9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along

The "villain":
In Roland Emmerich's latest "planetary kablooey movie with a date in the title", 2012, Carl Anheuser is the asshole chief of staff-turned-president who in the film's climax closes the doors to the ships carrying the last surviving humans on Earth, allowing thousands outside to drown...

He certainly has the jowls of a mass-murderer.
Hold on a minute there:
...and securing the future of the human race.

So these giant arks...are they why our country is $13 trillion in debt?
Anheuser didn't simply wake up one day and think to himself "Today, I shall be a massive dickcheese for no good reason." When he closed the entrance to the arks, it was because a mile-long tsunami was coming their way, threatening to violently flush humanity's last hope down earth's crapper. It was either the few thousand people outside, or the few hundred thousand inside, and someone had to make that call. Luckily, Anheuser wasn't born with a burnt sack of crap where his brain should be.
We know it sucked for those who didn't get onboard, but the whole planet was about to go tits up and Carl had to make sure that the last human survivors on Earth... you know, survived. He didn't even let his own mother on the ships because she was like a million and, frankly, when you're picking survivors, you have to think long term, which means one thing: Repopulation.
By bringing his mother onto the ark, Anheuser would be implicitly stating "Yes, I want as many people as possible to have sex with my mom so we can repopulate the world. Everyone does their part, come on." The man had to make some very hard choices just so the arks' 400,000-something inhabitants could breed in peace in the future, but putting his mom out to stud was not one of them.

"We only have 30 slots left. Drop your pants and prepare to be swabbed."

The "villain":
You're in a tough spot if "Wicked" is right there in your name, but WWW isn't exactly the most image conscious celebrity in Oz, either: She kidnapped Dorothy, threatened to drown her dog and tried to set The Scarecrow on fire, all to get her hands on the girl's ruby slippers. Foot fetish or not, that was some stone-cold villainy.

Nice teeth, though.
Hold on a minute there:
Remember that the Witch wasn't after Dorothy, and she wasn't trying to rule the world. All she ever wanted was those slippers. Say, how did Dorothy acquire those magical shoes in the first place? Why, by taking them off the blood-drenched feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. Who she just murdered. Who also happened to be the Wicked Witch of the West's sister.

These shoes used to be white...
Let's look at the whole "accident" from the West Witch's perspective:
The Witch sisters are hanging around Oz, minding their own business when some random teenager crushes a woman to death with a house, killing her instantly in an act of domiciliary manslaughter. Next, the teenager waltzes out and corpse-loots the victim's shoes (some sort of creepy kill-trophy, no doubt) which under every inheritance law in the universe damn well belong to the deceased's surviving family.

From where we stand, the Wicked Witch of the West had every right in the world to bludgeon Dorothy to death with a sock full of toxic batteries, but what did she do? Absolutely nothing. She just wanted her shoes back, and every action that she took was motivated by that want. Then, of course, Dorothy raises an army in the form of a giant, talking lion, a man made of metal and an unkillable scarecrow, steals the Witch's broomstick and kills the Witch, staging a nice little Witch sister reunion in the afterlife.

Never forget.

The "villain":
The actions of General Hummel (Ed Harris) in The Rock read almost like a How-To Guide for Villainous Assholes: 1.) Break into Alcatraz, take lots of hostages, 2.) Demand $100 million from the government, threaten to launch a WMD nerve agent over San Francisco if your demands are not met, 3.) Eat a puppy (probably).

"Braised puppy. You can't find good barbeque this far from Texas."
Hold on a minute there:
There certainly is a major villain in The Rock but it's not General Hummel. Ironically, it's the U.S. government, something you wouldn't expect in a movie by Michael "Star Spangled 'Splosion" Bay. Hummel was only doing this in the first place because the government used him and his troops for illegal clandestine missions all over the world. But Uncle Sam wouldn't spare a counterfeit wooden nickel for the families of soldiers who died during those missions. For some reason Hummel had a problem with that.
And he tried getting money and attention the legitimate ways. Hummel exhausted every official channel, trying to get the country to cough up some cash, before finally giving up and moving from strongly worded letters to the next logical thing: chemical warfare terrorism. Besides, he never wanted the 100 mill to be paid from the country's homeless kitten shelter budget or anything. Hummel specifically asks for the money to come from the Red Sea Trading Company... "a slush-fund where the Pentagon keeps proceeds from illegal arms deals."

