The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

What makes a bad villain so good that we love to hate him, or so bad that he simply doesn’t work for us? What makes one villain so good that he makes the movie work, and likewise another so ineffective and weak as a dramatic tool that his credibility as a character overshadows a potentially good story and weakens the movie to the point of dramatic failure?

That is what this topic is to be about, a discussion and study of cinematic villainy; what makes them work well dramatically, what do some lack from a story telling standpoint which weakens the film’s dramatic value to the point of failure. And what do we as movie fans look for in a well-structured, honest to goodness, love-to-hate-‘em movie bad guy?

Not all movie villains need to be a physical, mustache-twirling foe, for there are other types of villains in films and TV which provide a threat for the hero or heroine to overcome.

For instance, in war films there are often a specific villain to be defeated, an opposing commander or assassin. But there are times when a specific human villain is not shown, and the true villain is depicted in another fashion. Such as in Master and Commander, where the enemy captain is not shown giving orders or announcing his intent to defeat the English ship that had been sent out after him. Instead, only the enemy vessel is shown, attacking the hero’s ship, chasing it, and being fired back on. The enemy ship came out of the fog to attack, and the villain throughout the film was the mysterious dark colored French vessel. The ship itself was the villain, not the captain commanding it. It was an interesting fashion in which the villain was portrayed, because throughout most of the film I kept waiting for the French captain to be introduced, only to realize that it was the ship itself, as mentioned already above.

Yet despite whoever is revealed as the enemy commander, in any war movie or battle situation, the ultimate villain is the act of War itself. It turns good people on both sides into necessary killers, and depending on which side you’re advancing from, it makes the other side evil from your perspective. It causes suffering among the combatants as well as the innocent non combatants, and in many cases it haunts and pains the survivors for the rest of their lives. War simply is, by its very concept, the ultimate villain.

Before I get this party rolling, here comes a little bit of humor. We all sit in front of the TV or movie screen and think or yell at the villain, “That is so stupid, no villain would say that, do that, expect that, succeed in that, ect.” Yeah, many movie villains do dumb things that you know will be their downfall. Like capturing the hero and rather than killing him right away, sending him to a jail cell with 2 or 3 buffoon guards who will inevitably be knocked out by the hero in his escape. Or revealing his entire plot and list of secrets to the hero before killing him, and then being befallen by his own admission to the wizened hero. Yeah, those villains always seem to follow a pattern of goof ball mistakes that lead to their undoing. Here is a funny and interesting list of many of those goofball patterned mistakes made by movie villains:
Peter’s Evil Overlord List

"You mean I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?"

He just couldn't grasp that idea, that although life is hard and we all felt his anger at times in our life, that he simply can't strike back in the way that he did. He was convinced that the world around him was the villain, and it wasn't until a moment before he provoked his own death that he realized that his actions made him the villain.

I simply found that interesting. That is what made Falling Down a good film. Some of him is in all of us, only we don't declare war on the local McDonalds and shoot an automatic weapon into the ceiling because they won't serve us breakfast at five minutes into lunchtime. 

Okay now, time to talk about villains and evil masterminds, the bad guys of the movies I either enjoyed or felt dissappointment due to the villain's strengths or weaknesses within the dramatic storyline.

My first villain to discuss is General Chang, played by the masterful Christopher Plummer, in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country.

What did I like about him? Let me count the ways. The Klingon Empire and the Federation were on the brink of peace after years of mistrust and hostile conflicts. The Chancellor and his wife, and General Chang among others, board the Enterprise for a dinner meal with Kirk, the captain of the flagship which is escorting him to the territory of his former enemy. What does Chang do as soon as he meets the legendary captain Kirk? Ever the warrior at heart, he sizes him up and makes a comment about the kind of warrior Kirk was and how it felt to finally meet his former enemy face to face. In Chang’s mind there were not thoughts of future peace, but of former war. Then there is the dinner session and ill feelings were brought out from both sides, indicating that mutual trust and acceptance would not be as easy as they had hoped. Afterward, there is a sneak attack on the Chancellor’s ship and it is boarded by assassins who delivered a deadly blow to both the Chancellor, as well as the potential for peace between the two sides. Of course, Kirk is blamed and branded the enemy, accused of a war crime due to his own personal feelings which are revealed in his trial. It is known that Kirk is bitter toward the Klingons due to the death of his son at Klingon hands, so the assassination, planned and carried out by him and men under his command makes sense. Chang blames Kirk in a fit of rage, shocked at being so betrayed by an envoy of the Federation. Due to all of this, Kirk is sentenced by a Klingon court, and the peace is at a shaky standstill.

