6 Movies That Didn't Realize They Let The Villain Win
Not every movie can end with the main villain being punched, electrocuted, smashed by a fire truck and dropped on a conveyor belt, like in Con Air. (Unfortunately.) We understand that.
What we don't understand are the movies where the writers seemed to forget about the bad guys completely.
#6.
The Rest of the Aliens from Independence Day
In Independence Day, the film that inaugurated Roland Emmerich's obsession with seeing America destroyed, the bad guys are a "far more advanced" form of intelligent life that looks like something the Queen from Aliens gave birth to after getting drunk with Predator.
ALF just... stared.
These guys packed quite a lunch bag for their Independence Day barbecue: spaceships the size of Hawaiian islands, shields that could withstand the nuclear bombing of Houston, weapons capable of leveling Washington D.C. in a single blast, plus all the information about human anatomy they could possibly probe out of Randy Quaid's asshole.
But, after pancaking dozens of cities, a rag-tag group of humans cause each and every one of the alien ships to crash, the thousands of people who were no doubt crushed under each one a small price to pay for victory.
But We Forgot About...
Let's be generous and assume that every one of the alien city-destroying mother ships was downed. Do you have any idea how large a 15-mile-wide spaceship is? Each one is like a flying city, 1,000-stories high and about 100 blocks wide in every direction. And while New York may not have been designed to have giant spaceships fall on it, we have to imagine the space crafts had been designed with a contingency plan for gravity.
We're not sure how many troops and crew were on board each, but we know each one housed an entire air force worth of those little fighter craft.
Speaking of which, any aliens who happen to be sitting in one of those crafts is probably going to make it. We saw earlier that an alien shot out of the sky was able to survive. And by survive we mean it hot wired a human brain and had a conversation with the fucking President after going through a crash-landing, a cold cock delivered by none other than Will Smith, and being cut in half on an operating table.
"Wow, he went down really easy. It's almost like he wants me to take his unconscious body to my leader."
Take into account the weaponry the aliens will be able to recover from their downed ships, and we have a District 9 situation on our hands... only we're the ones herded into camps.
And we can't quite rock a red vest.
#5.
The Libyans from Back to the Future
Let's disregard for a moment all of the numerous problems we have with the "happy" ending of Back to the Future. Let's grant the filmmakers that everything wrapped itself up perfectly; Marty is happy, parents are happy, Biff is their slave.
All he wants is a case of Schlitz and time to forget.
It's so easy to get wrapped up in the Biff Tannens and time paradoxes as the main obstacles to be overcome that we forget the guys who should have kept Marty McFly up late at night.
But We Forgot About...
The Libyan terrorists Doc Brown ripped the plutonium from. You know, the armed, pissed off terrorists driving freely through Hill Valley, who wanted Doc Brown to build a nuclear bomb for them.
Ho-hum.
Take a close look at that VW van. These guys pack more wallop in there than the collected drug cartels in Breaking Bad and The Wire. These Libyans have AK-47s, RPGs, a shoot-first policy, tracking abilities that baffle even the guy who perfected time travel, and... oh, fucking plutonium.
This is some Tom Clancy shit right here.
OK, so Marty hooks up with his mom and warns Doc about the Libyans, which he takes as his cue to dig up a bulletproof vest capable of stopping assault-rifle slugs at point-blank range. Good for him. They then take off in their van and chase Marty in the Delorean. When Marty disappears back in time, the van crashes into a one-hour photo stand. Then... what?
...they back up, drive to Marty and shoot him in the face?
Nothing happens. Seriously, there are no terrorists flying through windshields; no RPGs going off; no big cathartic explosion to justify the use of the word "bomb" in the movie. All we see is the van kind of tip over, but sustain the abuse like any good, German-made car was built to. But when Marty returns from the past to check on Doc, they have an emotional reunion that completely ignores the fact that there is a dented van full of terrorists right over there.
If it can survive hippies, it can survive anything.
Hell, even if the van burst into flames and vaporized the gunmen, there's no way those few guys represented the entirety of their terror cell. This is a group serious enough to sneak into the U.S., obtain military-grade weapons and goddamned weapons-grade plutonium. You know, the stuff that no terrorists and only a few militaries have ever been able to get their hands on. If anything, Back to the Future is a cautionary tale about how disastrously vulnerable small U.S. towns were to terrorism during the Reagan years.
And how vulnerable the terrorists were to crimes of Chronomancy.
#4.
Death Proof
Tarantino's Death Proof is actually two stories: the story of the psychotic Stuntman Mike harassing a group of ladies, and the story of Stuntman Mike harassing a (different) group of ladies (who fight back and kill him). This is about the latter.
