Hollywood should remember what villains really look like – Washington Examiner
The article discusses the evolving portrayal of villains in Hollywood films, particularly highlighting a trend of avoiding clear antagonists in contemporary narratives. It uses the example of “Top Gun: Maverick,” where the foreign adversaries are depicted as faceless, illustrating a broader reluctance within the industry to identify real-world villains. Historically, Hollywood effectively portrayed recognizable villains during and after WWII, like Nazis and KGB agents during the Cold War, but this has changed in the post-cold War era, where enemies are less defined.
The article argues that political correctness has led to a sanitized portrayal of adversaries, with instances such as the 2002 adaptation of “The Sum of All Fears,” where Arab terrorists were replaced with European businessmen as villains. It also points out the influence of China on Hollywood, as studios avoid depicting the Chinese government as antagonists due to their notable market power. The pressure has led to alterations in films, such as changing the original Chinese villains to North Korean ones in “Red Dawn.”
the article suggests that while there are still genuine threats in the world, Hollywood’s tendency to avoid specifying villains is a troubling trend that hampers storytelling potential.
Hollywood should remember what villains really look like
In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character must train a team of hotshot pilots to take out a facility in an unnamed country with snow-covered mountains. Were they training for a mission in Switzerland? Hollywood was so wary of having any villains identified in this one that pilots from the generic foreign adversary were literally faceless. Maverick was actually a better film than the original Top Gun —rewatch the original before complaining — but one aspect of the original that far surpassed the sequel was the thrill of seeing Cruise flip the bird to his clearly identified Russian adversaries.
This is, unfortunately, but one example of a larger trend of Hollywood being unable or unwilling to specify who actually are the villains out there in the world any more. It’s a sharp break from the past. In the 1940s and 1950s, both during and after World War II, Nazis were clear villains, rightly portrayed as scheming, cruel, and duplicitous. During the Cold War, Hollywood correctly saw the Soviet Union as the world’s true bad guy, led by the KGB. In dozens of movies from the 1960s through the 1990s, the KGB was a nefarious force, looking to harm America and its allies. In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the KGB brainwashes an American soldier to be an assassin. In Avalanche Express (1979), KGB agents try to stop a Soviet general, played by Robert Shaw, from defecting. In No Way Out (1987), Kevin Costner plays a Navy officer searching for a KGB mole within the U.S. government. Once the Cold War ended, KGB agents showed up less frequently on screen, but for three decades, they were formidable, ruthless, and detestable villains.
In the post-Cold War era, Hollywood dropped the KGB and has groped ever since for discernible baddies. Movies set in the past — think Indiana Jones — can, of course, always keep using Nazis. But for decades now, Hollywood has been largely unable to identify any group that makes for good villain fodder when stories are set in the present, even though there are real and openly declared enemies of the West.
The problem isn’t — anyone surveying the world should be able to discern — that there aren’t actually any evil people out there anymore. But because of political correctness, all kinds of reliable bad guys have been dismissed. This was most visible in the 2002 film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears. Hollywood changed the bestselling book’s villains, Arab terrorists, into a cabal of right-wing European business guys.
Today, both parties agree that China is the “pacing threat.” Nevertheless, in recent years, as the journalist Eric Schwartzel chronicled ably in his 2022 book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China exercises so much power over Hollywood studios that the studios can’t ever show the Chinese state security services as villains. The bad guys who take over America in the 2012 remake of Red Dawn were originally the Chinese, but Chinese pressure led to the film being reedited to make North Koreans the invaders. Something similar happened in Olympus Has Fallen, in which North Koreans carry out a well-planned attack on the White House. In one particularly egregious example of undue deference to China, the recent female spy thriller The 355 had a CIA traitor as the villain, while the Chinese state security services saved the day. The Chinese, meanwhile, have no problem making Americans the villains in their films.
Even though we keep hearing that we have reached “peak woke,” there’s little evidence that this pernicious trend is abating. One of Netflix’s top 2024 movies, and one of its tops for all time as well, was Carry-On, which is a serviceable airport action thriller in which the bad guys — minor spoiler alert — are revealed to be hired by the defense contractors who are trying to make it seem like the Russians are the bad guys. Memo to Netflix: the Vladimir Putin-led Russians are the bad guys. No one has to execute a false-flag plot to make it seem as if they are bad.
Netflix is a consistently bad actor in this realm. In its Knives Out murder mystery series, it telegraphs the identity of the killers by making them white males. It, of course, employs very diverse casts, but none of them, firmly outfitted in plot armor, could ever be considered the killer. When Wake Up Dead Man comes out in late 2025, detective Benoit Blanc can make his job easier simply by eliminating characters who aren’t white men as suspects. And then there is the egregious Die Hard-on-a-floating-missile-defense-base Interceptor, which was a No. 1 hit on Netflix in 2022. In this film, the villains were white southern members of the U.S. military aiming to destroy the United States.
Perhaps this is a problem that is worse at the streaming services, which have not one- but two-track lefty influences, from both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal recently revealed how Amazon can’t move forward with the next James Bond film, as it can’t satisfy the Broccoli family, which owns the rights to the character, that Amazon knows how to portray him. According to the outlet, a woke Amazon executive even said, “I’ll be honest. I don’t think James Bond is a hero.” Don’t expect the Broccolis to give Amazon the green light anytime soon.
Hollywood’s villain problem is not without cost. Children raised on movies with these awful and wrong-headed ideas then go to college and pronounce America, Israel, and Western civilization the bad guys, not the real enemies we face in this world — the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia and its client states, Islamist regimes and proxy terrorist armies, authoritarian communist governments from North Korea to Venezuela to Cuba, and other actually existing evil forces.
Journalist Evan Gershkovich, writing an expose after his release from captivity by Russia, recently identified the DKRO, Russia’s Department of Counterintelligence Operations, as the unit that unjustly imprisoned him. Beyond that, the DKRO is also involved in all sorts of nefarious doings on behalf of Putin. Here, Gershkovich gave America an undeniable bad guy once again. Perhaps it can fill the position that the KGB did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
And the DKRO is only one example. Today we face a world with many villains seeking to do us harm. But our greatest threat is an American elite that not only fails to recognize them but sometimes even sides with them. Hollywood needs to focus on true villains, such as the DKRO, rather than manufacturing the same supervillains in the business and defense contractor world. The result would be that we’d get both good action movies and our moral compass back.
Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and the author of The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.
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