In the end, it turns out that Chang himself was behind the attack and assassination, carried out by a cloaked ship under his command. So Chang turns out to be the villain mastermind after all, but there are others involved. Federation conspirators, as well as Romulan co-conspirators, who conspired along with their enemy to carry out a plot that would ensure peace does not happen. All due to racism and mistrust. Chang and his participants, who hated the humans of the Federation and did not want peace with them, conspired along with humans from that very Federation who felt the same way about Klingons. Chang was revealed as the mastermind behind the insidious plot, and strove to attack the Enterprise afterward to ensure that Kirk’s attempts to hold the peace together do not succeed.

What is noteworthy, and chilling in the dramatic sense of the story, is that the two sides who hated each so much as to avoid working for peace, worked quite well together for the sake of working to ensure war and continued hatred. I don't remember if Kirk said the following during his little speech at the end after saving the president of the Federation from assassination, but if the two sides could work together so well to keep the division between them, imagine how much they could accomplish together in peace. The last thing I want is for this thread to turn political (which it won't, I promise), but imagine if the Isrealis and Palestinians, the Kurds, Shiites, south and north Korea, and all other divisions throughout the world, could heed that message and follow it. A lot of people consider The Wrath of Khan the best Trek of the series, and it was one of the best no doubts there, but IMO The Undiscovered Country is the best and most important Trek of the entire series. May we all find the undiscovered country in our lifetimes. What a place that would be. And that brings me back to my statement in the first post, about war being the ultimate villian. The undiscovered country should be the ultimate hero and goal of all the world. But, no politics here. Back to movie villains!

Why did Chang work for me as a good villain? He was not some power hungry tyrant trying to take over the galaxy or conquer a planet, something seen over and over in story after story. No, he was a being who felt in many ways as humans of our reality do; so racially biased toward his (former) enemy, mistrusting and unforgiving, that he literally could not accept a peace with a race/government that he had considered an enemy for so long. This story was likely and probably inspired in part by the end of the Cold War and the start of peace and cooperation between Russia and the U.S. in the late 80’s, and it worked partly because you could relate to how combatants on both sides, or in the case of Russia and U.S., longtime mistrust and separation, felt accepting as friends the government and people of a nation we had so long mistrusted and partly feared due to the Cold War. Yes, Chang worked as a good villain because his motives, though immoral and evil, were relatable to how we did, could, or might feel in the same situation. He also worked well for me because his secret was not revealed until the end, and all along he was portrayed as a man who agreed with the peace and blamed Kirk for trying to disrupt it. All along, the story revealed and dwelled on Kirk’s racial feelings and mistrust, as well as hatred for his son’s death, and that led up to the revelation that Chang was not only the true enemy, but that the feelings revealed about Kirk were nearly the same feelings of Chang himself. All that Kirk was blamed for, his accused motives, actually prepared us to realize that they were Chang’s motives in reality. So, no real set up was needed to explain Chang’s motives and his plans, because by that point, all that was said about Kirk during his trial was easily attributed to Chang.

And so, that is why Chang worked well dramatically and logically as not only a villain but also a villain mastermind, and why his feelings, those revealed and those to be realized, carried the plot forward and kept the thought process (mine) going through it all. He was the plot itself in symbolic ways, his bias, mistrust, and hatred, in which the whole movie was centered on. There were 3 villains in that film to overcome. Chang himself, Kirk's inner demons, and of course the mistrust between the 2 sides, demons shared by those who sought to distrupt the peace process. The story brought a fitting end to the first, a growing change in the second, and a chance for change in the third.

And those are my feelings on General Chang.

I recently watched Apocolypse Now Redux, years after seeing the original version, and it wasn't only the inserted scenes which enabled me to view the film differently, but my own personal views regarding character conflict and drama.

Who was the villain in Apocolypse Now? Perhaps others more intelligent than I have long understood the story in the film as I have recently come to understand it, so feel free to consider this either new views or old news.

Who was the villain in Apocolypse Now? The answer to this question, as I see it, is what makes that movie a masterpiece of human drama.

Who was the villain in Apocolypse Now?
I do say the following as quoted earlier,

But that is not the point I'm getting at, though it is certainly connected. There is certainly a cause and effect in that quote's relation to the film, but it is not the answer I am seeking.

Captain Benjamin Willard was sent on a mission to kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz, and along the long journey up the river (or was it down?) he and the gunboat crew witnessed, engaged in, suffered from, caused some,of the horrors of war. War is the ultimate villian after all, but that is not the answer I am seeking to bring out.

Who was the villain in Apocolypse Now then? When Willard finally moved himself to fulfill his mission and go home, when he entered the living space of Walter Kurtz, when he raised the sword over his head before Kurtz and swung it down on his target, who was he really trying to kill?

What bothered Willard most is that he began, through his journey up the hellish war torn river, to understand Kurts, even to see himself in his place. He was trying to kill the side of himself that he saw in Kurts, his own potential to become Kurtz after the changes he endured through the war and his river journey. The river was shaped by the war, just as the men involved were shaped by it. But the point I was making was that in this example the villian was what Willard had become, what Kurtz had become, what Willard saw in Kurts that he realized was in him at that point.

I see it as cause and effect, a causality loop.