The former didn't last long.
This part of the story is a girl-power picture which focuses on a white 1970 Dodge Challenger that our heroines hope to borrow for a dangerous game called "Ship's Mast."
They borrow the car from a scary-looking dude, and eventually use that car to get their revenge on Stuntman.
But We Forgot About...
Mike is just one of two. That white 1970 Dodge Challenger our heroines have their sights on is being offered for sale by a hardcore Tennessee "son of the soil" named Jasper. Bear in mind that Jasper is played by Jonathan Loughran, who you may remember as the trucker who tried to rape Uma Therman in Kill Bill, Vol 1. He's basically the same character here, right down to his trademark pre-rape "heh heh."
Nothing can go badly here.
Our heroines have no intention of buying the car, but nevertheless finagle their way into getting Jasper to let them take the hog for a spin by offering their single hottest friend as collateral. To sweeten the deal, they even point out that she's a porn actress as a nudge-nudge that she might be down for some intercourse while they're out. Oh, and they never mention any of this to her. Oh, and she's wearing this:
And the last we ever see of her is this:
What the hell were they expecting to find when they came back, especially after that little porn actress lure they used? The cheerleader and the hillbilly playing chess?
Even if they come back and the cheerleader is, somehow, still intact, there's the little matter of her girlfriends leaving her behind as collateral. You know, in case something bad happens to the Dodge Challenger, like maybe an on-and off-road duel with a homicidal stuntman.
By the end of the film the car is completely totaled, so what does that mean? Does the hillbilly get to keep the cheerleader (or her mutilated corpse, as the case may be)?
Have you actually SEEN "Independence Day", Jacopo? This was so badly researched I thought it was written by Christina H.
ReplyThe alien is not cut in half, as is clearly described by Brent Spiner's dialogue; he's wearing armor. In fact, when Spiner cuts the damn thing slightly and it pops open (along a SEAM), you can tell it's a helmet. Because it has a m***********g HEAD in it.
Further, the alien ship doesn't resist the affect of a nuclear blast; its SHIELDS do so. They also explain that the aliens use some form of broadcast power to their smaller fighter craft, so bringing down a mother ship brings down the fighters.
The scary thing is that I've only seen the movie twice and I apparently remember more than you do. Was Wikipedia offline or something?
Uncle Billy was so goddamn worthless. Hell, George could've left years ago if not for the fact that Uncle Billy is too stupid to run the bank.
ReplyThe bit about Independence day can also be said about Cowboys and Aliens. By the way before I forget SPOILERS.
ReplyBasically, whatsherface, who's also an alien (because freaken EVERYONE and their brother was an alien in that movie...or at least that's what it felt like) blows up the mining operation building before it could take off because "they'll come back with more, and there will be no survivors."
Um...excuse me...what do you think the United States Military would do if they suddenly lost contact with one of it's many overseas military posts? It's the same premise behind the Empire in Star Wars sending all of those drones. "The drone we sent to *planet* isn't responding...we might want to check it out".
I happen to know that there is a deleted scene from "Wonderful Life" where the angel visits Mr. Potter and tells him about George Bailey making it through the crisis, giving Potter a heart attack and thus killing him. The director cut the scene because he thought it was too dark. I was honestly hoping to see how Mister Potter responded at the end of the movie, which is why I was disappointed that this scene was deleted.
ReplyThat scene from Death Proof remains one of the more disturbing things I've seen. It's so obvious that the redneck is going have his dirty, perverse way with her. What makes it so sick is that, well, for starters, it's Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She's one of the sweetest looking girls and she altogether seems pretty innocent in the film. But the worst is that it was her own c**t friends that set her up. Why? Just so they can go joyriding. What'd she do to deserve that fate? The fact that the film ends with them being heroes is kind of undermined by that they instigated and endorsed a rape. I'd like to see a sequel where she stalks and butchers each one for revenge.
ReplyDo anyone knows Blofeld is actually... the cat?
Reply#6: I thought that WAS their entire race.
ReplyUm, Data didn't cut the alien in half. He cut open the alien spacesuit, which opened down the middle.
Reply"It's a Wonderful Life" doesn't belong on this list because they DID realize they let the villain win. They intentionally skirted the Motion Picture Production Code, which apparently required the villain be punished in some way, in order to let Potter get away with the money.
ReplyI always did wonder what happened to the girl they left behind in Death Proof.
ReplyI was expecting Vertigo to be on here. At the end, the one person who could testify against the villain is already dead.
