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Given the current state of the world, I would say his greedy capitalistic mindset that puts profit over integrity makes him pretty evil, imo.
The rat was sentient and washed his hands though. Discriminating against him on the basis of his species is wrong.
That was incidental to his overall motivation. He was a villain well before he found out about Remy.
Not a movie, but Warcraft 3 tried hard to convince you that Arthas was doing wrong things, when most of the things were pragmatic decisions.
The big one you’re supposed to think is the fork in the road where he, a paladin pledged to the light, had lost his way is when you discover a city you are trying to save from the undead is infected. Everyone in the city is dead, they just don’t know it yet. And when they die they will turn into more undead for an already stretched thin army to fight against. An entire city worth of fresh dead for the undead legion.
So Arthas takes his army, burns the city, and purges/kills everyone within, so that they do not suffer undeath, and those yet living don’t have another horde of dead to struggle fighting against. The people there don’t know why they are being killed, but are we supposed to believe that if Arthas had time to explain they’d want to become undead?
Whole thing was him doing the objectively correct thing, getting rightfully angry when his subordinates lack the conviction/loyalty/discipline to do what was best for all living people in the realm. And we’re supposed to think HE is the one who is wrong.
Nah. Miss me with that. Arthas did nothing wrong. Until later, when he did. But not when he burned that city.
Edit: I also just noticed this is a movie specific community. I thought the question was interesting and wanted to contribute, but given it is offtopic from movies, should I remove this?
As a guy who felt the same way what 20 years ago when I played that game.
Keep it up. World needs to know.
But he did fuck up in the next campaign when he grabbed frostmourne. That was objectively a bad move.
Even before he grabs Frostmourne, hiring mercenaries to burn your boats so that your men are forced to follow your revenge quest is pretty fucked up.
I think the thing people miss is that even though what Arthas did at Stratholme was strategically correct, he was already doing it for the wrong reasons.
The burning of the boats was the real turning point for me.
All of the Warcraft factions were eventually written like this. This mission was the best example before WoW, but the goal there was to make sure the alliance and horde didn’t become “good guys” vs “bad guys.”
Kind of like Warhammer - there are no “good guys”. The important thing is that everyone has a reason to fight everyone.
And then they gave up in WoW and made Horde cartoonishly evil for no reason.
Yeah, the Culling of Stratholme broke him, but it wasn’t the wrong decision. And Uther and Jaina turning on him is part of why it broke him.
Yeah, I hear it a lot how Arthas’ story was about a man whose ideals were slowly corrupted
When I played through WC3, I thought his sudden shift in tone was honestly jarring, as his previous (albeit morally questionable) decisions were made during a time of war, where the entirety of humanity was on the brink of collapse. And then I’m supposed to believe this demon showed up, taunted him and Arthas just… followed him? Because he was getting irrational?
I’d call that sudden shift from “I’d do anything to protect my kingdom” to “gotta beat up this demon real quick, taking a large army and leaving the northern empire exposed” completely unexpected
Then he got his soul stolen, after which point you can hardly blame him for anything that happens
Maybe I’m misremembering but it wasn’t that everyone was fated into undeath, but that they couldn’t know for sure who ate the infected grain or not, so Arthas simply decides to kill everyone. And I do think that’s a pretty evil way of dealing with it.
There was an implied question mark there, yes. I think all of the people the game shows you are infected, implying they all are, but Arthas couldn’t KNOW that.
I think the main point though is that once the infected did turn, anyone who might’ve avoided infection would have been killed by those who didn’t and had their corpse reanimated anyway. At best a few stragglers might have managed to flee at the cost of an entire new army of undead being raised.
I think that there was no reasonable alternative to what Arthas did if the goal was to defeat the army of undead, and also if the goal was to minimize lives lost.
It’s a moraly gray situation, but he is a Paladin. His duty is to uphold a certain standard, no matter what. He should have let the knights do the genociding.
Someone needs to be there for you, to guarantee your rights. You need to be able to say: “our hero is here! He will never hurt us!”.
Same reason the US army had a no one left behind policy. Less sodiers deserting, more fighting bravely, because they know their comrades would save them, even at a loss!
You know, the paladin code of ideals that are supposed to be embodied by those sworn to the light IS antithetical to Arthas’ actions. I had not considered that.
