10 Movies That Ought to Have a Villain But Don't

Few films feel as dark or hopeless as Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence.

In the film, we follow android boy child David (Haley Joel Osment) on his harrowing and unrelenting journey from the cradle to the grave, across thousands of years. He encounters the worst of humanity along the way, who want to exploit him and harm him and can't find it in themselves to love him the way he does them. He journeys past the end of humanity and the end of the Earth as we know it, into the time of advanced AI lifeforms, looking and hoping for the happy ending he deserves. 

But in the face of all the cruelties and injustices David witnesses, and which we must witness being thrust upon him, there is no overarching schemer, no malicious villain pulling the strings.

We might want to blame his creator Professor Hobby (William Hurt), but he is just a man, an inventor trying to bring the next line of his product to life (so to speak). No, there's no bad guy. In the end, there are only humans and their emotional, financial and existential avarice.