Some of this can be put down to a laudable attempt to step away from simplistic narratives concerning white hats vs. the black hats. As The Guardian pointed out last week, we’ve seen more darker-tinged heroes like “Suicide Squad” in mainstream cinema in recent years, and more subversions of the notion of super-villainy, including family movies like “Despicable Me” and “Megamind.” And if you were being really generous, you could suggest that some of it comes from a greater level of nuance. There are fewer truly dastardly villains, because there’s more effort to understand the motivations of, say, Toby Kebbell’s twisted ape challenger in “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes” or Cate Blanchett’s wicked stepmother in “Cinderella” (both characters are among the better recent bad guys in film).
To some extent, you can also credit (or blame) the diminishing of villains to Christopher Nolan. Early superhero movies like the Tim Burton/ Joel Schumacher ‘Batman’ films were driven much more by the villain than by the hero, but when Nolan rebooted the franchise, he broke some new ground by making an entry in the genre that was more interested in its hero than its bad guys (even Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” films, which helped pave the way, come most to life when its bad guys are onscreen: see Willem Dafoe going full Gollum as the Green Goblin in the first Spidey film, or Alfred Molina as Dr. Octopus in “Spider-Man 2”).
Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow and, when finally revealed as the antagonist, Liam Neeson’s Ra’s Al Ghul are fine in “Batman Begins,” but they’re essentially functional: they are there because they’re thematically convenient and because our hero needs someone to oppose rather than because they’d look good on a poster. Nolan had more time to develop his Batman and actually make a character that can often be dull be interesting, and it felt utterly refreshing at the time.
Focusing on heroes, particularly first time at bat, is understandable, and Marvel writer Stephen Markus defended the shift away from villainy in an interview with Joblo. “I get the criticism, but the early phases were all origin stories. It tends to create a similar villain. When it is no longer an origin story, I think you might have a little bit more freedom to create different villains,” he explained.
But in truth, Hollywood’s had something of a villain vacuum for nearly thirty years. For years, spy actioners and the like could easily find candidates thanks to the Cold War. But when the Berlin Wall came down, 007 and the like were left without an obvious villain to fight, and soon bad guys were found lurking in evil corporations, secret organizations or corrupt government officials (it’s notable that Jason Bourne, in the franchise that redefined spy movies for the 2000s, has always faced his greatest threats from the CIA).
The world had a villain in real life from 2001 onwards, when Osama Bin Laden became the globe’s most wanted man. But with terrorism hitting all too close to home, and worries from many that it could be seen as racist to deploy Middle Eastern archetypes as antagonists in movies (worries that proved to be pretty accurate with this year’s “London Has Fallen,” in which Gerard Butler tells a terrorist to “go back to Fuckheadistan”), action movies have mostly shied away from using Al Qaeda and more recently ISIS as fictional threats —it’s hard to make that fun. Instead, we got Christoph Waltz in “Spectre” or, in probably the very worst example of this tendency, Michael Nyqvist in “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” characters who are almost nothing on the page, who feel small and petulant, and who are left to talented actors to try and enliven, often with little success.
Villains reflect the times in which they’re created, and the films with the most interesting antagonists of late have reflected that. Justin Marks and Jon Favreau’s interpretation of Shere Khan saw him not as a base animal, but as a protectionist and isolationist deeply afraid of the outsider (sound familiar?). Our increasingly divided political system has led to two films that pit beloved superheroes against each other (one more successfully than the other).
And unexpectedly, the villain of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” had fascinating real-world echoes. Kylo Ren is an antisocial loner with rage issues who likes to wear black, coming across as much as the star of Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need To Talk About Kylo” as he does a super-villain. But he’s also a radicalized young man torn between the values of his parents and those of a sinister mentor, and we’re surprised that the echoes of the kind of young person that makes up much of the membership of ISIS hasn’t been commented on more.
But the vast majority of modern blockbusters see villains become either dull megalomaniacs that even great actors can’t save (see Oscar Isaac in “X-Men: Apocalypse”) or walking portals in the sky. “Suicide Squad,” a movie ostensibly about villains, is an example of the latter, wasting both its principal villain and the occasional fleeting appearance from Jared Leto’s Joker.
Hopefully better things are to come. Seeing a great villain vanquished is one of the most cathartic qualities a story can provide, and in dark times such as these, with Donald Trump a nominee of one of the major political parties in the U.S., Vladimir Putin stronger than ever, racism on the rise, and ISIS one of the greatest threats to the world since the Nazis, that kind of catharsis can be a powerful thing. At least writers and filmmakers have plenty of inspiration, we suppose…