Moral Myopia / Live-Action Films

---

• 28 Days Later: "You killed all of my boys." (Several of whom had been involved in an attempt to kill Jim and were preparing to rape his girlfriend Selena and the other female in the party, a 14-year-old girl, which was disturbing even by West's standards.)
• In A.I.: Artificial Intelligence we see a group of humans that make a sport and spectacle of publicly destroying sentient robots in various ways. They are shown having great concern when the possibility that a child has gone missing on their grounds and that it may have been confused with a robot is presented to them. Meanwhile, the crowd who've gathered to see this show end up rioting when the MC tries to have the child-mecha David dissolved in acid, and it's clear that they did this mostly because the MC failed to prove that David was a robot.
• In Apocalypto, the leader of the slavers, Zero Wolf, is perfectly content with leading his men (and among them his son) to Rape, Pillage, and Burn the jungle villages, enslaving its dwellers and even killing their babies; however when one of those villagers, Jaguar Paw, kills his son in self-defense, he starts an implacable chase to kill that man.
• A running theme in Apocalypse Now is the moral hypocrisy of the US army acting like they are the good guys throughout the The Vietnam War while judging the action of their enemy. When the army shoots up a village and school to the tune of "Ride of the Valkyries" it's badass, when a member of that village suicide bombs one of their helicopters with a grenade they're "savages".
• In Casino Royale (2006), Valenka is terrified when Obanno attacks her boyfriend Le Chiffre and threatens to mutilate her. Later in the film, however, she's smug and devoid of pity when Le Chiffre takes Bond and Vesper captive.
• In Children of Men, Patric, one of the two men sent to kill Theo, takes it personally when Theo inadvertently kills the other assassin in the process of saving his own life. When they meet again near the end of the film, Patric even knees him in the groin, shouting about his fallen comrade: "He was nineteen!" (because young people are viewed as precious as human beings had stopped having children).
• In Clash of the Titans (2010), Zeus is made aware of his son Perseus but refuses to show him any favor. He says his son has shown no love for him either, casually ignoring the fact that Perseus is a discarded byproduct of one of Zeus's nights of lust with a mortal woman. Eventually Zeus warms up to Perseus and helps him on his quest, even claiming him as his own in the end.
• In the 1999 film The Corruptor, Danny Wallace (Mark Wahlberg) is an Undercover Cop from Internal Affairs sent to investigate Lieutenant Nick Chen (Chow Yun-fat) for corruption, which disgusts Danny's father that his son is a Snitch. Yet Danny's father himself is a former Dirty Cop that took bribes. Apparently to him there's nothing wrong of taking bribes from criminals but going undercover to catch dirty cops is.
• The Craft - Nancy's Face–Heel Turn comes about when Sarah tries to cast a binding spell on her. She and the others turn on Sarah for betraying the coven, especially daring to cast a spell on one of their own. They'd been perfectly fine with Sarah casting a love spell on someone Nancy hated or humiliating one of Rochelle's bullies. And Sarah's binding spell was to prevent Nancy from causing any more harm after she'd killed two people with her powers.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Aquaman:
    • Black Manta seeks revenge against the titular character for not saving his father's life when he was trapped in a sinking submarine. He seems completely blind to the fact that his father died after trying to kill Aquaman and before that, he had led a pirate siege against the submarine in which he ordered the execution of half of the vessel's crew with the intent on killing the rest, which in turn was the first part of a false flag campaign the film's Big Bad was orchestrating. To drive home the differing moral alignment of the two characters, Aquaman later admits that his actions had, in part, created Black Manta.
    • Orm hates surface-dwellers for damaging the ocean and endangering his people but he himself murders the king of the Fisherman kingdom, strongarms the Fisherman princess and her people into joining his army and goes to war with the Brine kingdom when they refused to join him, causing more strife among the kingdoms.
  • Marilyn Batson from Shazam apparently got disowned by her own parents for having Billy at 17-years-old, which then created a bunch of emotional turmoil for her. However, she fails to see that leaving behind her helpless 4-year-old toddler son without telling him (even with trusted authority figures) can cause equal amounts of emotional turmoil for him as well. When Billy meets up with her at her apartment complex after ten years of searching for her, she refuses to acknowledge that Billy might have been emotionally damaged because of the abandonment.
• In Dungeons & Dragons (2000) the main character, Ridley, is a thief and constantly steals from others, but is shocked when another thief robs him. This is explained as being because he believes in Honor Among Thieves, and didn't realize that other thieves don't necessarily hold the same view.