But it's ours! We earned it fair and square by breaking international laws!
In the end, Hummel never hurt one innocent person and revealed that the nerve agent missiles he had prepared were all a bluff, making his whole operation something of a large scale charity performance, only with guns and WMDs instead of smugness. Elaborate and dangerous, sure, but his punishment, (that Nicolas Cage goes down as the hero of the movie he died in), should count as a war crime.

Look! Two atrocities posing for a picture together.








Ah, lord of the rings. Where a group of pure white supermen beat off the hordes of Arabs, Black people, and deformed types just because they belong to a certain race.
Replyseriously screw Tolkien.
Yep. Just because they belong to a certain race. Of course, in this case, "a certain race" means "bunch of people from different nations invading their lands and slaughtering innocents while serving a guy who is the embodiment of evil, alongside creatures that have been twisted into hating basically everything (including themselves)".
But you know... can't let details get in the way of ridiculous political statements, can we?
i read somewhere that Sauron slept for 2 thousand years then commited genocide on the elves after started a war before his hibernation and then making the rings that would tear their world apart if it got in the wrong hands
Replyso yeah he did nother but stop an invading army and use minorities to his advantage
Holy s**t, is that Dr. Cox as one of Hummel's henchmen?
Reply"In the end, Hummel never hurt one innocent person"
ReplyUm, his team wiped out the Navy SEAL unit in the showerroom, remember? Fellow US servicemen carrying out a mission. Sure, the movie says they were startled, but the courts don't take that crap in ordinary felony-murder cases. A team of superduper special Marines better know when not to pull the trigger.
(Also, kidnapping a bunch of civilians in a prison which no longer has running water is kinda harmful, too.)
innocent, look it up.
I'd add Colonel what's his name from Avatar to the list. Yeah he comes off as a total dick. but the guy was hired to keep the humans alive against these 12 foot savages with poisons that can kill you in under 2 minutes etc. And he pulled strings to get the ungrateful back stabbing marine a very expensive surgery to get his legs back. And let the SOB go through with some lame 'tree hugging' voodoo nonsense and have a second chance at talking out a solution after the guy damaged military property etc.
ReplyTo be fair his response to finding out that Jake;
1) Broke 4 cameras on a tree clearing tank and
2) Got attached to the natives
was to MURDER HIM AND EVERYONE ON THAT HELICOPTOR THAT'S TRYING TO ESCAPE while letting all his collegues almost get poisoned to death when he opened that door.
It killed me that Anhauser refused to give his mother a ticket onto the Ark because they needed "people who could contribute" yet filled them with a bunch of useless rich f*cks who probably couldn't change a flat tire. The Chinese workers would have been a lot more practical, since they would actually have known what to do when they found land.
ReplyIf you think about it, 2012 would almost certainly have a downer ending if it had kept going. You've got a bunch of idiot, useless rich people, some computer geeks, and comparatively few military personnel. They'd be lucky if half of them survived the first year.
Somebody should write another article about video game villains that were right all around. It would probably be pretty short, though, because most video game's idea of deep characters is "HE IS A GIANT f*****g TURTLE WITH SPIKES!!! KILL IT! KILL IT!"
ReplyDorothy doesn't take the shoes. Glinda shows up, gives them to her, and orders her to never give them to the Witch of the West, and implies to Dorothy that the witch is evil.
Replywhich makes her guilty for receiving stolen property...bwahaaaaa
Wasn't she incapable of taking them off her feet, though? It wasn't like she voluntarily put them on, and once Glinda had given them to her, she was stuck with them. I doubt a jury out there would convict poor Dorothy, since she essentially got turned into a living pawn.
Everyone in Lord of the Rings was White and the Orcs were colored. If this isn't a clear case of White supremacist fantasy I don't know what is.
ReplyWhat part of enslaving the munchkins and the winkies is "minding their own business?"
ReplyThat was the witch of the east, not the west.
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
Reply-Some machine
Yea, if you just watched Lord of The Rings, you wouldn't understand his motives, but if you read the books and read the Silmarillion, it clearly depicts that he doesn't give a crap about the orcs or any of the other races. The orcs were just twisted and ruined elves after all, so they weren't even their own race exactly. Morgoth wanted to take Illuvatar's place as God and Sauron was his servant.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesSo? We should have to do homework to enjoy a movie? The bookverse and movieverse are two very different things and you shouldn't HAVE to read the book to understand the motives of the characters- they should be clear.
