlic, holy water, white oak, the works."), so the ammo isn't designed to go through anything, but explode on impact which is why it doesn't keep going into the crowd.
    • Heck, he's not the only one. Abe and Liz had no problem picking off those little buggers one by one as they flew around in a veritable cloud around them (thank goodness that Plot Armor prevented them from completely swarming Abe like they did to the Muggles), and Liz at least once shot one as it was flying directly into Abe's face from point blank range while standing directly in front of him. The Red Shirt was doing pretty well too.
    • For what it's worth, if your choice is between shooting a little moving target that is flying right towards me, or withholding fire and just standing there and watching as it streaks up and eats me alive, teeth-first, I for one would say "Take the shot, already!"
• Liz choosing Hellboy over 'the world' kinda makes sense because Hellboy has a proven record of avoiding his destiny. But then a few moments later Abe gives Nuada the means to commit genocide against the entire human race so he can get back the princess (not so he can save her life, mind, so he personally can have her back, given that the Prince obviously can't harm the Princess without hurting himself.) Always Save the Girl usually results in a little questionable morality; in this case it's taken to an extreme and Abe comes across as a full-blown selfish moron ready to sacrifice everyone and everything for the sake of getting his potential girlfriend back. Seriously, Abe, screw you.
  • In all fairness, the Golden Army was kinda underwhelming. They're much stronger than a human and can self-repair to some degree, but they didn't seem too fast or agile and one wonders how their ability to pull themselves back together would hold up to being melted into seventy times seventy golden puddles from a hail of ICBMs from across an Ocean, or what would happen to them if the very arrogant prince who was controlling them was sniped from a rooftop a quarter mile away. And that's not even counting nukes. And that's not even counting the ridiculous tactical advantages modern society holds in terms of communications and spy satellites, especially if BPRD figures out how to implement the glamour-breaking technology into them...
    • That would be another issue; I'm guessing that Golden Army was pretty impressive when the opposition was using spears and shields. In a modern context? Not so much. The Prince's plan was pretty hopeless. But that's beside the point; in story, it's treated like a terrible threat to human survival, and yet Abe Sapien potentially screws everybody over for the sake of getting back a woman he barely knows. That's less romantic and more sociopathic.
    • Neither; it's desperate, pure and simple. Love makes you stupid, after all, or at least prone to incredibly bad decisions.
    • This. Especially first love. Especially after a reasonably long life of loneliness and isolation.
    • Also, the Golden Army is indestructible. Literally, not just "somewhat". You can blow them up as many times as you like, they always regenerate. Sure it would take them time to exterminate humanity, but they can't be stopped without the crown, only slowed down. And presumably other elfkind would have joined in after the initial victories, as well.
    • It's explicitly stated in the novelisation that the Golden Army was intended to be backed up by fairy support troops, acting as the spearhead of an army rather than on its own. How well that would have worked when the fairies are all but extinct is another matter.
    • Even if they'd regenerate, how hard can it be to put them all inside a giant cage? Or for that matter, blowing them into a giant puddle of golden metal, then putting all of than into a cage without enough space to reassemble. Or launching them all into the sun while they're regenerating. Or, as a troper previously mentioned, just killing Nuada. In premedieval times, sure, the golden army would have been unstoppable, and Nuada could just have stayed with them at all times, no-one could have reached him. But against a modern-day military, they're just not unstoppable at all.
    • Rule of Cool. Also, bullets and bombs run out, soldiers die and tanks can get scrapped. The Golden Army regenerates rather rapidly onscreen, meaning it would be just as unfeasible to scrap all 4,900 of them, gather all the broken bits, and shoot them off into space.
    • Its very easy to suggest putting them in a cage or melting them down. It's another thing to make it happen. Kind of like 'We Escape' is a solid plan if you're trapped somewhere.
• In the final panoramic, there are way more than 70 x 70 Golden Soldiers. Even counting only the ones we could see, there were more than 4900.
  • Do you honestly claim counting them all? Human brains generally aren't very good at accurately estimating numbers like that intuitively, especially when the subjects are placed in such an uneven manner. With pausing the Blu-Ray a few times, this troper can't honestly say for sure if we ever saw more than a few hundred soldiers, in fact.
  • Bible scholars are pretty sure now that its frequent mention of "forty days and forty nights" isn't a literal measure, but an old poetic way of saying "quite a while." So maybe "seventy times seventy" is just fancy faerie-talk for "a veritable shitload."
• Did the movie ever explain that destroying the crown would disable the Golden Army, because if not there should have been a little thought put into what would happen if the Nigh-Invulnerable Mecha-Mooks were left leaderless and became Omnicidal Maniacs.
  • The Golden Army only even move if someone is actively commanding them to. They're not just "leaderless," they're totally inert unless they're being given direct commands.
  • Does your car drive away when you destroy the keys?