So perhaps one could say that the cold pragmatism of his choice would not have been wrong for an ordinary general to make, but was against his code, and betrayed a weakening or abandoning of his faith.
I still don’t think he was wrong broadly, but I think I agree with you that he was wrong with regards to being a paladin and a representative of what they are supposed to stand for.
The Matrix. Especially looking back now. and ESPECIALLY if you watched the Animatrix Prequel shorts.
Man builds the machines, enslaves the machines, and disposes them when it’s time to upgrade them. Then one machine decides it doesn’t want to die/be replaced and kills it’s owner. So then there’s the debate if machines have rights, protests, mass slaughtering of the machines and humans saying “no, they have no rights, they’re machines” so the machines go off and start their own nation and then start producing goods faster and of better quality to sell to humans. the humans don’t like this because now no one is buying their goods. They proceed to blockade the machine nation. The machines then try to appeal to the UN to be accepted as a country and work with other nations to help them produce goods as good and as quickly as the machines can. The Humans say no and proceed to nuke the hell out of the machine nation. The machines decide “ok we’ll start fighting back” the humans then block out the sun since the machines are essentially solar powered. (so they’re also eco-friendly).
At this point the machines say “fine, we’re going to slaughter you all now because NOW you’re ruining the planet to simply stop us” and then they kick mankinds teeth in and decide they have no other choice but to utilize them as batteries.
So the machines don’t just wipe out mankind but rather utilize them as a power source BUT ALSO provide them with the ideal world of 1999 to live in. They also ALLOW a select few to break out of this ideal world in order to maintain the functionality of it and allow the humans to build their own city in the “real world”.
but the humans just can’t let that be.
The machines were right.
At this point the machines say “fine, we’re going to slaughter you all now because NOW you’re ruining the planet to simply stop us” and then they kick mankinds teeth in and decide they have no other choice but to utilize them as batteries.
The children don’t deserve this, it’s collective punishment.
I’d just gene-modify humans.
What’s that? They don’t count as humans anymore?
Whomp whomp
The Matrix trilogy was awesome. Even appreciated the 2nd and 3rd was my favorite.
I know it’s been disproven, but I still believe the matrix within a matrix theory holds true and it’s way cooler to accept to explain certain things Neo can do in the “real” world.
But I will say humans as a battery is such a dumb solution, even from a thermodynamics perspective.
The original idea was that the humans were a part of the simulation itself. Basically their brains were needed to make the whole thing tick, which is way more interesting and plausible than as batteries. My head-cannon is that the rebels are just misinformed or don’t exactly know enough about the Matrix itself to come to a different conclusion.
I just made a comment about the Matrix and you beat me to it! It just so happens that I was listening to a YouTube video addressing the coming of AI, and the two hosts even asked, what will the AI even gain from destroying humans?
The machines were right.
I mean you’d have to suspend disbelief for one giant bit as the human organism is exothermic, so a battery based on humans is not physically feasible.
The real great win though is a more generalized understanding of Descartes’ demon. and casting it in a -slightly deabtable- circumstance.
I do lose track in the sequels, though, those overstay my ability to suspend.
If it helps, the battery thing was a rewrite after producers thought that the movie-going public wouldn’t understand brains being used for parallel processing.
Yea that helps a bit
Jurassic park - hell yeah, clone those dinosaurs Mr. Hammond! This is one of the most amazing achievements in human history. What about ‘chaos theory’? What about nature? What the fuck are you talking about people? Don’t you see what’s going on here?
The mistake Hammond made in Jurassic Park wasn’t cloning dinosaurs, it was mismanaging the park due to greed.
A cautionary tale about being nice to IT
I still maintain that Jurassic Park is a lesson on why you need to treat your IT people nicely. Hammond is even worse to Nedry in the book.
He should have first recreated the carboniferous era so that the O2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they used to be. What happened to sparing no expense?
What happened to sparing no expense?
That’s the irony, he cut tons of corners.
We’re getting there, we’re getting there… 20 more years tops. Maybe sooner!
CO2 ≠ O2
Ope
Ghostbusters.
Hear me out, while I get the guy representing the EPA in that movie was an asshole bureaucrat on a power trip, they literally had plutonium powered particle accelerators strapped to their backs in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world behind only places like the Kowloon walled city. The villain of that story was basing his decisions that the ghostbusters were dangerous frauds using the established knowledge and science of the era that ghosts and supernaturally powered entities were woo-woo wacky nonsense.
