10 Movie Villains Who Deserved MUCH WORSE

It's difficult to nail down exactly where the titular character sits on the hero/villain scale in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. While Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss was undeniably the antagonist as revealed in the third act, on a much larger scale it was J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) himself, who ushered the entire world into a new age of warfare.

He had been dubbed the most important man in the world, and judging by the fact that he told Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) that he believed those at Los Alamos may have triggered a chain reaction without end to destroy the planet, it seems he saw himself as the villain in his own story.

Though the third and final hour of the film is dedicated to an investigation into Oppenheimer's threat to the country, resulting in him having his security clearance revoked, a flash-forward to 1963 shows the man receiving the Enrico Fermi Award from President Lyndon B. Johnson, essentially being rewarded and recognised for his contributions to science.

In reality, the Manhattan Project that Oppenheimer led at Los Alamos killed almost 200,000 Japanese people, the majority of whom would have been innocent. He may not have had final say over when and where the H-bomb was used, but it was he who made it possible. Oppenheimer had become death, the destroyer of worlds, and anyone else who was responsible for as many deaths as he was would have seen far worse consequences.