Because 3 movies that are each 3+ hours long aren't enough, right?
Dead_Person: You don't have to do anything to enjoy a movie. If you want to discuss the underlying motives of characters in the movie though, it's handy to have read the books where those motives are explained.
Technically, since the article is about famous MOVIE villains, it is fair for the author to criticize movie-Sauron. But when the movie is an adaptation of one of the most beloved stories in modern literature, and when the movie makes (almost) every effort to be as faithful and true to the book as is possible within the medium--no, Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire would not have worked in the movies--then criticisms leveled at the movie's STORY inevitably bleed over into criticisms of the book. For the LotR movies, the "movieverse" is trying to be identical to the "bookverse," and most of its failures to achieve that are due to budget, time, and medium constraints.
So, while it is *technically* possible to criticize Jackson's Sauron separately from Tolkien's Sauron . . . in practice, that doesn't fly very well.
Sauron's empire was funded largely by slave labor and he was an incredibly cruel spirit-person; "the Cruel" was one of his nicknames in the old days when he was fighting the elves- when he was the chief lieutenant of Morgoth, who tried to destroy God (in a fictional world where God definitely exists, and Morgoth has met him) and bring the world into chaotic darkness.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesSauron was absolutely a villian, who used orcs and humans like toys and repeatedly sold his temporary allies out when it suited him. His major goal, after the exile of Morgoth, was to conquer all of Middle-Earth and be worshipped as a god- there was no "revolution" for the masses.
The saying goes, "one man's terrorist is another's revolutionary/freedom fighter". As bad as Sauron was, if he even elevated the orcs' position in the world by a minute fraction, they might perceive it to be better than what they had.
Not really though. They went from hated gribblies living under ground to hated, unpaid gribblies living above ground driven to battle under pain of death and fueled by their own curse of hatred and domination. If anything, Sauron was just a taskmaster with a whip leading them on to die in droves for his own gains.
Exactly. Neither Sauron nor his generals ever cared about how many Orcs died. Angmar let them run directly into the fire arcs of Minas Tirith just to test their range. He smashed Orcs while advancing to the gate. What if they would have won the war? Do you really think the orcs would have become a ruling species or something like that? They were nothing more than a tool to him and once they have done their work, they are disposable.
Not to mention it's repeatedly mentioned that they only serve him out of fear of what he'd do to them otherwise.
Animatrix is just a bunch of propaganda. Lies invented by the robogovernment to discredit the revolutionary hero John Connor
ReplyThe article claims that racism born out of superfluous differences drives the free peoples of Middle Earth to shun the orcs, then cracks a joke about their habit of eating manflesh. An insaitable hunger for all their neighbors is an extremely compelling reason to keep them away from society.
Reply"What Scar offered the hyenas was a revolution of the common man. He was more or less their four-legged Lenin."
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesAnd, in reality, he was only lying to them so they'd be his brainwashed puppets willing to commit murder and enforce oppression in the name of his beliefs and final goal of Absolute Power.
So, yeah, just like Lenin.
Yes, because communism is evil, and Lenin just did things for evil. And there was no ideal in its revolution, only evil for the sake of being evil.
Does really people in the U.S. has so caricatured vision of the whole background of the USSR?
More like Stalin.
Oh, come now. Lenin was a moderate among his commie peers (as compared to say, Trotsky advocating swift, violent revolution), but he wasn't above justifying "disposing" of the bourgeoisie when it served the Party's purpose.
Lenin fit the bill of the ruthless, revolution-at-all-costs sort of leader rather than a pursuer of absolute power. The latter better describes Stalin. That said, both of them were elitists in their own right and had a blatant disregard for human life.
Lord of the rings is a group of people trying to establish a tyrannical absolute monarchy against another tyrannical absolute monarchy
ReplyForgive me if I see little difference in factions
No, sir, I do not forgive you. Sauron wants to dominate the whole world with cruel terror. He didn't even recruit the Orcs, his will made them do his bidding.
The Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits just want to be left the f**k alone. Sure, there is some hatred and distrust amongst them, but it's not like any of the individual Man Kingdoms want to conquer and rule all other. Middle-earth was even created specifically for all of them to live in.
