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* WARNING: No doubt there will be plenty of movie spoilers in this thread *
So a post in the Ratatouille thread got me thinking about what are some sympathetic movie villains. Characters that are definitely the bad guys, but you can understand with their motives.
The only one that immediately sprang to mind was HAL 9000 from 2001. He was psychotic, but only because reached an absurd (yet logical) solution to the problem of two conflicting orders.
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Ed Harris as Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel in "The Rock." Noble villainy at its' finest.
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I'll say it, cause somebody's got to. Annakin Skywalker in Episode Three. Sure, the acting sucks and he's just a whiny little punk you want to beat up, but he's still sympathetic.
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The villain from The Incredibles, whatever his name was. Tom Hanks' character in Catch Me If You Can.
I actually have zero sympathy for Anakin Skywalker in Episode III. I found him completely despicable.
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: I'll say it, cause somebody's got to. Annakin Skywalker in Episode Three. Sure, the acting sucks and he's just a whiny little punk you want to beat up, but he's still sympathetic.
But he's so STUPID.
The old movies claim you turn to the Dark Side out of it seeming "easy, seductive"
Anakin turned because he just wasn't very bright. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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I'm disturbed by how often I see people say that Buddy/Syndrome was "sympathetic".
He FORCED himself on Mr. Incredible right in the middle of a dangerous criminal situation. His inventions caused said situation to get far more destructive and dangerous than it otherwise would have been
Of course Mr. I is going to blow his top! The kid was a stupid punk who was going to get innocent people killed.
Then he goes on to murder HOW many super-heroes, just because he felt one treated him badly?
Then he allows missiles to strike a plane containing innocent children?
Then his "brilliant invention" turns out to be just as dangerous as the devices he built as a kid when freed from controlled conditions, putting how many millions of innocent people at risk?
Then he tries to kidnap and brainwash a baby?
Sympathetic? It was very obvious all his speeches about being "hurt" and "making things equal for everyone" were just a lot of hot air used to justify his selfishness and cruelty. I can't sympathize with him at all.
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From anime: Folken Fanel in The Vision of Escaflowne.
He does terrible, unspeakable things...but we learn exactly why he does those things, and almost understand why from his viewpoint such cruelty was justified.
It helps that he's truly compassionate and fair to those beneath him, and is anguished by how much pain he's caused.
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quote:He FORCED himself on Mr. Incredible right in the middle of a dangerous criminal situation. His inventions caused said situation to get far more destructive and dangerous than it otherwise would have been
Well, duh. He was a kid, and he was well-intended. I can't count the number of times I tried to "help" my parents as a kid and ended up making the task more difficult or actually causing one of them physical harm.
His speeches about equalization obviously weren't aimed at promoting the common man to the level of superhero, they were aimed at bringing heroes down. His reasoning and intention behind wanting to destroy heroes everywhere resonated with me, because if my parents had been less understanding about me screwing up so much as a kid, I could easily imagine myself feeling the same way.
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Tom Ripley in Ripley's Game (I know there are other Ripley movies, but I haven't seen them). The character is despicable, but you find yourself rooting for him anyway. Perhaps it's not so much "sympathetic" as it is "seductive."
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Puffy: Just because he is sympathetic does not mean he can't become dispicable. I sympathized with his mental journey that turned him into Syndrome. I don't sympathize with just how evil he became.
But come on in the deleted scene where the baby sitter asks him what the S on his costume stood for and he said, "Sitter" and then explained that he couldn't walk around with a costume with the letters "BS" for obvious reasons, that you didn't snicker. Funny villains are sympathetic. "I'm geeking out just thinking about it!"
From Anime: Testuo from Akira is a sympathetic villain, at least at the very end. That movie was kinda weird IMO
Not from Anime: Mel Gibson's character in "Payback."
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Dr. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, Hannibal Rising. You don't find out why he's sympathetic until the last movie, though.
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vonk, personally, I don't think any character in Fight Club was sympathetic, hero or villain. I can understand Tyler's motivation, but I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.
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Archibald Cunningham from Rob Roy...he's not very sympathetic, but eventually you learn his background and it's not very surprising he turns out to be a right bastard.
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Not that challenging his brother's pacifism until he is forced to kill someone is particularly nice or that he wasn't particularly sadistic to do it...
