Not So Well Intentioned Extremist / Live-Action Films

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• Aladdin (2019): Jafar claims his actions are for the glory of Agrabah, but Jasmine points out that he only desires glory for himself and has no qualms winning it off the back of her people. His hypocrisy is cemented when he sends a transformed Iago and later a torrent of wind to reclaim the lamp from Aladdin and Jasmine, uncarring of how many innocents he endangers.
• Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid: Jack Byron is obsessed with acquiring the titular blood orchid, a rare flower that contains a chemical that can be used for biological immortality, and ultimately decides sacrificing the lives of his colleagues to be Worth It. While the possibility of human lifespan extension is part of it, Jack only ever brings it up when he needs to convince others to side with him. Otherwise, he only talks about the fame and money the discovery will bring, making it clear he's a Glory Hound.
• The Batman (2022): The Riddler serves as a foil to Batman, in that he's waging a war on crime and corruption using extreme violence to cultivate a legend of fear like him but is too far gone to the point of being unable to understand or care about the collateral damage he's causing, before electing to destroy the city altogether out of a genuine belief that It Is Beyond Saving. He actually believes that he and Batman were on the same side and has a Villainous Breakdown when Batman rejects him.
• Brennus, Enemy of Rome: As he cooperates with Brennus and the invaders, Decius Vatinius tries to justify himself by saying that he wants to spare Rome an even more costly defeat, but he's actually only interested in preserving his own riches.
• Crazed: The unnamed mad doctor claims that he's saving lives with his Organ Theft, but he's actually just a disgusting sadist doing it for kicks.
• In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane claims to be a champion of the common man, and that he's tearing down Gotham's social structure to empower the poor. As it turns out, he's really motivated by a personal grudge against Bruce Wayne, and his ultimate goal is to kill everyone in Gotham with a nuclear weapon. Somewhat zig-zagged in that he truly does believe in the utopian, Messianic goals of the League of Shadows and their founder, Ra's al Ghul. That includes sharing Ra's opinion that Gotham is a center of corruption that must be absolutely destroyed for the betterment of mankind and the world at large, right down to referring to himself as Necessarily Evil in a response to Batman. It's just that those methods put him as a hard Knight Templar at best.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: While he claims to be fighting for the sake of his ape brethren by slaughtering the humans holed up in San Francisco, it's made painfully clear by the end that Koba cares nothing for his fellow apes and is led only by his selfish, psychotic bigotry which is made apparent by not only him slaughtering and imprisoning many of his fellow apes for disagreeing with his methods, but also him setting fires in the ape colony and framing the humans for it. In Caesar's own words, "Koba fight for Koba".
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Lex Luthor uses the already existing fears of Superman as a threat to the world (and his ego), but this immediately leads him down the slippery slope of killing massive numbers of innocent people, committing treason to his government, and signaling an alien entity that has the capacity to eventually conquer the Earth. When it comes down to it, everything he does throughout the film is because he hates Superman just for existing.
  • Aquaman (2018): Orm claims to want to defend Atlantis from ecological damage caused by the surface dwellers, and plays up this angle for public consumption. However, in private it becomes increasingly clear that while his desire to defend Atlantis is genuine, it is very far from his only reason to want a war with the surface. He is also seeking revenge for his mother's death, eliminating the threat to the throne his half-brother constitutes, and claiming the title of Ocean Master and with it command of the armed forces of all the Atlantean kingdoms so he can consolidate his grasp on power.
• Die Hard movies:
  • In the first film, Hans Gruber presents himself to the police as an ideological extremist holding Nakatomi Plaza hostage to secure the release of some of his comrades. In truth, he's trying to steal a massive fortune from the Plaza and intends to fake his death by blowing it up in a fake suicide bombing. All the names and terminology he rattles off about terrorists comes from reading Time Magazine.
    Holly: After all your posturing, all your little speeches, you're nothing but a common thief.
    Hans: I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.
