Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a 2008 film directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film is a sequel to 2004's Hellboy, also directed by del Toro.


PLOT:

A young Hellboy is told a bedtime story by his adoptive father (John Hurt), involving an ancient war between humans and the mythical creatures. The tale culminates with the creation of a crown that would give its wearer control over an unstoppable clockwork army. The 4900 soldiers, called The Golden Army, decimated the humans so completely that a truce was made. Humans would have the cities, while the mythical creatures would have the forests. The crown was broken, with two parts going to the elves and one to the humans. The Golden Army was buried and quickly became legend.

In the present, the now-adult Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is having relationship issues with his girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair). The duo, along with their partner Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), are sent to an auction house where violence has erupted. Unbeknownst to them, The King of the Elves has been murdered by his son Nuada (Luke Goss), who has taken it upon himself to destroy mankind. After taking his father's piece of the crown, he unleashed thousands of tooth fairies in the auction house, which devoured everyone and allowed him access to the second piece of the crown.

Abe scans the auction house, but accidentally scans Liz and discovers she's pregnant. She denies it, but Abe assures her he is never incorrect. After a fierce, fiery battle with the fairies, Hellboy is blown out a window and exposed to the media, thus destroying the secrecy of the BPRD. Furious at his actions, the Washington branch sends down a new agent, Johann Krauss (Seth MacFarlane), who works completely by the book.

The group then travels to The Troll Market, an enormous city hidden under The Brooklyn Bridge, for clues. They eventually discover Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), who holds the last piece of the crown needed to control The Golden Army. They take her into captivity at BPRD headquarters, where Abe quickly falls in love with her.

When Prince Nuada discovers his sister's location, he attacks BPRD headquarters. She hides the final piece of the crown, but her brother still kidnaps her, forcing the agents to bring the final piece to him. Unable to find the last piece of the crown, they travel to Northern Ireland, where the Golden Army was buried millenia ago, to confront their foe.

Little do the other agents know, Abe has found the last piece of the crown that Nuala hid and gives it up to Prince Nuada in exchange for her life. He forms the crown and awakens the golden army, which immediately attacks the agents. After a fierce battle, they realize that the army cannot be destroyed, as all of their damage regenerates.

Hellboy challenges Nuada for the right to the crown, which the Prince is forced to accept, given that Hellboy is royalty in Hell. They duel, but Abe informs Hellboy that he cannot kill Nuada, for the Prince and Princess are shared-soul twins - and when one is injured, they both share the wounds. Hellboy defeats Nuada, but the latter tells him he must be killed, as he will never stop fighting. Hellboy refuses and the Prince tries to attack once more, when suddenly, blood pours from his chest. His sister has stabbed herself through the heart, killing them both.

Abe rushes to Nuala's body and tells her he loves her before she dies. As she does, he cries for the first time in his life. Liz incincerates the crown, shutting down The Golden Army forever.

As the BPRD agents leave the underground compound, Agent Manning reprimands them for their actions. To his surprise, Hellboy, Liz, and Abe all hand over their belts and announce their resignation from the bureau. He complains to Johann, who then insults Manning and walks off defiantly with his newfound friends.

Wanted

Wanted is a 2008 action film loosely based on the comic book miniseries Wanted by Mark Millar. The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov and stars James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Thomas Kretschmann, Konstantin Khabensky and Angelina Jolie. Production began in April 2007.

PLOT:

The film opens with a man known as Mr. X (David O'Hara) walking into a building in Chicago. He goes into a room and speaks with an Indian woman to find out who made a particular bullet for a "competitor". The conversation is interrupted by a sniper shooting the woman from a nearby building. This prompts Mr. X to run back into the elevator, where he performs a breathing exercise which causes his perception of time to slow. He then dashes down the corridor at amazing speed and makes a spectacular leap through the window, across the gap between buildings, eliminating all his opponents in mid-flight. As he assesses his fallen enemies, a dead sniper's phone begins to ring - a call from a man he calls Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Cross tells Mr. X the snipers are decoys, who looks down and realizes that he is standing on top of an X mark on the ground. Cross then says goodbye as he fires a multi-stage bullet through Mr. X's head from miles away.

The scene then turns to Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a seemingly insignificant accounts manager in an unnamed firm. He lives a monotonous and unrewarding life, subject to frequent abuse from his boss, and suspects(accurately) that his friend and coworker is having sex with his shrewish girlfriend. He feels his life is summed up by an attempt at self-Googling; which produces no results. In addition, he is a hypochondriac, prone to panic attacks, which he takes Ativan to control. However, his perception of time seems to slow during these attacks - just like Mr. X.

