Sci-fi is famous for putting romance en the back burner, for consigning it to sub-plots and contrived afterthoughts, and for allowing animatronics and matte paintings to trump matters of the heart. But for my money, Hellboy gets it right.

There’ve been many incarnations, of course, from comic book to movie to sequel. But for our purposes, let’s stick to the 2004 movie as realized by Guillermo del Toro, the brilliant, symbol-loving director of Cronos, Blade II, and The Devil’s Backbone.

Yes, in typical sci-fi fashion, Hellboy boasts special effects and epic battles against alien critters. And there’s over-the-top action, hilarious one-liners, and an all-in charismatic performance by Ron Perlman in the Hellboy getup. But the point of Hellboy isn’t about galactic combatants or the thrill of the hero versus the apocalypse. It’s ultimately about the practice of using genre storytelling as a fantasy gateway to the reality of love. It’s the personification of love’s slow burn, the Beauty and the Beast motif ridden straight to the soul. It’s a theme made all the more interesting in this case since the Beauty is quite a bit of a Beast herself. Forget the old chestnut of fire and ice. This is man of heat, woman of flame. They build each other up instead of cancelling each other out. In Helboys’s arms, Liz (Selma Blair) bursts into her signature plume of a simmering blue blaze, but he hangs on because he’s the only one who can. Theirs is a fire that creates instead of destroys, that engulfs but doesn’t burn.

On one level, Liz is a typical trapped-in-a-tower princess. But she’s more along the lines of Fiona from Shrek, a kickin’ ass and takin’ names princess. She’s a complex woman, apprehensive yet powerful. Warm but distant. There’s an inner smolder to her, as if she’s a tinderbox waiting -- eager yet terrified -- for the right spark to set her off. Although she doesn’t chant her comic book mantra in the movie (“The fire is not my enemy. It is part of me. It is mine”), the idea remains. An iconic every-woman, Liz suffers, rebels, doesn’t know her own strength, and in the end, if she doesn’t save the day, at least we know that the day wouldn’t have survived without her.

Like Liz, Hellboy is complexity personified, the ultimate man, not just in the Arnold Schwarzenegger “my gun is bigger than yours” kind of way, although he does boast some serious pecs and the phallic appendages of a long prehensile tail and a rock-hard right arm. But Hellboy isn’t the simplified hero on a white horse. He’s a prince of a different color. Born in some distant dimensional hell, raised by Nazis, and adopted by secret scientists and a bureaucratic government agency of questionable moral motivations, he grows, develops, and changes over time. He possess both the benefit of age and the absurd courage of youth. Some heroes are billed as an “every man,” the ordinary All-of-Us with extraordinary abilities. These are the men whom men wish to be. Hellboy, unlike these other heroes, is plagued by insecurity about his looks (he files down his massive horns in a pointless effort to “look more normal”) and about his place in the world. Hellboy is every boy -- well-intentioned, troubled, heroic beyond his own capacity for understanding heroism, and madly and inexplicably in love. He’s a cigar-chewing, cat lovin’, soft-hearted hard ass and a brilliantly complete comic book metaphor for what young men truly are. Often we think of the middle ground between black and white as being some shade of gray. In this case, though, it’s crimson red.

Hellboy and Liz are imperfect beings who are perfect for each other. Both outcasts. Both surrounded by people yet isolated and alone. And what true romance would be complete without the requisite doses of jealousy, confusion, complications, and the innocent advances of a rival suitor? In any world but the fantasy world, Liz should and would be with John Myers (Rupert Evans). After all, he’s the right age, the right looks, the right personality, and the right species. But there’s no flame. He can give her a relationship of lukewarm stability. Hellboy, on the other hand, promises her the only two things he can offer: “I’ll always look this good” and “I’ll never give up on you… ever.” This is fire of a different kind, one that neither Liz nor Hellboy can handle alone. Get them together, though, and watch the sparks fly!

Liz and Hellboy don’t have a romantic relationship in the comic books. But in the movie, the writing team of del Toro, Peter Briggs, and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola wisely allow the two outcasts to live paranomally ever after.

In the end

Liz, dying in Hellboy’s arms, returns miraculously from the brink and asks him in a whisper, “In the dark I heard your voice. What did you say?”

He leans in and tells her, “I said, ‘Hey you, on the other side. Let her go. Because for her, I will cross over, and then you’ll be sorry!’”

It’s the best romantic line ever under the worst of circumstances. Over the course of human history, a million guys have told a million girls that we’d go through hell for them. Hellboy is the only one who means it.

   -- Malcolm Matthews