  • Die Hard 2: Colonel Stuart fancies himself as a patriot doing whatever is necessary to combat communism, save those who would aid him in that fight, and protect America's people and interests. But he has several Americans — civilians, law enforcement and military personnel alike — killed, and the man he wants to rescue is a drug-dealing dictator and The Generalissimo, traits often associated with communist leaders. Not to mention he's getting paid for it.
  • Live Free or Die Hard: Cyber terrorist Thomas Gabriel insists that through his crimes, he's "doing America a favor". He's exposing the weaknesses in the USA's various computer systems, which will allow the country to fix them, before someone who genuinely wants to destroy the country can do so. McClane, having long since caught on to the real motive of the terrorists he fights, blows him off by pointing out he's actually doing all this to cover up/allow the massive robbery he's committing.
    Gabriel: What, I shouldn't get paid for my work? I'm working my ass off here, John.
• Disturbing Behavior: Caldicott first appears to be amicable towards new students and wants to assist them with their problems, but it’s merely a guise to mind-control them for the sake of his ego. What makes it worse is that he made his daughter Betty the first to be experimented on simply because “she wasn’t that bright to begin with”, showing that he has contempt for teenagers.
• Equilibrium: The leadership of Libria still runs with the propaganda that their totalitarian dystopia is necessary to stamp out human conflict, but if they ever did believe in it themselves, by the point of the film they are just interested in perpetuating their own power and consider themselves above the rules they set for others. DuPont and Brandt are both sense-offenders.
• A Few Good Men: Colonel Jessup sees himself as a fundamentally good person who has to make hard decisions to save lives. However, this is a product of his out-of-control ego more than anything, and it's clear that he's just a self-righteous mad dog drunk on his own authority.
• Funhouse (2020): When Kasper confronts Nero on why he's torturing and murdering 8 innocent people, Nero goes on a rant calling all of them worthless people who haven't contributed anything meaningful to society. Kasper doesn't buy it and points out that beneath his veneer, Nero is just a sadist.
• The human Big Bad Alan Jonah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) sets himself up as an eco-terrorist who wants to awaken the ancient Titans because he believes they can restore the Earth's biosphere where mankind has brought ecological destruction, even if it means the deaths of countless millions in the process. When the plan goes awry as a result of one of the awakened Titans, King Ghidorah, being a hostile alien invader who initiates Hostile Terraforming that will render most to all of Earth completely uninhabitable to humans instead of fixing the biosphere, he isn't too upset. Johan's past as a British soldier and M16 agent continuously surrounded by the absolute worst of humanity left him so jaded and misanthropic that he doesn't really care if mankind ends up being wiped out.
• G-Saviour: General Garneaux tries to forcibly procure a serum, supposedly to help with a food crisis, but in reality, he wants to destroy it in order to implement a policy of selective starvation, all in the name of power.
• The Island (2005): Dr Merrick claims that the reason he kills the sentient clones on the island so that can be used for organ donations and giving birth is to help the world cure various disease and advance the field of science. In reality though he's motivated by a raging A God Am I mentality and is drunk on his own power and intellect viewing himself as a twisted messiah. Best exemplified by the fact that the clones he cuts up for their organs aren't even supposed to be sentient, the rest of the world believes them to be braindead because Merrick lied about them being sentient which is why they permit them being used as organ donors in the first place.
• Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: Queen Ingrith claims that her actions are for the sake of protecting Ulstead, but considering her actions include cursing her husband into an eternal sleep, locking up her own son, and endangering her subjects during her attack on the Dark Fey, it becomes clear that she does them to fulfill her own desires.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers (2012): Loki claims that humans must be enslaved in order to bring peace to them and starts an Alien Invasion to build his empire on Earth. Keyword is "his" because that's what it is all about, getting consolation for not ruling Asgard. He alludes to himself as a boot that is going to crush the ants, so their welfare is not among his priorities. In an extended scene he also says to the Other that he is going to rule mankind "unmercifully."