One night, at a grocery store, Wesley notices he is being stalked by Cross, but doesn't pay any mind until a mysterious woman (Angelina Jolie) suddenly appears next to him, telling him that his father, Mr. X, was an elite assassin who had been killed on top of a building the day before - by Cross. The woman opens fire, and a shoot-out in the grocery store leads to a car pursuit in the streets, with the woman and Wesley making a narrow escape.

He wakes up the next morning at the base of The Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins who kill those who threaten to bring the world to chaos. The group's leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), introduces Gibson to Fox, the woman from the night before, and invites him to follow in his father's footsteps as an assassin. Sloan first decides to test Wesley by making him shoot the wings off a fly. When Wesley refuses, a gun is put to his head, triggering a panic attack - during which he manages to shoot the wings off several flies.

Sloan explains that Wesley's "panic attacks" are actually an untrained manifestation of a rare superhuman ability which allows his heart to beat at an abnormally high speed, flooding his bloodstream with equally abnormal high levels of adrenaline. This causes his perspective of time to slow dramatically, granting him superhuman reflexes and strength. This trait is genetic, inherited from his father - and with his father's death, he also inherits his father's fortune to do with as he wishes. But Sloan is offering more than that - he is offering Wesley his father's position within The Fraternity, signified by his father's gun. Wesley, already overwhelmed by the day's events, refuses and leaves.

Wesley wakes up the the next day thinking that everything was a dream, but discovers his father's gun and finds over $3.6 million in his bank account. Confirming the claims made by Sloan causes him to have an epiphany - he can be more than what he is. He tells off his boss and quits his job, knocking out his philandering friend's teeth with his keyboard (the shattered keys and teeth spelling out "fuck you") as he leaves. Fox is waiting for him outside to give him a ride back to the Fraternity headquarters - an unassuming textile mill.

Wesley immediately begins training to make full use of his abnormal adrenaline surges and join the Fraternity. The Repairman desensitizes him to pain through daily bludgeoning. The Butcher teaches him various forms of close combat; hand-to-hand and knife fighting. Fox teaches him parkour. The Gunsmith teaches him marksmanship, not only with normal firearms but also the Fraternity's smoothbore weapons which are able to "curve" specially etched bullets in a manner similar to expertly pitched baseballs.

The training is brutal, and is only endurable with the assistance of periodic medicinal baths that accelerate healing. While recovering in one of these baths, Wesley meets the Exterminator (Konstantin Khabensky), a fellow Fraternity member named for his use of mini-bomb-bearing rats. He muses to Wesley of thousands of mini-bombs set upon a target.

Wesley makes amazing progress over due time but seems unable to master curving a bullet around a piece of hanging meat. Eventually Fox stands in front of the meat and Wes is told to shoot around her at the target. Once he finally succeeds, his training complete, and Wesley is given orders to kill people from The Loom of Fate, a cloth spinning machine that gives the names of the targets through a binary code hidden in the weaving of the threads, a process which Wesley initially finds suspicious.

While on his first assignment, Wesley hesitates in killing his target while riding by on the top of a train. In the next scene, he questions Fox, "How do we know who is bad or good?" She responds by telling him a story of a young girl. The girl's father was a prestigious judge who was handling a sensitive case, and the case's defendant had put a hit on him in order to get a judge who could be bought off. One day a hired killer held the young girl at knife point as they waited for her father to return home. The killer lit the father on fire as the young girl watched, then he branded his initials into her neck, which was the signature of his work. Fox explains that the killer had been targeted by the Fraternity several weeks prior to the events of the story, but their assassin had failed to carry out his duty. Fox then explains that is what the Fraternity does: kill one, and save a thousand. Wesley notices that initials are scarred onto her neck, indicating that the young girl in the story was her. The scene switches back to Wesley firing and curving the bullet to take out the target, revealing that Fox's story was told in a flashback prior to the assignment taking place.

Wesley is then given a second assignment - which he accomplishes easily with limited assistance from Fox. He then returns to his apartment to retrieve his father's gun - and encounters Cross upon leaving the building. Gunfire is exchanged and Wesley pursues Cross, but accidentally kills The Exterminator in the process. Cross takes this opportunity to "curve" a bullet into Wesley's arm. With his dying breath the Exterminator tells Wesley, "thousands."