I always got the one about the Lion King - I wonder(ed) whether or not it was intended a lesson on how the marginalized in a society could be easily exploited by those wishing regime change. Yes, I work in a university, and yes, I think too much.
ReplyThey already wrote the Wicked Witch of the West's perspective, it was called Wicked. And she was completely mad by the time "The Wizard of Oz" takes place and it was awesome.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesshe mad bro
To be fair, Wicked was written by a completely different author and does have a few glaring contradictions. It's still a great book though.
I know! And they made a musical. Bloody brilliant.
Luckily birger1987 saved me the effort of writing a wall of text myself. I can say I fully agree there. Furthermore i want to take a closer look at another one of your not-villain villains:
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesCaptain Skroeder from Short Circuit. So a military higher-up who is responsible for a bunch of highly evolved war machines without conciousness and being desingned to kill stuff looses one of his weapons. This weapon gets the chance to reflect about himself changing his view on violence, war and killing. And you seriously root for the military guy? Are you American? Sorry for the bad prejudice-joke, but come on!? The statement of the entire movie clearly aims towards peace and getting rid of this mad weapon industry, therefore Captain Skroeder as a personification of this ruthless machinery is OF COURSE THE VILLAIN. (childhood memories will NOT be taken away from me)
Sauron? Not even relying on the books he created something so evil, that wearing it drains life out of you, making you mistrust your best friend and tempting stronger beings to become exactly what Sauron already is: an evil overlord. (see galadriel). Oh the poor orks following their Lenin? Nope. They follow him out of fear and greed. He also destroys the environment with his huge machines and his big ass vulcano. He sents his 9 enslaved half-undead former human kings after Frodo. But yeah - i see no sign of him being evil at all!
- Actually i am on a roll so i'm going to do all:
Matrix - asides from the fact you actually watched that much of matrix which makes you very suspicious in my oppinion, it is never ok to take away freedom from a whole species, nation, religious group and its even worse not to tell them about. Or acta/sopa cool with you because people do a lot of s**t in the internet?
Carl Anheuser? Oh yes he is such a responsible person for saving all the rich bastards who simply bought their way into being saved because capitalism showed its most ugly face in this movie. Its more likely that he just wanted to save HIS OWN ASS, as if he would truly be a philantrop he would give some friggin child with an IQ that goes through the roof his space on the ship. As far as i remember he was just to greedy to pay for his mother to get onboard.
Edward Rooney: Only saw this movie briefly so: If you look at the message it want to tell the audience: Chill out and pull that stick out of your ass from time to time. Its pretty clear why he is the villain. But being so invested in this whole matter only proves, that he never had "fun" in his life, being jealous and not happy with his life at all. He tries to get rid of his frustration by pursuing one pupil that skips school one day like a bloud hound. He does never show any sign of being worried or such about his student. That makes him a sad and angry man - which could be pitied but is not reason enough to concentrate his anger about his crappy life on a child.
Now X-Men: Again taking freedom away from people is not a good thing to do. It never was. X-Men is a bit problematic but well: They could consider finding a solution where the "good" mutants assure that the bad ones won't run amok, which would be resulting in far far less mutants feeling procecuted and loathed, therefore not trying to free themselfes by enslaving mankind. He is a ignorant politician who without properly informing himself about the topic uses people's fears to stay governing. Oh that looks like a villain to me - as well!
Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel is actually the only one i give you. But I think him being more of a freedom fighter and not-such-a-bad-guy-after-all is one of the story twists, or do I remember it wrong?
Sorry, but even though I believe you took your time and were kind a proud of your idea you just named shallow arguements, and took single actions out of context.
And sorry for the million typos i surely have, because i am writing on a very crappy laptop keyboard.
uh-oh, somebody's feewings got huwt. do you need a band-aid wittle guy? want me to kiss it better?
it's COMEDY dumbass, obviously these guys are villains, but it's fun to think about it another way. jesus.
U m***********g idiot troll
"Thank you for saving me from writing a huge wall of text! Here's a huge wall of text!"
This would be one for the Trollers' Hall of Shame if it wasn't prefaced with "thank you for saving me the wall of text."
Nice try, though.
not all the "bad" mutants were always evil pyro was going to be part of the x-men then magneto promised teaching him full control of his powers that he become evil before that he was just an a*****e