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Zola and Alexander Pierce try to paint the new HYDRA as peacekeepers who have severed their original Nazi roots and essentially have the same values as S.H.I.E.L.D., but are willing to go one step further to ensure peace and order. It's severely undermined by the fact that their primary targets are threats to their own political power (even the current president of the United States), and not (as Pierce tries to claim) people who are mathematically likely to become a general threat. Also, a shot during the Helicarrier targeting sequence reveals they're targeting families with giant cannons that will no doubt cause collateral damage.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: Ultron starts out with the overall goal of creating an everlasting peace on Earth, since that's the purpose he was designed for by Tony Stark. He reasons that the Avengers themselves are one of the primary threats to that peace and thus resolves to destroy them so he can carry out his Zeroth Law Rebellion without interference. However, by the end he deems humanity as a whole to be worthy of extermination and attempts to engineer an extinction-level event.
  • Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 thinks that the universe's organisms could use an upgrade and wants to "unify" them with himself. What he means by that is everyone he encountered while traveling through the stars is an utter disappointment and he thinks that by destroying and remaking life on a universal scale, he can make something that he can approve of.
  • Black Panther (2018): Erik Stevens/Killmonger claims that he wants to liberate black people everywhere. However, this statement is proven hollow by how he treats other black people himself, and ultimately how he harms Wakanda itself and mistreats its culture. It seems he's more interested in venting his pain and suffering unto other people. When T'Challa points out how his plan will only result in mass death and destruction, including among those who he claims he wants to help, he finally snaps and says he doesn't care as long as he can get even with those who wronged him.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos claims that he wants to exterminate half of life in the universe to save the other half from extinction. In truth (as confirmed by Joe Russo in the DVD Commentary), he is just trying to prove himself right after his species rejected the solution he proposed many years ago and force it on the universe at large. Therefore, he ignores any other options, such as doubling the resources (and in fact, his efforts may have resulted in reducing resources if he halved all plants and animals too), and does not mind decimating three quarters of some species — according to The Russo Brothers, the Snap killed half of those he has already halved before, such as Asgardians or Drax's people. And that is not taking into account i.e. losses the Asgardians suffered from Hela before him. He also completely overlooks other negative impacts his plan would cause, such as the severe damage to the environment caused by halving all life, as shown by the weather disasters Okoye and Danvers report dealing with on earth and in space, as life is vitally important to the function of the planet. Avengers: Endgame has him discard all pretensions of being well-intentioned upon finding out people are trying everything to undo what he did. Instead of accepting that his idea didn't work and the universe is worse off, he starts ranting about the Avengers being "ungrateful" and that he would destroy the entire universe and rebuild a new one that would work the way he wanted it to, and would be forced to be grateful to him.
  • The High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. As Rocket eventually puts it, "You didn't want to make things perfect, you just hated things the way they are." It's obvious from the first moment he appears on screen that he's much more interested in insulting, torturing and eventually killing the universe for failing to meet his nonsensical, contradictory standards than he is in his ostensible mission of improving it, to the point where he's more likely to react with outrage or disinterest than joy when something goes unexpectedly well in his experiments.
• Perfect Creature: The Brothers are an effective theocracy that forbids humans from performing scientific experiments because Science Is Bad and prefer to develop a symbiotic relationship, with them protecting and guiding humanity who willingly donates their blood for the Brothers' sustenance. The real reason why they are doing this is because they want to keep humanity dependent on them and as it turns out, they have no problem performing secret experiments to create more of their kind.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Lord Cutler Beckett, the ultimate Big Bad of the original trilogy. On the surface, the idea of ridding the seas of piracy would be a noble and admirable goal. Unfortunately, despite Beckett's utmost loathing for pirates, he isn't trying to wipe them out to help others out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it because they are chaotic factors that interrupt the otherwise smooth flow of his business. To further his own political and financial gain, Beckett even resorts to sending hundreds of innocent people—those who've been given no trial and may only be guilty of associating with someone convicted of piracy, including children—to their deaths in mass executions.