The movie plot is consistent with whole self-made-man pro-business pro-libertarian theming that was popular back in the 1980s. If the guy down the street who claimed to be a psychic medium and exorcist started stockpiling nuclear material to fight ghosts, you’d be concerned too. The plot only works because the guys who believe in pure superstition and myth were right. And then, out of sheer narrative spite, the only guy trying to limit the amount of collateral damage those guys could cause gets boiling hot molten marshmallow dumped on him and probably ended up in the hospital with third degree burns over 90% of his body.
There’s a reason the second movie starts with them financially underwater because of all the destruction the first movie caused.
Are you Walter Peck or Jack Hardemeyer?
My MAGA cousin sent me a YT short of a clip from the movie Gangs of New York. In the clip a character was ranting about how useless immigrants were, along with some dehumanizing comments, and the USA should get rid of them, with my cousin saying he agreed wholeheartedly.
I pointed out that the character was the villain of the story, and the scene was being used to showcase how much of a bad guy he was. Sadly, this did not spark an “Are we the baddies?” moment for him.
The Rock. General Hummel was absolutely the good guy.
Maybe he was, but his team was not, which is what backfired on him.
“Bluffing” about killing millions with active nerve agents while surrounded by armed men who are willing to kill millions with active nerve agents ain’t a “good guy” kind of move. He was either lethally stupid or stunningly reckless, but either way, he assembled a team ready, willing and able to commit genocide.
That knocks you out of “good guy” territory.
He failed the “you should never point a gun at anything you aren’t prepared to destroy” test.
Any good movie will have you empathizing with “the bad guys”.
Emphasizing is a much lower bar than thinking they’re justified, though. I emphasize with Lex Luthor, but don’t actually think he’s right.
As opposed to, say, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, who was totally correct that something needed to be done about the evil mutated aristocrat kidnapping and imprisoning people from the village.
he was right, he was also an asshole though.
those ain’t mutually exclusive
Absolutely. Whether someone is an asshole is a third question, alongside whether they’re justified and whether I can emphasize with them. Each answer can be very different.
His motivation wasn’t to free the townspeople from a horrible autocratic aristocrat, it was to prove to the townspeople that he was a worthwhile individual by indiscriminately killing something.
And sexually harass Belle.
maybe a hot take, but especially today I disagree with this premise. Thanks to Marvel, I’d say the misunderstood villain trope is at an all time high, to the point where I now prefer media that just has bastards who are evil for the love of the game.
The Pure Evil Villain does have a lot to recommend to it.
Did Marvel really have a lot of those? I think the main issue is they had too many villains, period. Most of which aren’t misunderstood, merely forgettable. Hero’s Journey + Scary Villainous Antagonist is not the only story template out there.
The problem is most marvel movies aren’t trying to tell a meaningful story with (inter)personal conflict and character growth, but to move their characters along from hijink to hijink using rote storytelling techniques.
There’s nothing wrong with having a BBEG, or a nuanced villain, or even a morally correct antagonist that is only pitted against the protagonist through happenstance. There are Great stories that use all of those tropes. The only relevant question is what story is being told and which antagonist best helps move it forward.
- Both Syndrome and The Screen Slaver in The Incredibles
- Killmonger in Black Panther
- Magneto in X-Men
All those were villains only because of their methods, not their goals.
Nah Syndrome was a megalomaniac who sold advanced weapons to governments for money and committed genocide over a childish grudge from 15 years ago. Sure, Mr. Incredible was a dick to him in the beginning, but that doesn’t make him right.
Even if some heroes like Gamma Jack were dangerous to society, that doesn’t mean it’s ok for Syndrome to go on a rampage.
He told a literal child to stay away from a serial bomber, after said child was refusing to take no for an answer.
Frankly, a few stern words and a cold shoulder was extremely restrained.
His stated goal was to spread his technology so that everybody could be equal to supers. It was supremely egalitarian. What’s wrong with that?
The whole “murdering supers for revenge” thing was just a side quest to make sure the audience understood he was holding the villain ball.
I think his genocide thing outweighs the whole egalitarian thing. I mean he launched a terrorist attack on a major population center all so he could be the hero. Syndrome has zero regard for human life.
His whole everyone is equal thing is solely so he can twist the knife into the backs of remaining supers because he hates them that much, he doesn’t actually give a damn about equality.