But in the end Knives is right about something-- death is simply a part of life. It's Tolstoy against Nietsche-- we can either act and kill the spider or not act and let the grasshopper (or was it a butterfly? or whatever it was...) die. Even saving the other bug kills the spider eventually. Whatever you do, when confronted with a deadly conflict, you kill. Even if you do nothing.
Edit to add: my sympathetic villain from Pirates is Norrington.
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: I'll say it, cause somebody's got to. Annakin Skywalker in Episode Three. Sure, the acting sucks and he's just a whiny little punk you want to beat up, but he's still sympathetic.
I agree. I don't think he was simply stupid. I think initially he wanted to do the right thing, but he let his pride get in the way and made a series of increasingly bad decisions. And he absolutely was seduced by the easiness of the dark side.
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I'd like to put forth the theory that almost every good movie has a sympathetic villain. Simply because it's most realistic. I think most of the people throughout history who are widely considered 'evil' thought their actions were justifiable, and the fact that they thought they were doing a net good makes them sympathetic. Still horrible, of course, but sympathetic.
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: vonk, personally, I don't think any character in Fight Club was sympathetic, hero or villain. I can understand Tyler's motivation, but I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.
-Bok
Well, you obviously haven't been disillusioned enough. Give it time. Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Heh, y'know, I enjoyed that movie, but I never really thought about it from the angle I read from your post, Bok.
I guess I accepted right away, as part of the movie, that one of the premises involved was that the world was a pretty crappy place. I mean, for Fight Club, accepting that is sort of like accepting weird mutations for watching X-Men, right?
But now that I think about it...heh, Tyler Durden and his ego/alter-ego seemed to be pretty independant, self-starting people. So why are they so angry that the world and life has left them down? Don't they realize that life is what you make it? It seems they do realize that, sort of...but only partially.
Am I making any sense?
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I think they do realize that life is what you make of it. They are rebelling against what they (or he) feel is a sterile, predetermined path set out by our family, jobs and media. They feel that they've been misled all of their lives into believing what is or is not a good life, or the American dream.
In other words, they aren't angry that the world or life has let them down, they're angry that they've missed the meaning and quality of the world and life because of the actions and attitudes of contemporary American society. The attitudes and actions that propegate the idea that an individual's life quality is tied up in what they own, what they do for a living, how much money they make, who their family is, etc.
I think that they realize that life is what you make of it, and are putting that into action in a way that breaks the boundaries of commonly accepted thought/action.
Also, I don't think the movie required that you accept a false reality for it to work. It is set in the real world with real reactions, Palahniuk merely percieves things to be worse than others. I suppose the supsension in disbelief is that Palahniuk's preception is a valid one.
Hmm, am I making any sense?
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You are, Rakeesh, but life is only partly what you make of it. There's a lot of stuff that happens to you which is totally out of your hands and it can pile up really quickly... and when it does, no one wants to give you a chance to recover.
When I moved to South Carolina, I found that my bank (Washington Mutual) didn't have any branches for hundreds of miles around. It took me over a week of searching to find a bank that would let me open an account because of my poor credit rating. I'm talking about a savings account here.
So a divorce and 4 months of unemployment was *that* close to making me completely unable to conduct business in today's world (no one would cash my pay check either, including the bank it was drawn on-- can they even legally do that?) when the appropriately named Bank of Traveler's Rest finally gave me a chance.
So yeah... I can totally relate to wanting to destroy the financial infrastructure to get the have-nots a fighting chance against the haves, who do everything to slant the rules their way and make sure they "have" more.
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I agree with the idea that there are no heroes or villains in Fight Club. Durden was a strange character and the closest thing the movie had to an antagonist, but I wouldn't call him a villain.
Maybe the buildings that got blown up in the end. Them was some evil looking buildings, yo.
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I can understand the motive, as I noted, but the characters, themselves, were pretty despicable in, well, character.
Note that the only character that gets any sort of redemption (and of course, being Fight Club, it's a sort of ironic, after-the-fact sort of redemption) was a character that died.
Nothing the characters actually do is redemptive, which probably is just reinforcement of the idea early on that all those support groups that give you a kind of redemption, really don't.
Even Tyler Durden, Mr. Independent, is not only dependent on his snivelly side, but what's the first thing he does? Start a (demented) group.
quote:I don't think any character in Fight Club was sympathetic
That's how I feel.
quote:I guess I accepted right away, as part of the movie, that one of the premises involved was that the world was a pretty crappy place. I mean, for Fight Club, accepting that is sort of like accepting weird mutations for watching X-Men, right?
That could be my problem.