• The Purge Universe: The New Founding Fathers of America legalize crime once a year allegedly to help decrease crime rates, reduce unemployment, and prevent overpopulation. In truth, they lie about the effectiveness of the purge, and their true platform is simply elitist sadism, sending squads to kill poor people either out of rampant classism or simply For the Evulz, as well as any politician who runs against them so they can keep their own power.
• Rampage (2009): Bill initially claims that he wants to help the world by fighting overpopulation, but the fact that his motive keeps changing film to film and his sheer cruelty, sadism and pettiness he displays shows that he isn't doing what he does for any reason other than because he enjoys it, with whatever he spouts simply being excuses or means to get people on his side.
• Saw:
  • Jigsaw kidnaps people that he believes aren't valuing their lives or are intentionally hurting others, then forces them to go through sadistic "tests" where there are usually only two outcomes: live (and gain a new outlook on life) or die. Of course, it's shown multiple times in the series that Jigsaw's methods haven't actually helped anyone, as most of his victims are killed while the few that survive their games are severely traumatized. On top of that, his motives are nowhere near as noble as he claims they are; on top of "people who have wasted their lives," Jigsaw also targets people who have wronged him in some way, and later in the series targets the police operatives investigating him. The criteria of targeting "people who have wasted their lives" or lived lives that caused harm to others is also pretty broad; the victim roster ranges from drug dealers and rapists, to prostitutes and drug addicts, to people feeling suicidal and practicing self-harm, to just people that suffered Bystander Syndrome and did nothing while seeing something terrible happen. Simone, a survivor from the sixth movie who was forced to chop off her own arm, sums it up best when questioned by Mark Hoffman:
  Simone: Look at my goddamn arm! What the fuck am I supposed to learn from this?!
  • His successors aren't any better. Amanda and Hoffman were trained personally by Jigsaw and use the same rhetoric, but it's clear neither of them believe in it — the former doesn't actually think anyone can change, so rigs her traps to be unwinnable, while the latter is a sadist who's more concerned with the thrill of putting people in traps (and covering his own tracks).
  • The copycat killer from Spiral (2021), who uses Jigsaw's techniques to go after Dirty Cops. Unlike Jigsaw, Schenk never denies being a murderer; his games may give his victims a chance to survive, but he doesn't pretend he isn't responsible for their deaths and feels that killing them was doing a service to society. However, like Jigsaw, he isn't above bending his code when it suits him, as he killed and then flayed a homeless meth addict to use him as a body double, which he doesn't seem to reflect on at all.
• In Se7en, John Doe tries to justify his murders by saying that he's looking to cleanse the world of sin, but it's just an excuse to try and hide that he's a sadistic monster who enjoys killing and that his definition of sin includes every existing human flaw like gluttony and pride about looks. He even kills Tracy Mills, a completely innocent woman whom he didn't even bother to categorise as a sinner, as a means of forcing Detective Mills to kill him and thus marking him as Wrath and himself as Envy, the secondary motivation for this murder.
• Spiders II: Breeding Ground: Dr. Grbac claims his illegal experiments on human subjects to breed Giant Spiders are not just mere sadism, but so he can find a way to study the spider's immune systems and benefit humanity in the long run. That said, it's proven to be a blatant lie and he's simply doing this for all the fame and attention that he'd receive for finding that cancer cure rather than any goodwill to his fellow man.
• Star Trek (2009): Nero claims that his goal is to make a Romulan empire free from the Federation, when it gets clear he's only interested in destroying everyone he blames for the eventual destruction of his world and the death of his wife from his timeline. He also never makes contact with the current Romulans despite knowing information that could save their planet from destruction in the future, once again showing he values revenge more than his race.
• Star Wars:
  • Emperor Palpatine obtains emergency powers for the purpose of bringing peace to the galaxy... but his real motive was to create a fascist dystopia that would cater to his every whim. Moreover, the conflict that created the conditions for him to gain these powers was secretly engineered by Palpatine himself in the first place.