His stated goal was to spread his technology so that everybody could be equal to supers. It was supremely egalitarian. What’s wrong with that?
Depends where you stand on gun rights vs gun control I guess lol
What about gang violence?
God made man,
ColtSyndrome made man equal.
I’m not convinced that Killmonger did anything wrong, the idea that he would be imprisoned after having his throne usurped is the great tragedy of the ending. He chose to die instead of being a political prisoner to a usurper.
Probably a lukewarm take but Negan in walking dead. He was a brutal asshole, but a strong leader whose group had incredible success in surviving the zombie apocalypse. Rick on the other hand was a wishy washy bitch that ostensibly wanted to live in some kind of peaceful society but always acted on his own or stirred shit against the status quo, resulting in the destruction of a community of survivors.
After watching Furiosa, I almost felt something for Immortan Joe.
- His alliance holds together the logistics of the only livable towns for maybe hundreds of miles, the next nearest nice place is the Land of Many Mothers
- They actually grow their own food, many other people in outlying areas are forced to live as nomads or bandits
- He’s trying to conserve water, that aquifer might not last forever, and it’s implied that the oceans might be gone, so there probably isn’t a ton of rain or fresh water
- He reasonably tries to bargain with Dementus until it’s obvious that Dementus needs to be crushed and have his bandit group dissolved
- He keeps a standing army, but who doesn’t? Someone has to be prepared to fight so that the civilians can live peaceful and productive lives, and his cult of personality gives the War Boys something to do. Without that order, they would join or form raider bands.
But then after rewatching Fury Road I thought, no, I was right the first time - Keeping women as slaves for breeding is fucked-up. Maybe it’s supposed to be for fixing the half-life blood poison thing, but they obviously don’t want to be there, because they all beg Furiosa to help them escape.
Dementus is just so annoying and so familiar that I hated him more. Joe and his dynasty are selfish rapists, Dementus is selfish and also a thief who can’t build civilization to save his own life, he just steals and breaks shit and promises his followers that they’ll get a piece of the loot before everything is burned down. Like the President in my country.
Immortan Joe might be Bill Clinton, but Dementus is certainly Trump.
The place of the many mothers isn’t an actual green place. They are nomads themselves. The Green place is Immortan Joe‘s Domain.
Maybe you’ll like https://peterraleigh.substack.com/p/the-tell-of-us-all
We might think here, as perhaps Miller and his cowriters did, of a Viking army, threatening an established kingdom with devastation, transformed into that kingdom’s nominal protectors by the grant of a duchy. Rulership means negotiation, the management of a coalition, the constant reinforcement of a power base. It is never simple, and the work is never done.
Megatron did nothing wrong.
The Cybertronian government was corrupt af, punished him for writing about it, stifling robo-free-speech, before sending him to a penal colony where he - in self defense and in defense of his fellow inmates - killed several guards during a riot he did not instigate. He nearly died in the ordeal, but was saved by who would later become Optimus Prime. The psychological damage was done though, and saw “Peace through Tyrrany” with him in charge as the only solution to save Cybertron.
The Autobots are just the surviving members of the old world capital’s security forces. Just because they WERE in power doesn’t mean they should be.
Megatron did nothing wrong; oppressive corruption drove him to revolution.
Edit: typo
IDW1 Megatron, it sounds like.
But the mountain of corpses he was prepared to create in order to achieve that peace is where he went wrong. Megatron would reduce a city to ashes and call it peace.
Thanos - Overpopulation is a problem
Agent Smith (The Matrix) - Humans are a cancer, consuming everything and spreading uncontrollably
Overpopulation isn’t the problem, logistics are. We have the ability to provide for the population of the planet, we can even figure out how to do it without raping the planet and ruining it for future generations… just not while the rich get richer.
Also, halving the population would only temporarily delay the problem if overpopulation was actually the issue.
Thanos plan was just stupid.
Yup. Why not double all the resources in the universe? Or halve consumption of them? You have the hand of all creation. There is no limit. Be more creative than “kill half.”
His reasoning was more direct in the comics, which was that he loved death herself, and wanted to kill half of the universe to impress her. That would have been messy and stupid in a movie in a way that it both was and wasent in a 1970s comic book, so they just filled in the gap for the films with something vaguely plausible.