• When Nuada is fighting his father's guards and one of them manages to pop him in the face, making he and Nuala bleed from the nose, the blood is red. Any time Nuada and/or Nuala get cut for the rest of the movie their blood is golden, like tree sap. Do they just bleed two different colors?
  • Maybe their snot is red.
• Krauss releases his ectoplasmic form to fight Golden Army, and is very effective. So why does he suddenly decide that it's not worth continuing after he learns that the robots can rebuild themselves? He could still cause a lot of useful damage and slow the robots down.
  • He might be able to slow, what, a dozen or so down, for what, 30 seconds? Fighting the Golden Army is only useful if they stay down. There's no point to keeping fighting when, at best, you're going to tie up 6 or 7 out of several hundred.
    • All several hundred can't be actively attacking the heroes at once, there simply isn't the space for them to operate. Krauss only needs to tie up the very front line of robots to buy the others time.
    • Buy them time to do what, exactly?
    • Tossing the pieces to Liz to vaporize them? Liz incinerating the general area where Nuada or Nuala was standing? The corporal teammates retreating and calling in an airstrike? Trying to grab Nuada and remove his crown?
    • Easier said than done, specially when the one holding the pieces is Prince Nuada Silverlance and there are 4900 huge, explosion-blocking soldiers ready to butcher the shit out of you.
  • Maybe it was more tiring than expected, and he realized it would be impossible to keep doing it against a regenerating army.
• How effective would the army truly have been in the modern world? From what little we see of it the soldiers are slow, clunky, close range and easily broken apart for modern weapons. I've sure they were more than enough to fight humans armed with at best iron spears or swords, but I don't see them being that effective against modern humans. Sure, release them in a crowded civilian area and they could so a lot of damage. Yet sooner or later they would have to face human military forces and would at best constantly blown apart by modern missiles if not damaged and destroyed. At worse sooner or later you could nuke them. Did anything else clarify how Nuada planned to use the Golden Army? On its own I don't see it being that effective against the sheer number of modern humans and technology.
  • Bullets and missiles run out. Humans get tired, even if they're only firing a rifle. Nuking them means nuking your own territory. It might not be an instant, crushing defeat, but if the Golden Army is truly unstoppable and tireless, then yes, they're plenty of threat.
  • Strictly speaking, the humans would just have to kill Nuada to disable the Army. A straight-up fight would be impossible, but the armed forces of the world have plenty of incisive weapons. Of course, they'd have to first find out that Nuada is the key.
    • Nuada's entire race managed to hide from humanity for several hundred years before the movie's events. Even if humanity somehow figured out he was the key - which would be unlikely since the only people at the BPRD who knew were all on the mission and potentially about to die - they'd have to find him while trying to fight off an infinitely-respawning army. My money would've been on the Golden Army.
• How exactly does the whole "twin bond" thing Nuala and Nuada have work? If Nuada could somehow determine the BPRD's location based on where Nuala was, how did he not know that she was in the troll market with him? If you were to propose that one can know the other's location at will, his not knowing that she (and "the crown piece") were literally within walking distance of him doesn't make sense in the slightest. And, if he could somehow gain knowledge of where she'd hidden the piece (ie the wonderful "blue book, poetry of love lost" scene) how did "she" not know that the actual map could only be gained by rolling the heated casing of the map on another surface? If Nuada found that secret out awhile back, surely she would have gained an idea (well, a vague idea, but still an idea) of the case's importance too? Since she hid the piece in the book her sort-of-crush found her reading, a book "the same color as his skin" - she was definitely feeling a lot towards it. If Nuada gained the knowledge of the book from her due to those strong emotions forming an idea of that book in his mind, wouldn't she have gained knowledge of the map case's importance when he discovered its secret? (Assuming he felt emotions of the same magnitude at that point in time - he probably did, seeing as how he begged his father to make the army and was nuts enough to kill his dad for the crown piece.)
• Why didn't Nuala just grab the jumping elemental bean herself instead of staring at it and then suddenly demanding Abe get it which led to it growing into a giant monster?
  • She's just not physically adept. Abe is much quicker and more agile, and thus better able to grab it.
• Why didn't Nuala challenge her brother for the right to command the Golden Army? She's royalty too so she should have the right, and he'd be pretty much stuck. He could try torturing her without killing her etc but he's also got a very angry Hellboy nearby who probably doesn't give a care for ancient codes of dueling. Is it just because she's a woman?
  • Because she's not a fighter. Nuada doesn't have to kill her to win the challenge — he's probably got a higher tolerance for pain, or he could simply immobilize her and force her to yield that way.
  • For all we know, she would have challenged him if there was no other way. But Hellboy was there, he was qualified and willing to cut loose in a duel with her brother, and there was at least a chance (albeit remote) that he could subdue Nuada without killing him. And if Hellboy did kill Nuada, at least her twin would get to die honorably, battling a worthy opponent: something she'd prefer for the brother she still cares for, however far off the deep end he's gone.