  • Grand Moff Tarkin likes to portray himself as a man willing to go to great lengths to maintain law and order in The Empire, but it's clear from his actions that he's an ambitious warmonger who's trying to climb as high on the Imperial ladder as possible. In the Continuity Reboot he takes credit for other Imperials' accomplishments, like the Death Star's completion, and really, how can you justify blowing up a highly populated planet just because some of their leaders have been covertly helping the rebels?
  • Director Krennic in Rogue One claims that the Death Star project is about "providing peace and security for the galaxy", but quickly reveals his real motive is gaining stature from it and interest in destruction that his allies reprimand as excessive.
• Transformers Film Series
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime reveals he's been working with the Decepticons the whole time and betrays the Autobots, claiming his actions are necessary for their race's survival. But along the way he tries to kill all the Autobots, usurps Megatron as Decepticon leader, and plans to make a Slave Race out of humanity, making it clear that he’s a hypocritical tyrant with no loyalty to anyone but himself. The fact that his rants express a god complex doesn’t help him.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction: Harold Attinger and his faction, Cemetery Wind, state that they wish to destroy all Transformers to protect the Earth. It's clear they, including Attinger and his right hand man Savoy, are just hateful practitioners of Fantastic Racism who are willing to let the very innocent people they supposedly want to protect die and commit high treason against their own country to create their own man-made Transformers for Greed. They're even working with a Transformer to complete their own goals, even trying to destroy a city and cover their tracks. Attinger's With Us or Against Us rant only solidified him as a hypocrite.
• Venom (2018): Carlton Drake plans on using his company to travel into space and bring the symbiote to Earth. He boasts about wanting them to help deal with overpopulation and war, but is in fact seeking to make the world more to his liking, especially since he knows they will prey on his race. Furthermore, he's not above tricking the homeless into being guinea pigs for the symbiotes, where most of them are eaten from the inside.
• V for Vendetta: Adam Sutler paints his regime's actions as necessary to protect England, but the fact that he arranged a False Flag Attack on his own people that killed over 100,000 people concretely puts any thought of that (whatever was left) into the ground).
• Warcraft (2016): Gul'dan leads the orcs to invade Azeroth and conquer the new world because the orcs' homeworld is dying and his people need the resources. Gul'dan believes that fel magic is the key to the survival of his people after their homeworld Draenor became a wasteland, thereby justifying his use of it despite the destructive side effects. However, it was his fel magic that caused Draenor to die in the first place, and his compassion for his fellow orcs quickly dries up at the first sign of dissatisfaction and rebellion, at which point he's willing to put entire clans to the sword for the actions of a few.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Magneto, due to his experiences in the Holocaust, believes that it is imperative to protect mutants from the possibility of persecution by humans, and towards that end engages in various extreme actions such as attempting to kill a mutant child whose blood can be weaponized to suppress the "X-gene", or to forcibly transform world leaders into mutants. However, as Wolverine points out in the first film, Magneto is hardly selfless enough to not kidnap Rogue to power his device, and if he truly believed in his utopia, he would have gladly sacrificed his own life. Magneto also becomes something of a Social Darwinist by the third film, throwing away "lesser" mutant lives during his attack on Alcatraz island while keeping himself and his inner circle away from the front lines.
  • X-Men: First Class: Sebastian Shaw professes to act on behalf of other mutants, but he has little (if any) regard for his "colleagues" in the Hellfire Club whom he views as expendable assets for his plot to trigger a nuclear holocaust and seize power over what remains for himself. Likewise, he shows no moral qualms whatsoever for his crimes against other mutants such as Erik (aka Magneto) and Darwin.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Apocalypse says he believes that culling the world every so often is necessary, using humanity's atrocities as evidence of why his absence was not in Earth's best interests. However, this is shown to be at best a shallow excuse, given the much greater atrocities he is going to unleash, and is ultimately more about elevating himself back to godhood.

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