Why Movie Villains Aren't What They Used To Be

As the old saying goes, a hero can only be as good as his villain.

For as much as we like to see someone standing for the side of the angels, fighting for their cause, there are plenty of examples of actors revelling in everything that makes these baddies so... well... bad.

On the other hand, the entire concept of "bad" has gone in a bit of a different direction of late.

Ever since the turn of the century, a good number of villains in the mainstream haven’t come in the form you’d expect them to. Whether it be the drastic change in style or just your standard narrative, every antagonist tends to have a lot more under the hood than what you’d normally expect from someone who fits the role.

Our childhoods may be full of handlebar moustache-style villains, but there are three things that separate the villain from the hero nowadays:

Evil, depth, and perspective.

It goes without saying that to be a villain, you have to have some sense of evil as part of your character.

As much as some actors yuck it up onscreen, each villain throughout the history of storytelling has always had a motivation to inflict some type of harm on our hero. While there may be some specifics that go into every one of these characters, we started to see a different type of evil around the end of the ‘00s.

After a little film called the Dark Knight dazzled the screens of cinemas across the world, fans got a taste of what evil could really look like behind a camera. We have gotten to know the Joker as kids when we read the comics or watched the animated series, but this portrayal by Heath Ledger was something more than your average clown.

Complete with some of the darkest humor imaginable, this Joker became more of a terrorist than your average movie villain, whose motivations were more steeped in anarchy than the actual enjoyment of causing harm.

The argument made by Joker throughout the film almost makes it sound like he’s the inevitable conclusion of what humankind has come to in the modern age.

As movies went forward, the mainstream media became fixated on how to create a villain as engaging as Ledger, which made for a lot of films centered around terror rather than something you’d see in your average action movie.

Look no further than the revamping of the Bond franchise with Daniel Craig, where most of the adversaries seemed to cater more towards outright terror rather than developing some grand scheme just for the hell of it.

Compare this to something like the revamping of Indiana Jones in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. While there was nothing necessarily too wrong with the portrayal of Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko, the generic introduction of yet another baddie for Indy to fight just added more fuel to what was already a disappointing movie.

There might be a lot of material to be brought out of the typical villain formula, but after the turn of the century, you had to start looking at the entire concept of evil through a different lens.