ReplyI gotta disagree with Back to the Future.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIf they were tailing Marty at 88 miles an hour before slamming the brakes and colliding with a building head on (and I have no reason to believe they were wearing seatbelts), then it was likely going to do some physical damage to each of them. And we're not talking minor booboos, either. At that speed, we're talking damage to the car frame, probably enough to make exiting the vehicle difficult, if not impossible without intervention from the fire department- and the police. Add that it's unlikely that the automatic gunfire would have been IMPOSSIBLE to go unnoticed in a city in California? The Libyans were probably arrested- even if they planned to testify against Doc Brown as an accomplice, the man has a time machine and no obligation to return.
Yes, but that still leaves the rest of the Lybians. Three men does not a terror cell make.
@scottmale24
Indeed so. So... do the Libyans have a time machine?
And as we've seen before on some cracked articles, some "cells" are just hyped up idiots that aren't actually authorized by the group they claim to belong to. I don't think this is the case, mind you, but these guys were reckless, if nothing else.
I seem to recall we see a shot at one point of the Libyans backing their truck out of the booth (which was only a cruddy clapboard photo booth, after all) and tearing out of the parking lot. So they are still alive and their vehicle still functions.
District 9 sucked massive ass.
Replyabsolute win on all the uncle billy captions
ReplyI'm sure someone's mentioned this, but the ID4 saucers didn't just fall, they were spewing fire out of every surface. Just because the entire chasis didn't vaporize doesn't mean all the aliens and fighter ships inside were still intact. Besides, with the earth's entire nuclear arsenal in play, I'm pretty sure we'd stand a chance agains the shieldless saucers.
Replyand i dont think having the vast majority of your population killed in one battle, the the ship that was for all intents and purposes your homeworld completely destroyed, and stranding the few survivors on a now united hostile alien world counts as "winning"
The author also seems to forget a couple of facts:
A) All the alien tech was somehow powered wirelessly from the huge mothership orbiting earth. It's a plot point in the movie, the crashed spaceship in Are 51 was almost useless until the mothership arrived. And since that damn thing went all explodey thanks to our heroes, none of the surviving alienss tech is going to work. Which takes me to the next point.
B) The alien in the operating table wasn't cut in half, that was some sort of biological power armor. The aliens themselves aren't really that tough.
Maybe come up with some new Cheney jokes? It's like hearing "the cake is a lie." Just makes me want to punch whoever said it for keeping the damn meme alive.
Replyis that cheney? I thought it was mccain :|
We'll stop making jokes about Cheney when he stops being one.
I always thought SPECTRE was with Monsanto. Live and learn.
ReplyIt's A Wonderful Life is one of my all time, bar none favorite films. A charming and uplifting story for the entire family: dad thinks himself worthless and that his life is totally meaningless so to help everyone out decides to commit suicide on Christmas.
ReplyMerry Christmas, kids! Daddy drowned himself so we get to keep our crappy lives in this dead end town! Yay!!
Did you watch the last half of the movie?
Probably has not seen the movie.
ID4 facts is a huge facepalm: Earthlings won because they were able to cancel the shields for their whole space armada, including those mini ships. Air Forces should do the rest. As to that "being cut in half" thing, they were only removing his exo-squeleton, or armor if you prefer.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesForget the fact that the USAF was pretty much destroyed in the first attack on the ships around United States, What about the ships over the major cities of countries that have no real Air Force? I suspect that no fewer than 10 countries could adequately defend their capital, let alone the entire country with an established Air Force.
Keep in mind that a significant amount of each countries military aircraft was most likely destroyed before the shields were disabled. Also, in the final battle scene from ID4, you see almost half of the F16/18's being destroyed before they figure out how to bring down the colossal Alien ship. Remember that scene where the army guy was enlisting pilots of any skill level to fight that battle? Your gonna tell me that the remainder of those pilots is going to take down the remaining ships across the country? Doubtful.
Plus, now that the aliens know that we figured out where its weak point is, i doubt they are going to open the ship up and expose it for the remainder of the war...
I like how, in yet another movie, america forgets that the rest of the planet has a f*****g military aswell.
cavemansol, with the centralized pattern of alien tech, when the mother ship got nuked the individual ships probably lost most if not all ability to communicate with each other.
@ASpaceOstrich - they showed over seas military at the end they were using primitive comms to talk with them, they mentioned broadcasting the weakness all over the globe at the end. Did you see the movie at the end?
I read another commentary on It's a Wonderful Life which made a much more significant point as to why its not an altogether happy ending. In all likelihood, George Bailey would still be facing jail time, as merely replacing the missing money through a separate source doesn't take away the original offense.
ReplyExcept the Bank examiner decides to let it go on the "no harm no foul principle," ripping up the arrest warrant.