Why Movie Villains Aren't What They Used To Be
5. Adding Depth
Then again, there are many definitions for what evil can be. While the actions of your antagonist may stand out as evil on the surface, it may make absolute sense when you consider everything that they’ve gone through in their life. There might be a bad person at the heart of the matter, but once you see the depth behind the mask, it might not be as black and white as you might think.
We may have seen this countless times on screen at this point, but the most recent version of doing it well has to be Thanos from the MCU. Yeah, at the heart of it all, Thanos has been the Grimace-looking not-that-nice guy who’d rather take an axe to half the universe rather than making more resources for the rest of the world.
That might seem like a pretty heinous action, but it all comes from a backstory of not being believed by his people. When you get a look into his past back on Titan, you see that there’s a lot of different facets to his character that don’t necessarily have to be all bad. It’s also important to give Gamora a bigger role in Thanos’ plan rather than make her the tortured daughter.
Sure, Gamora doesn’t mince words when it comes to killing her father, and even goes so far as to do it before everything is revealed to be a vision, but the fact that Thanos still shows compassion for his adoptive child is engaging. It's more than what you’d get if you saw your villain absent-mindedly stroking a cat or something.
In fact, that’s what made the movies of every movie buff’s youth so engaging. While you had the more cartoony villains accounted for, characters like Darth Vader from the original Star Wars have been much more intriguing to watch considering the more human side of the character. There might be a “bad guy” on the surface level, but the amount of inner turmoil carried on makes him feel like a man who has made a lot of mistakes in his life.
Some villains might seem evil beyond repair, but once you add depth to your character, it’s almost like there’s a spark of hope that these people can be redeemed.