10 Innocent Movie Characters Who Got Totally Unnecessary Deaths
Jurassic World's Zara got done dirty.
Tone is so incredibly important in movies, that whatever the vibe of a film is, there should be a consistency to it unless the filmmaker intentionally decides to betray it for dramatic effect.
But sometimes they get the balance so horribly wrong, particularly where character deaths are concerned.
It's simply a given that innocent people are going to die in movies, as they do in real-life tragedies, but how it's depicted makes all the difference. And in the case of these 10 innocent movie characters, they all died deaths that are at best unnecessary and at worst absolutely, savagely cruel.
Inspired by this recent Reddit discussion on the subject, these movies all introduced us to affable, harmless characters who were utterly undeserving of the grim fates that befell them in gnarly detail.
This in turn resulted in intense mood whiplash for many viewers, feeling that for better or worse the death scene wasn't "justified," no matter how well-crafted or impressively gory it might've been.
Everyone's got their own preferences about what qualifies as a "deserved" or "necessary" movie death, but these ones in particular have sparked a ton of debate and discourse...
10. Gordon Silberman - 2012
Roland Emmerich's disaster flick 2012 pulls the typical blockbuster movie gambit of giving our hero, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a romantic rival who must, of course, be brutally killed off in order to clear the way for his reconciliation with his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet).
The character in question is Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy), a plastic surgeon and amateur pilot who is presented as a thoroughly decent, likeable guy throughout the movie.
He's far from the typical a**hole boyfriend character we can't wait to see die, and yet, he suffers a bafflingly horrific death all the same.
In the movie's third act, Gordon slips while trying to enter one of the arks intended to save the human race, and despite Jackson's efforts to save him, he gets dragged into the gears that control the ark's loading gate.
Worse still, Gordon is dragged in feet-first, meaning he has agonising seconds to comprehend that he's being turned to pulp before his vital organs are actually destroyed.
Though not gory in the slightest - it being a PG-13 movie and all - it's a strangely nauseating demise for such an appealing character. And it's made all the worse given that Kate spends all of about 10 minutes mourning him before locking lips with her ex again. Yikes.