My Greatest Failure / Film

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• In Alien³, this is how Clemens got to Fury 161. He was previously a doctor, but he got addicted to morphine in medical school. When an industrial accident caused the deaths of a lot of workers, he was called in. Eleven people died not because of their injuries, but because he was so out of his head that he prescribed the wrong dosage of painkillers. He was jailed for seven years on Fiorina, and his medical license was reduced to a Class C. When the facility was due to be closed down but the inmates didn't want to leave, he elected to stay on as the medical officer. He got seven years for the act, but he considers this a light sentence.
• Avengers: Endgame:
  • Everyone feels this way about Thanos killing half the universe, but Thor has it the worst. At the end of the previous movie, he struck a lethal blow on Thanos. For all intents and purposes he had won, but he decided to gloat instead of finishing Thanos off. This gave Thanos a chance to use the Infinity Stones and kill half the universe. Five years later, Thor is a fat, drunken wreck who does nothing but watch TV and intimidate a teenage gamer online.
  • Tony has one of his own: his inability to stop Thanos cost Peter Parker, the young boy who he had taken under his wing and who became like a surrogate son to him, his life. After returning to Earth, the emotional trauma he suffered from Peter's death, combined with physical weakness upon his return and concern over the family he starts with Pepper in the five years since, leaves him reluctant to help the Avengers again until he resolves to try and bring Peter back.
• In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, before the events of the film, Clark has the battle of Metropolis, blaming himself for not being able to prevent all the death and destruction that Zod and his followers caused, while Bruce has both the death of Robin, murdered sometime before the events of the film by The Joker and Harley Quinn, and the destruction of the Wayne Financial building in Metropolis during Zod's attack, which fuels a lot of his hatred for Superman. During the film itself, Clark's greatest failure becomes the destruction of the US Capitol building and the deaths of everyone inside, since he blames himself for not seeing the bomb that caused the destruction (although Lois Lane discovers that Lex Luthor hid the bomb behind lead, meaning that Clark wouldn't have spotted it even if he was looking for it), while Bruce's becomes allowing his fear and mistrust of Clark to become hatred and cruelty, allowing Lex to manipulate him and making him partly responsible for Clark's death. However, Bruce decides to learn from his mistakes and reach out to the other metahumans in friendship, bringing them together as a team.
• A Classic Horror Story: Riccardo's is that, in his career as a doctor, he lost a patient. As a result, his life was ruined, his wife left him and took his daughter, and won't let him see her.
• In Day of the Evil Gun, Forbes eventually reveals that the reason he is hellbent on accompanying Warfield on his quest to rescue Angie and her children, despite Warfield not wanting him there, is beacuse he was on his way to see Angie on the day she was taken and, when he saw the Apaches attacking the ranch, he hid in a ravine and watched as the Apaches captured Angie and the two girls and rode off. Even though he knows he could not have saved them, and trying to do so would almost certainly have got him killed, the guilt of his inaction haunts him.
• In Die Hard, Al Powell admits in the movie that he can't shoot a gun anymore since he shot a kid with a plastic gun. By the end of the movie, however, Al ends up killing The Dragon with a gun.
• Disturbing the Peace: After accidentally wounding his partner during a hostage situation and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, Texas Ranger Jim Dillon moves to the small town of Horse Cave, Kentucky, where he works as an unarmed police officer assisted by Deputy Matt. Learning of his former partner's death ten years later, he falls into a deep depression.
• In The Expendables, Tool tells Ross about a time in Bosnia during his mercenary days when he came across a woman about to throw herself off a bridge. He mentions he could have at least tried to save her, but since he was more concerned with just keeping himself alive until he could be evacuated, he simply turned and walked away, hearing her body hit the water as he left.
  Tool: She was gone, and after takin' all them lives, here was one that I coulda saved, but I didn't. And what I realized later on was if I'da saved that woman, I mighta saved what was left of my soul.
• The reason why Rose abandoned the ghost-hunting business in Extra Ordinary (2019) is because she forgot part of an incantation, resulting in her father being possessed by both a haunted pothole and a dog (It Makes Sense in Context), leading to her father getting run over by a bus.
• In Eyes of a Stranger: When they were both young children, Jane failed to keep a watch on her little sister, Tracy, leading to the latter being kidnapped, raped, and rendered blind, deaf and dumb. Guilt over this failure shapes the adult Jane's life, as she feels obligated fo sacrifice her own personal life to attend to her sister. Jane gets a second shot at this moral conundrum as her reckless actions during the film cause a second Serial Rapist to attack Tracy while Jane is again failing to watch over her sister, but thankfully this time Jane is able to save her sister from being raped.
• Fear City: Matt Rossi is still reeling over the accidental death of one of his opponents when he was a boxer.
• In 42, this is the real reason why Branch Rickey tirelessly fights for integrating Jackie Robinson into the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey's lifelong love of baseball was spoiled when he was unable to recruit a talented African-American player due to segregation.
• In Gang of Roses, Rachel cannot forgive herself for the last bank robbery her gang pulled, which resulted in an innocent bystander being killed and her having (literal) blood on her hands.
• Halloween Kills: Officer Frank Hawkins has two from the same night in 1978. First, when trying to shoot Michael Myers, he missed and accidentally fatally wounded his partner, Pete McCabe. Second, when Michael was captured, he stopped Dr. Loomis from shooting him and decided to arrest him instead, insisting he was still a human being. In the present, when Michael escaped from captivity and went on another killing spree, Hawkins expressed regret that his act of kindness was wasted on a monster like Michael.
