Saturday, September 14, 2013

Weekend Weigh-in: What Villains are Justified in Their Actions?

Let's try and hear their side of the story, you guys.

The discussion we had on the site earlier this week about Star Trek Into Darkness began with Alex suggesting a question about what movie villains are the most justified in their actions. So instead of coming up with a new question, I'll just use the one from Alex. What villains are the most justified in their actions? Are they REALLY bad guys, or just misunderstood? And does it affect how you feel about a movie if you can side with the villain?

16 comments:

  1. I like this subject, and James Earl Jones makes it easy because he always plays his bad guys as if they were the heroes of their stories. Thulsa Doom admits that he's not the best person, that he only slaughtered Conan's village in some hope of discovering philosophy. By the time Conan shows up for revenge, Thulsa doesn't even have time for his crap. He just delivers a lecture about The Riddle of Steel. He's a bad guy sure, but he's operating under his own logic.

    Hans Landa IS the hero of Inglourious Basterds to some extent. We spend more time with (and subsequently learn more about) him than we do about Aldo Raine. Really the only person more important than him in that movie is Shosanna.

    Then you have The Phantom of The Opera, and any character Lon Chaney played is going to have my sympathy.

    George Stark from The Dark Half is just fighting for his own survival. Granted, he kills a lot of people, but only in a twisted idea of self-defense.

    And I've been told that Eros is the villain of Plan 9 From Outer Space, but I never saw it that way. I thought he was the hero for a while, the single voice of reason in an otherwise insane film.

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  2. I love when a villain has at least some justification or merits some sympathy from the audience. It gives an added dramatic weight to what they do and lessens the sense that a screenwriter is giving them evil behavior for the sake of plot. I can't remember who said it originally, but really great dramatic conflict comes from having characters in opposition who are both in the right.

    For justified villains I think you have to start at Shylock, particularly as he's depicted in Michael Radford's version of Merchant of Venice a few years back. There we actually get to see some of the abuse the character has lobbed at him by the Christians around him and subsequently we're somewhat cheering him to get revenge, particularly since he's Al Pacino there.

    Magneto and Loki are two obvious ones, though notably both manage to progress from sympathetic villains with logical (if extreme) plans and agendas into full-blown genocidal maniacs by their second appearances.

    I'd also throw in Prince Nuada from Hellboy II, Olga Kurylenko's mute Roman-hunter from Centurion, and Jane Greer's abused femme fatale from Out of the Past, all of whom have legitimate grievances and suffered wrongs committed against them or their loved ones that inform their choices.

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    1. Definitely agree with Loki - I thought he was the most interesting character in Thor... until he turned into a cookie-cutter megalomaniac for the sake of the plot.

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  3. Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.

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  4. I hate to say it, but Walter Peck from Ghostbusters. Sure he gets petty with his cause and could stand to listen to reason when the apocalypse gets into full swing, but holy shit, four crackpot NYU rejects are walking around Manhattan with unlicensed nuclear accelerators. Motherfucker's trying to do his job and gets a marshmallow shit on for his efforts. Poor dickless bastard...

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    1. Geez Harry, I thought you'd put a good word in for yourself - although you were a pretty sleazy bastard in Vienna, your Ferris Wheel speech is still a classic...

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  5. Alien from Spring Breakers. "All I ever wanted to do was be bad!"

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  6. The xenomorphs from Aliens: "You don't see them screwing each other over for a fucking percentage."

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  7. General Hummel (Ed Harris) in The Rock. Harris is so good that it feels like there's an honest-to-god CHARACTER smack in the middle of a Michael Bay movie, and a shockingly sympathetic one at that. Sure, he's endangering the lives of lots of people, but at the same time he truly believes in his cause and he's got a point, he's just going about making his point in a horrific way. It's almost a shame to see the situation he created spiral so far out of his control, keeping us from siding with him.

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  8. Burgess (Max von Sydow) in Minority Report - PreCrime (theoretically) prevented so many murders and saved a lot of lives. Sure, it's at the expense of the living conditions of the precogs and the murder of a drug addled mother - but hey, justice is hard.

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  9. Magua in The Last of the Mohicans. Magua is a vicious and cruel character but he did have his family slaughtered. His cruelty and drive for revenge are fueled by this love for his lost family.

    Harry Osborne as Green Goblin In Spider-Man 2 and 3. Same as story as Magua.

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  10. Doctor Octopus from "Spider-Man 2". He was a mentor/friend to Peter Parker until his wife was accidently killed during one of his experiments and he was forged with one of his creations. That same creation arguably manipulated his fragile mind and turned him mad. He does redeem himself with the best line in the movie.

    Deathstrike(Kelly Hu) from "X-Men 2". She is literally a puppet used by the real villain, Stryker, throughout the movie. Her demise is unavoidable but tragic.

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  11. Clive Owen in Inside Man strikes me as an obvious example - but then, I only first watched the movie last weekend.

    I don't see any reason not to root for the victim in Inception, since his mind-molesters are definitely no better than him. If his company is too large, governments ought to dismantle it, not other CEOs, and I still want to know why Cobb can't have his kids flown out to join him in Venezuela or whatever. (Yes, I am the villain of this thread who is justified in not liking Inception.)

    The "heroes" of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl spend about the entire movie trying to prevent the bad pirates from becoming mortal, and I am utterly at a loss as to why this is a bad thing.

    Finally, **controversy alert!**, when it comes to governance, I'll take the Romans of ~30 CE over monotheistic theocrats any day. One thing that really struck me the last time I watched Life of Brian was just how positively the Romans were portrayed.

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    1. We could also count Senator Obama and his campaign in HBO's Game Change. If not outright villains, they're definitely the "other team" of the story.

      Also, neither the Men in Black nor JK Rowling's wizards have any right to hide their gifts from humankind, let alone to mess with our brains.

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  12. Only very tangentially related, but I love this clip where it's explained that Alan Rickman doesn't play villains, he plays "very interesting people":

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BYeI6Cn6dk

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  13. Clubber Lang in "Rocky III". I'd be pissed too if I deserved a shot at the Heavyweight Championship of the boxing world, and I had to wait year after year as the champ's representation ducked me in favor of easy title defenses. Think of the purses Lang missed out on. And these were Lang's prime years. I'd challenge Rocky at the statue unveiling. And the way Rocky prepared for that first match, he should have gotten that beat down. As for Mickey, I don't think Lang really meant to do him serious harm. That was just one of those unfortunate things.

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