I myself in the past on this very blog have repeated the common notion that having a great villain is a requirement for a great Superhero story. But a lot has happened to change my mind on that.
It would be pointless to go on about great Genre stories that have no villain at all like the third Pokémon movie or Star Trek IV or the book of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Because that's irrelevant to the argument that if there is a villain the villain needs to be a very engaging and/or entertaining character.
Now I do love great villains, from cartoon villains played by a charismatic actor having a great time hamming it up to complex nuanced psychological profiles. SSSS.Gridman provided one of each of those making it perhaps the best Anime of 2018 in the villain department.
But there is no story where every character is going to be a super engaging stand out character. I need some to be fun and/or interesting for me to get into a show or movie, but it's okay if not all of them are. Even some characters who have a lot of screen time and narrative importance in a given movie are basically just talking plot devices.
This post is about the fact that we tend to see the role of antagonist as one that's uniquely not allowed to be of lower priority. No one is confused when a Superhero film is well received in-spite of the love interest character not being all that highly regarded. But I'd argue the person we're supposed to believe the Hero is In Love With should be more important to get right then the person the Hero is trying to beat up. The old Batman movies got away with relegating Pat Hingle's Jim Gordon to just an exposition device, but when they get one of the villains wrong everyone loses their minds.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe was for awhile perceived as being pretty weak in the villain department besides Loki and maybe a few others. But those movies were massively successful in-spite of that and certain internet critics were pretty confused, lamenting that society has lost something in allowing villains to get stale.
Now over the course of phase three there is a perception that the MCU has been getting better in the villain department. I personally like some of the older MCU villains particularly Ultron, and am not as impressed with some of these highly praised recent ones, especially Killmonger and Hella. But that's not the point today.
I would argue that in the early years of the MCU general audiences and even some Comic readers didn't consider the lack of scene stealing villains a bug and maybe even saw it as a feature.
The 90s Batman movies were largely treated like episodes of the 60s TV Show just now on the big screen and separated by years instead of weeks, and so the fact that each movie had a different villain was treated as the main thing setting them apart from each other. And to a large extent the 2000s pre-MCU Marvel Superhero movies followed their example. When Batman Begins came along and the marketing largely underplayed the villains for the sake of selling it as Batman's Origin Story a lot of us thought things would be different. But low and behold for the sequels it was once again The Joker and Bane who were really selling them.
I think it's possible when the MCU got going many found it darn right refreshing that these Superhero films were not so villain driven, even if often the marketing was seemingly trying to be business as usual in this area. Even the MCU films that critics weren't so kind to still did well at the Box Office.
Thor: The Dark World is constantly treated by YT Video Essayists as among the worst of the MCU films, but for me it's the best Thor movie by far. And criticisms of the movie largely come down to finding Malekith a bland boring uninteresting villain with unexplained motives. I can't even remotely understand criticizing anything else about the film.
The movie isn't actually about Malekith, it's about Thor and his relationships with Loki and Jane and Odin. And in my opinion all of that is handled beautifully whether or not it was predictable. Malekith being just an external threat to advance that narrative is perfectly fine and I would possibly even have disliked screen time being wasted on trying to make him more sympathetic or understandable.
Ronin in the first Guardians of The Galaxy is viewed as being the exact same "problem" as Malekith yet it doesn't seem to have hurt the overall critical reception of the film nearly as much. In that film I think Ronin being a bland character was recognized as being actually thematically relevant, it contrasts him to the fun cast of quirky heroes being established, it even plays into how he's defeated at the end. And maybe the same idea was at play in using him in a minor role in Captain Marvel.
Malekith's blandness may not be so thematically justified but I'd certainly argue it's narrativly justified. He's someone who wants to destroy the Universe as we know it because he wants to eliminate all light and return existence to perpetual darkness. Would it really make sense for that to be a fun one liner dropping character? And knowing why he is like that or wants that would add nothing to what the film is actually about, it would only be a distraction.
Going outside of Comic Book Superhero movies I feel similarly about the aliens in Darling in The Franxx, and many of the villains of the Pokémon movies, and Count Dooku. Some Pokémon movies have great villains, like anyone connected to Team Rocket (even if that connection only exists in the Dub). But it's totally fine that the villain in Pokémon 2000 is just there to start the conflict and then become irrelevant, and that plenty of later ones were just basically that formula being recycled, because the villains are never what I watch a Pokémon movie for.
And maybe it's a problem that for so many Comic Book fans the villains are what they watch Superhero movies for?
Update July 3rd 2019: I have stumbled upon on old YouTube video that perhaps overlaps with the ideas of this discussion. Though I suspect they're critical of more Plot Device Characters then I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGtKCATsUuA
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