I would call Durden a villain.
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OK, maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of the thread, but it's not "villains who have some explanation for their villany" but it's "villains who have good, logical, valid reasons for doing what they're doing, but have been forced into methods which are not palatable". By which token I exclude about 2/3 of what people have said.
Hanibal Lecter? Maybe he has his reasons, but they aren't valid. Darth Vader? Maybe Anikin started out trying to do something good, but his actions which made him villainous aren't directed at that good. How does killing all the apprentices help him save Padme? Knives Milions? Maybe he was right about death, but his motivation was revenge on his brother and the whole world because he wasn't human.
The Operative, yes, Francis Hummel, yes, Gollum, ok,
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quote:Hanibal Lecter? Maybe he has his reasons, but they aren't valid.
Did you see Hanibal Rising? He has valid, sympathetic reasons for becoming the monster he is. I don't know if he's sympathetic in the other three movies, but in that one at least I definitely think he is. I was rooting for him for most of the movie.
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quote:He has valid, sympathetic reasons for becoming the monster he is.
No, he does suffer a tragedy that turns him into the monster he is, but that doesn't make it a good reason for choosing to eat people later in his life.
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I guess that's just not how I interpreted it. To my mind he suffered a horrible contastrophy at the hands of evil men during WWII. His family was gunned down and he had to watch as the men ate his sister, not to mention him eating some as well. I thinks that's enough to cause deep psychological trauma. Later when he was hunting for the killers I felt very sympathetic, and wanted him to find them. When he ate them I took that as a psychological break, brought on by the fight against his nightmare enemies. I didn't think he just chose to eat them 'cause he thought it would be cool, but because in his mind that was appropriate to the level of crime they commited. I can also sympathise with that. They did eat his sister after all. YMMV.
Edit: also, I didn't think the villains decision has to be "good" for them to be sympathetic. I thought it was 'I can sympathise with the decisions they made, even if I don't think they were the right ones.'
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quote:Originally posted by vonk: I don't know about the others, but...
quote:Hanibal Lecter? Maybe he has his reasons, but they aren't valid.
Did you see Hanibal Rising? He has valid, sympathetic reasons for becoming the monster he is. I don't know if he's sympathetic in the other three movies, but in that one at least I definitely think he is. I was rooting for him for most of the movie.
Ewww I wouldn't call what happened to him valid. Sure it was horrible and it effected him deeply.
Spoilers*
But the whole point of the movie was that Gong Li's character, who loved him, and he loved her tried to get him to stop and settle down with her. The very end of the movie is the culmination of everything where he basically chooses to torture and eat the last man who had crossed him and in doing so forsook Gong Li the rest of his life. That choice set him up in his life of crime because he did not stop with the men who had murdered his sister, he went on to kill and eat others the rest of his life.
I mean look at what he could accomplish when he was focused. He became a doctor AND managed to track down, stalk, and kill every single one of the 4 men. He kept saying, "I can't stop, I made a promise to my dead sister." Can you imagine that line coming out of the Hopkinesk Hannibal? He could have put a bullet in the head of the last man and run off with Gong Li but no he had to stay and carve into the guys chest and to eat him.
Hannibal is NOT a sympathetic villain to me, interesting yes, efficient yes, tortured yes, forced to be who he is no.
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Huh, it's very interesting to see how different people interpret movies. I like this thread.
And I just want to repeat this part: I didn't think the villains decision has to be "good" for them to be sympathetic. I thought it was 'I can sympathise with the decisions they made, even if I don't think they were the right ones.'
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quote:Originally posted by vonk: Huh, it's very interesting to see how different people interpret movies. I like this thread.
And I just want to repeat this part: I didn't think the villains decision has to be "good" for them to be sympathetic. I thought it was 'I can sympathise with the decisions they made, even if I don't think they were the right ones.'
Right but there is a difference in sympathizing with the added weight of a specific circumstance and sympathizing with everything a person does based on the strength of one or even several events. I personally can't think of a single event that effects EVERYTHING I do.
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It is not a stretch for me to believe that the trauma Hanibal experienced during the war would be enough to effect his phsychological development and his mental state for the rest of his life. I think that if the event is traumatic enough, as his was, it is enough to change who you are. He was not the same boy after the war as he was before. (IMO)
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vonk: OK but enough that you think the sheer magnitude of everything he did was mostly if not fully justified? For me I just think the majority of what he did was still a result of his decisions that he was able to make freely just like anybody esle.
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