Wesley analyzes the bullet from his arm and traces its origins - it is an expertly engraved bullet that might as well be autographed, the work of a renegade Fraternity member named Pekwarsky (Terrence Stamp). Sloan grants Wesley permission to personally investigate Pekwarsky despite Fox's protest that it could be a trap. After Wesley leaves, Sloan hands Fox a new kill order from the Loom - Wesley.

Wesley and Fox travel to the Fraternity's original base of operations in Europe, an abbey all but identical to the textile mill. The two easily capture Pekwarsky and force him to take them to Cross. The meeting leads to a confrontation between Wesley and Cross on a moving train. Fox steals a car and crashes it into the train, eventually causing the train to derail when it reaches a bridge over a deep ravine. Wesley, Fox, and Cross hang on for their lives as their cabin dangles from the bridge. Wesley is about to fall, but Cross catches his hand to save him. Wesley unhesitatingly shoots him. Before Cross dies, he tells Wesley that everything the Fraternity told him was a lie, and that he is his real father. Fox confirms the truth and explains that Wesley was the only one who could kill Cross not because of his superhuman talent, but because the only person Cross wouldn't kill was his son. Fox raises her weapon to shoot Wesley, but Wesley shoots the glass underneath him, plunging into the river far below.

Wesley awakes in a medicinal bath in an apartment across the street from his former apartment, courtesy of Pekwarsky. Upon inspecting the apartment he discovers it belonged to his father, who had been monitoring him his whole life. Pekwarsky hands Wesley a loom weaving and tells him to decode it. Wesley is shocked to discover Sloan's name in the weaving. Pekwarsky explains that Cross went rogue due to this discovery. Since then Sloan has used false weavings to direct the Fraternity as mere contract killers. Wesley realizes that Cross had never actually tried to kill him in their previous confrontations - he had been assassinating Fraternity members to keep them away from Wesley. Pekwarsky departs after giving Wesley plane tickets, stating that his father wished him a life free of violence and chaos.

While investigating the apartment further, Wesley discovers a secret room containing all of his father's weapons, maps, notes, and battle plans. He even finds a supply of The Exterminator's mini-bombs, realizing that The Exterminator had been working with his father. Consumed by rage and seeing his opportunity, Wesley devises a plan to take out Sloan and the Fraternity.

Wesley begins the first phase of his plan by filling a garbage truck with rats gorged on explosives-laced peanut butter, "arming" a number of the rats with the Exterminator's mini-bombs. He then crashes the truck into the Fraternity compound, thus flooding it with pseudo-smart bombs. After all the rats explode, he charges in, killing all the Fraternity members he encounters, including the Repairman and the Butcher. Upon Sloan's office, he finds himself surrounded by Fox and her fellow master assassins. Wesley tells them that Sloan is killing for profit by providing his killers with fake instructions from the Loom. He then attempts to kill Sloan, but is disarmed by Fox.

Fox then asks Sloan if this is true. Sloan then reveals that all of their names had come up in the weaving, and that he had merely acted to protect them. He then goes on to explain that if they truly believe in the code then they should all commit suicide right where they stand. Otherwise, they should kill Wesley and live a life of freedom - or more appropriately, world domination. The other assassins seem to agree with Sloan, but Fox, for whom the code is her reason for existence, turns on her fellow assassins. She curves a bullet to kill the entire circle of assassins, including herself. However, Sloan has already escaped.

WALL-E

WALL-E (promoted with an interpunct as WALL•E) is a 2008 computer animated adventure comedy science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures on June 27, 2008.

PLOT


In the 2100s, the company Buy 'n Large supplies almost every service on Earth and eventually becomes the world government. Overrun by consumerism, the planet eventually becomes so heavily polluted that it can no longer support life. In an attempt to keep humanity alive, Buy 'n Large sponsors an exodus to space aboard several Executive Starliners, one of which is the Axiom. In the meantime, millions of WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) units are left behind to clean up the planet by gathering up garbage and compacting it into cubes for easy disposal. The recovery plan fails, and by 2805, only one WALL-E (the protagonist, voiced by Ben Burtt) remains operational. He is curious, awkward and just a little lonely. WALL-E has developed a personality and collects various items that he finds among the refuse, including a Rubik's Cube, plastic utensils, a lighter, an iPod, and a treasured videotape of the film Hello, Dolly! that teaches him emotion, particularly holding hands. He also finds and saves a seedling plant, repotting it in an old boot.

EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) (Elissa Knight), a robot from the Axiom sent to find plant life, lands on Earth. After observing her from afar, the two robots finally make contact and WALL-E's curiosity grows quickly into love. After multiple misunderstandings, WALL-E shows her the plant he found. Following her directive, EVE stores the plant inside herself and deactivates herself. WALL-E goes to great lengths to protect her body including harming himself. EVE is eventually recovered by the ship that took her to Earth and where other EVEs are stored and flys back to the Axiom. Chasing EVE, WALL-E latches on to the outside of the ship and rides it back to its destination. Aboard the Axiom, WALL-E escapes notice by other robots and explores the ship. After 700 years of liquid food and leaving all the work to robots, humanity have become lazy and morbidly obese, unable to stand or move without robotic help, and have no awareness of Earth. Every task is now automated, including the captain's duties, which are handled by the autopilot AUTO (MacInTalk).

WALL-E follows EVE to the captain's room, where the captain (Jeff Garlin) is to be shown the plant. However, EVE no longer contains the plant. AUTO informs the captain that EVE has apparently malfunctioned, and she is sent to the robot repair room. WALL-E is spotted and also sent to the repair room, where he, in a misunderstanding about the diagnostic machine, takes EVE's gun arm and accidentally liberates all the malfunctioning robots from their prison-like confines. WALL-E is carried away by the celebrating, newly-freed malfunctioning units. EVE chases the other robots and WALL-E to recover her arm; in the process, she is accidentally labeled as a rogue robot, mistaken for helping lead the other crazed robots. Seeing the chaos WALL-E has caused, EVE tries to send him back to Earth in an escape pod, but he refuses to go. While she tries to put WALL-E into the pod, AUTO's assistant, GO-4, arrives and reveals that he had the plant the whole time. He then tries to dispose of it in the escape pod, and when WALL-E tries to retrieve it, he is launched into space and the pod's self-destruct sequence is activated. By using a fire extinguisher to propel himself, he escapes with the plant at the last second. Realizing that the plant has been recovered, AUTO again triggers the alert against WALL-E and EVE. EVE brings the plant to the captain; curious to see images of Earth, he projects EVE's memories and security camera footage from when she shut down, where she sees the lengths that WALL-E went to protect her. The captain is shocked by the environmental devastation on Earth depicted in the recordings and decides they must return to make amends.

AUTO mutinies and tries to dispose of the plant, and is forced to reveal the truth of the situation to the captain. After leaving the Earth, Buy 'n Large quickly concluded that the planet was too toxic to ever support life again and abandoned recolonization plans; as a result, AUTO is secretly programmed to never return to Earth. AUTO locks the captain in his bedroom, electrically shocks WALL-E, throws him and the plant into a garbage chute, and deactivates EVE. EVE awakens in the Axiom's disposal facility where gigantic WALL-A (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Axiom-Class) units are compacting garbage and launching it into space. EVE saves WALL-E, whose hardware is heavily damaged and rapidly losing battery power, and realizes that they must return to Earth in order to fix him. They recruit the malfunctioning robots and fight their way back to the main part of the ship. Meanwhile, the captain tricks AUTO into bringing him back onto the bridge. He tells WALL-E and EVE to put the plant on the holo-detector, a pedestal that rises from the floor on one of the passenger decks. AUTO forces the holo-detector back into the floor and turns the ship on its side, and EVE is forced to save several humans as they slide into a wall. WALL-E uses his body to jam the holo-detector open so EVE can put the plant inside. The captain shuts down AUTO, takes manual control, once the plant is in the holo-detector the ship's hyperjump back to Earth is initiated. WALL-E's crushed body runs out of charge and shuts down.

Once they arrive on Earth, EVE frantically replaces WALL-E's damaged components using spare parts in his home. As he recharges, he appears to lose the personality he has developed and begins to perform his programmed task, crushing his knick-knacks into cubes. EVE, despondent over the loss of WALL-E, holds his hand and leans forward to "kiss" him, causing a spark to jump between the two. The spark reboots WALL-E's memory and he suddenly recognizes her. With a renewed sense of purpose, humanity and robots begin working together to restore Earth's biosphere.

As the credits begin, the redevelopment of Earth is depicted through a series of drawings, starting with primitive cave paintings and moving through more sophisticated techniques. The progression ends with a picture of WALL-E and EVE gazing at a giant tree, which is revealed to be the plant rescued from the Axiom. During the credit roll, pixel art images of the characters appear and interact in various ways.