Villains Who Were Right All Along

Cracked.com has a good writeup on nine movie villains who weren’t exactly the simple badguys they’re generally understood to be. I think they nailed it with Ed Rooney, Senator Robert Kelly, Carl Anheuser, and  General Hummel, and at least make interesting cases for the Wicked Witch of the West, the Matrix-bots and Sauron.

As is often noted, almost nobody ever actually sees themselves as the bad guy. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Jim Jones, Woodrow Wilson, Osama and many others are clearly seen as villains… but they nevertheless attracted large numbers of followers who were fully aware of the ideology and actions that we seen as villainous… and were perfectly happy with it.

But there is a different form of villain I’d love to see more of. Let’s take the James Bond flick “Moonraker.” (I know the movie sucks on pretty much every level, but it was a favorite of mine from childhood and I still find it entertaining as hell, so bite me.) In it, Hugo Drax plays an industrialist (Boo! Hiss! Dirty capitalist!!!) who builds his own space program including a fleet of space shuttles and magically builds a city in space without anybody catching on, and plans to wipe out all humans on Earth and start again. OK, that’s pretty villainous. But imagine a somewhat different take on the story. Eliminate the Surprisingly Toxic Gas aspect, but keep the missing Space Shuttles. Hell, ramp it up. Space technologists from around the planet have disappeared in large numbers; astronomers and such have been having a really bad run of luck with heart attacks, bad brakes and occasional lead poisoning. Vast sums of money seem to have been pilferred by shell corporations and mysterious individuals that may be related to Drax Industries. Hell, even SPECTRE has come out of the woodwork, doing all manner of nasty thievings and kidnappings and such, and again it vaguely points to Drax Industries. James Bond does his investigation thing and does his “get caught by the bad guy and get him to monologue his evil scheme thing,” but instead of a monologue, the bad guy goes straight to tossing him into the Unnecessarily Complex Execution Machine. Bond, being Bond, escapes, hitches a ride on a Shuttle, and rides up to the space city, where he sees a rather larger space city, with a *lot* of secret space shuttles. Gets himself caught again. This time, the Bad Guy decides to do the monologue. And just why has Hugo Drax murdered, extorted, stolen in order to build his space city? Look at the monitor: that’s a ten-mile-wide nickel-iron asteroid on a collision course with Earth, with a velocity of 70 kilometers per second. The governments of Earth wouldn’t look at the evidence of onrushing DOOM, so the astronomers who discovered it went to private industry in the form of Hugo Drax… who used his company, along with whatever other resources he could scrape up, to build a giant Space Ark (which will either stay in Earth orbit for eventual re-colonization of Earth, or is due to boost to Mars for terraforming… whatever).

Here James Bond, Hero, would be presented with a bad guy who has done bad things… because that was the only way to save mankind. If Bond does anything to interfere, he knows that he will reduce the shipments of supplies, seeds, critters, people, etc. that the space colonists will need to survive. The only way to save the world is to let the villain win and get his way.

Now, wouldn’t *that* be a much more compelling villain?