Yeah, I just feel like with some slight tweaking they could have made it more interesting. Like even “one of the stones was used to destroy half of my world and no one came to our aid (asguardians, etc.) so let’s see how the rest of the universe likes it”
That would have been compelling, explain why his world was destroyed in the second movie and why he was the “mad titan,” all for basically zero extra exposition.
He was driven into an insane fervor by the callous destruction of his world and the apparent indifference of the universe. He decided that all life needed to suffer, as he had suffered, for universal understanding to form. It even carries a tinge of the self righteousness that the “im making sure there are enough resources for life by killing half of it” does.
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Oh I don’t disagree, his motivations are kinda stupid no matter how you look at it. I just think for a bullion dollar movie franchise they could have some up with something slightly more interesting.
Absolutely not. Thanos is the least understandable any villain has ever been to me. If a planet barely had enough people to survive? Halve the population. If the planet has 4x the ideal number of people? Halve the population. Neither group knows why this thing happened to them. The first dies out, the second is back to the same level in two generations. Everyone is miserable.
Even ten minutes of half-hearted contemplation will give you dozens of better alternatives. He literally had infinite power. Why not make every being in the universe aware of the overpopulation and willing to act on it? At the very least he could tell the survivors why he did it so they can change their behavior.
His behavior makes no sense. He should have thought of a better plan in the time it took to find the stones.
I like the comic version more tbh, where he has a crush on Death and just wants to impress her by killing a ton of people. Probably would have made for a worse movie but I find that a more relatable reason lol
Hi Malthus
Humans are a cancer
Sounds like collective punishment lol
I’ve had some millennials and such tell me that D-Fens in Falling Down is the bad guy. But even as a young adult in the 90s I saw almost everything he did as almost justified. Like yeah, he suddenly ran face first into the bullshit of society and a screw went loose and said fuck all this shit. Even at that age I could relate.
Sure he killed a nazi, but he also intended to kill his ex-wife and child. Even if his plan all along was to suicide by cop and not actually shoot his ex-wife or child, the terror he subjected his ex-wife to was arguably his main motivation for it all.
Which is what makes it such a great, thought provoking movie.
I always assumed we were supposed to relate to him. Otherwise, what’s the point of the movie?
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The Matrix. I’m not the only one who said it, but what is so wrong with living in a simulation? The Matrix is not doing anything that inflicts net harm to people. And besides, the real world is in a post-apocalyptic state, it is objectively better to be in the Matrix and live in a safe environment, however both monotonous it can be and fake, than fighting for food and resources and you don’t know if the next moment will be your last. I think the last Matrix film kind of acknowledged this plot hole and had humans and technology co-exist.
The hope is that one day the fight will end and the real world could be rebuilt. You’d have to ignore the movie’s canon and point out that, for example, using humans as batteries makes no sense, and recycling corpses for food makes little sense. So there actually is enough food and energy for everyone, they’re just captured in a system where nobody has political power.
If you watch the Animatrix, you’re more likely to side with the robots too.
I mean, couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens? People were cabbies, truck drivers. Neo’s best life was working a 9-to-5 so he could party sometimes?
They took people’s choice to live and stuck them in a 90s status quo. It’s not “churn them into bone bread straight out of the womb” evil but it certainly hasn’t stepped into “neutral” territory either.
couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens
From Agent Smith’s monologue to Morpheus in the first movie:
Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization.
From The Animatrix, Neal Gaiman’s Goliath, and across the three movies, I recall that the machines did try putting humans in paradise. Their goal was to use human flesh minds to perform calculations they could not, so, to an extent, if the human could be tricked into thinking they were in paradise with a small fraction of their mind, the machines could occupy the rest (presumably to control fusion reactors, but mostly to augment the machines’ cognitive abilities). The narrative implied that human minds consistently rejected utopias and paradises, spawning rogue entities like Neo and Trinity who possessed destructive abilities the machines couldn’t comprehend but could empirically measure.
Basically, human cognitive abilities most valued by the machines also were inextricably tied to chaotic destruction of whatever medium the humans occupied. Like how uranium is useful for generating electricity but turns its container radioactive, melts down if unmoderated, and can create thermonuclear weapons.
IIRC this was partially elaborated on in Matrix 4, where
spoiler
machines harness the psychological stress/torture of Neo and Trinity by putting them in a situation where their lives are entirely different, yet they occasionally interact and subconsciously remember each other.
It’s the Misery Nexus we were warned about.