• Instinct: Powell, after living in a gorilla group, has come to loathe the fact that he'd once captured a gorilla he named Goliath. He now lives in a zoo, making no attempt to escape even when the door's opened as he's broken by captivity.
• Jason's Lyric: The main protagonist, Jason, spent all his life blaming himself for accidentally killing his father that he keeps protecting and saving his troubled brother, Joshua (despite he is implied to have been aware of being taken the advantage of) and almost sacrificing his happiness with Lyric. But, he eventually chooses his girlfriend over his brother after she almost died at Joshua's hand (by accident) as well as earning his mom's blessing for his relationship with Lyric.
• The Karate Kid (2010): Mr. Han's car accident that killed his wife and son.
• The Killer (1989): Ah Jong/Jeffrey Chow felt this way after he accidentally blinded Jenny with a muzzle flash at the nightclub at the beginning of the movie and towards the child who he brought to a hospital after she took a bullet from one of the people out to kill him during the shootout at the beach.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service: Harry failed to properly pat down a mook prisoner to see if he was carrying a grenade, so when the prisoner attempts to blow up himself and the rest of the Kingsmen in the room, Eggsy's father pushed Harry out of the way and jumped on the grenade himself, taking the blast. Made even worse given how he was Harry's protégé.
• Mandalay: Dr. Burton's problems with alcohol have led him to betray his Hippocratic Oath at least twice. The first occasion is the one he considers to be this trope — due to being too drunk, he committed misconduct and caused a patient's death.
• The first film of The Mighty Ducks trilogy has Gordon Bombay missing the penalty shot at the 1973 Minnesota State Pee-Wee hockey championship that would have won it haunt him for the next twenty years, becoming a hotshot lawyer who's damned good but also arrogant and without any meaningful relationships other than being a Perfectionist "Well Done, Son" Guy to father figures (first Hawks Coach Riley, later Ducksworth his boss at the law firm). It takes a half-season of coaching the Ducks to the 1993 championship game and seeing Riley causally ordering a hit on the Ducks' best player (who even used to be on the Hawks earlier that season) to get Bombay to realize Riley didn't give a damn about him while he had spent twenty years beating himself up over the '73 miss.
• The Mountie: During a raid on a Chinese gambling den, Sergeant Grayling accidentally shot and killed a young girl. This causes him to turn to opium, earns him a year in the stockade, and gets him demoted and Reassigned to Antarctica. He treats his transfer as an opportunity to redeem himself.
• The Fastest Gun Alive: Despite his quick draw skills, George never tried to avenge the murder of his father and it weighs on him during the film, which takes place about a decade later.
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes follows Sherlock Holmes on a case which he later comes to consider one of his greatest failures.
• Nathan Wallace from Repo! The Genetic Opera is wracked with guilt over his failure to save his wife, Marni. It's what caused him to become a Repo Man in the first place.
• Jake Rainer from Silent Fall used to run a group home for autistic children, until a boy under his care committed suicide because Jake pushed him too far in a therapy session. Jake quit working with kids after that.
• In Spider-Man when Peter realizes that the carjacker who shot and killed uncle Ben is the same thief who he intentionally let get away earlier in retaliation for the wrestling promoter (who the thief just stole from) paying him significantly less money than originally promised. This gets expanded on in the sequel.
• Star Wars:
  • There's the stormtrooper in the picture at the top of the page (those WERE the droids he was looking for). The 2017 book From a Certain Point of View has a story about that stormtrooper, operating number TD-110.
  • The gunnery officer on board Darth Vader's ship told the gunner, "Hold your fire, there's no life-forms [on board]" (on the escaping life-pod carrying C-3PO and R2-D2); forgetting (a) that droids, not being life-forms, wouldn't show up on a scan for life-forms, and (b) he REALLY should have scanned for droids as well, since the Rebellion has a history of employing droids as agents.
  • In Return of the Jedi, when Yoda passes away and becomes one with the Force, he admits his sole regret was not allowing Obi-Wan to tell Luke the truth about his father, understanding from prior consultations with the Force ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn that confessing this regret was the only way he could become one with the Force.
    Luke: Master Yoda, is Darth Vader my father?
    Yoda: Rest I need. Yes. Rest.
    Luke: Yoda, I must know.
    Yoda: Your father he is. Told you, didn't he?
    Luke: Yes.
    Yoda: Unexpected this is, and unfortunate.
    Luke: Unfortunate that I know the truth?
    Yoda: No, unfortunate that you rushed to face him, that incomplete was your training, that not ready for the burden were you. Obi-Wan would have told you long ago, had I let him. Now, a great weakness you carry. Fear for you I do.
    Luke: I'm sorry.
    Yoda: Face Vader you must, and "sorry" will not help.
  • The Last Jedi reveals what happened to Luke during the Time Skip after Return of the Jedi. Sensing his nephew Ben's dark future, Luke was briefly ready to murder him in his sleep to prevent it from happening. Just as Luke realized what he was doing, Ben woke up and defended himself. As a result, Ben pledged his loyalty to Snoke, destroyed Luke's Jedi academy, and adopted the identity of Kylo Ren.
    Luke: And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose Master had failed him.
• Underworld (2003): In the extended cut and novelization of the first film, Michael Corvin had a fiancee named Samantha. They were in a car crash, and because Michael had no idea what he was doing, he was unable to save her from bleeding out. Determined to never let a tragedy like that happen again, Michael became a doctor. At one point, he laments that if he knew then what he knows now, he would have been able to save her.
• The death of Xavier in X-Men: The Last Stand, which Magneto directly caused by awakening Dark Phoenix.
  Magneto: Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you'll ever know. My single greatest regret is that he had to die for our dream to live.

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