Ron Perlman’s heartfelt performance as Hellboy (right) elevated this comic book-to-screen transition. © The Orphanage/Sony Pictures 2004.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was great on vfx, but came up short on plot. ™ & © 2004 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

No costume or masks for this superhero, who rids the world of monsters.

While Spider-Man 2 isn’t overtly about terrorism, there is something about Dr. Octopus’s approach to life — his willingness to destroy the entire city of New York with his experiments and in his quest for revenge — that, intentionally or not, chillingly echoes the fear of the city’s destruction, whatever the motives of the would-be destroyer.

Hellboy
The comic-to-screen translation of Mike Mignola’s masterwork was a pretty seamless translation. From the WWII opening — tying the movie into the era of the “greatest generation” — to the present day adventures, the key, as with Spider-Man, is the characters. Both Mignola and director Guillermo del Toro knew they wouldn’t be happy until they got Ron Perlman to play the role of Hellboy and the resultant movie shows why. While the CG effects were occasionally detectable, the heart the actor brought to the key role made the world all the more convincing and believable. While Hellboy brings us up close and personal with a world of demons and monsters, it certainly steers clear of any hint of the menaces of terrorism. (But it does leave us with the comforting thought that Hellboy is out there somewhere, literally fighting our monsters for us.)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Not specifically a superhero movie, Sky Captain is influenced by vintage comics, cartoons, serials and other noir and fantasy films. If Sky Captain confidently flying his plane, waving to the public, his square jaw neatly coming to a point, isn’t cut from the superhero mold, then nothing is.

As spectacular as Sky Captain’s effects are, that’s how wafer thin the plot and the performances in this eye-filling extravaganza were. Still, the various locales and creatures in the movie, as well as the muted retro look were all pulled off with extreme skill and a great sense of fun.

Here, the menace to New York of an army of giant robots is scary but in a fun, entertaining way. Pure escapist fantasy is what this movie is after and what it delivers. If it evokes terror of any kind, it’s the terror of WWII London, where nightly air raids were the norm, and the echoes of that terror felt in the U.S., where regular air raid preparedness was practiced.

Van Helsing
After a slow beginning, and a display of some of the worst fake Transylvanian accents on record, Van Helsing turned out to be a fairly impressive genre piece. While Van Helsing may not wear tights and a mask, he’s as much a superhero as anybody. This vampire hunter treks the earth in search of monsters to destroy and encounters the granddaddies of them all — Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. The plot gets them all together efficiently and puts Van Helsing in the middle of the situation in a way that is dramatically satisfying.