• In Falling Down: D-Fens deals with a lot of various annoyances, but sees nothing wrong with his disproportionately (except in the case of the Neo-Nazi and gangbangers) violent reactions to them. An example is when he attacks the Korean store-owner. He is offended that the guy thinks he is a robber, and is willing to pay a (fair) price for his soda, but sees nothing wrong with smashing up the man's store, taking his bat, and making racist remarks. Prendergast sums it up quite nicely:
  Prendergast: So he stole your baseball bat, but he paid for your soda? Oh, this guy's discriminating.
• In A Fish Called Wanda, Otto and Wanda double-cross George, the head of the group of robbers, and go on to steal the profits of their heist. When they find out that the locker the loot was supposed to be in is empty, a sign that George was Properly Paranoid, Otto starts furiously shouting about people never trusting him. And just before the locker is opened, Wanda is preparing to hit Otto over the head and make off with the money from the heist herself. She refrains only because she needs him until the loot is recovered.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Valentine is perfectly okay with committing global genocide, as long as he's not directly witnessing it. However, when Merlin activates his implants, killing all of his underlings and associates, he calls Eggsy out for "killing all [his] friends".
• Friday the 13th (1980): Everything Pamela Voorhees does throughout the film is to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from reopening, to avoid another tragic incident like Jason's drowning. However, Pamela causes more than one tragic accident in pursuit of this goal, killing multiple counselors, setting fires, and poisoning the water.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Dr. Emma Russell defects to violent eco-terrorists, willing to sacrifice billions of innocent lives to "save the world" from humanity's environmental damage. Emma even brainwashes her daughter Madison into joining her stance, carelessly putting her life in danger and making Madison complicit in her actions. But when Madison becomes fed up with her after the plan goes wrong and runs away to set things right, Emma immediately drops her plan as though her child's life is more important than everyone else's children's lives. Emma said she was doing everything in memory of her son Andrew, but somehow neglected to realize or just didn't care that her plan would kill more children, similar to how Andrew died, resulting in other parents suffering her kind of loss in the same way. Madison even calls her out on it, asking Emma if she truly thought Andrew would've wanted any of what she's done, and Emma doesn't have an answer.
• Home Alone: At the climax, the Wet Bandits muse that they're going to repay Kevin for the hell he's put them through by inflicting the same injuries on him along with some extra fingore. Whilst it is implied that they wouldn't have made things nearly as bad for Kevin before they went through his traps as Kevin ultimately did for them, and to their credit, Kevin didn't really give them fair warning in advance; Marv and Harry nevertheless completely ignore that Kevin only put them through his traps because they were trying to pillage his family's house with him in it first.
• In The Hunt (2020), the liberal elites who organised the titular hunt think of their victims as subhuman and deserving to die when some of the people they’re targeting did nothing worse than post tasteless internet comments (at least one of their targets hunted endangered animals, but others were just vocal bigots rather than doing anything actively harmful to other people).
• Kick-Ass 2: Katie is furious when she thinks Dave is cheating on her with Mindy and dumps him, despite the fact that she has been cheating on him for some time herself, which she shows no remorse for.
• During the championship fight in Knockout, "Terminator" Tessaro hits her opponent Belle several times after the end of a round. When Belle later does the same to her, she gets offended.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain America: Civil War: Helmut Zemo seeks to avenge his family, who were killed during the Avenger's battle with Iron Man's creation Ultron, but he ends up killing multiple innocents who surely had families of their own. He does seem to acknowledge this, seeing as how he apologizes to Black Panther for killing his father.
  • Black Panther: Killmonger blames white people and Wakandans for the suffering of black people around the world, accusing the former of colonizing and pillaging Africa and condemning the latter for hoarding advanced technology that could be used for helping the African diaspora. While he does have a point about what Europeans did and how Wakanda could have helped the situation if it wasn't so busy being a Hidden Elf Village (which T'Challa acknowledges by the end and endeavors to fix), his ultimate plan is to use advanced Wakandan technology to conquer and rule the world — doing the same thing the Europeans did, but palette-swapped. And despite disparaging Wakanda for holding back all the nice toys for itself, he burns the Heart-Shaped Herb garden to ensure that he alone will possess the power of the Black Panther. Even his death scene is one of these as he believes allowing himself to die to avoid imprisonment for his crimes puts him on the same moral level as a captured African who jumped ship and drowned to avoid a life of slavery.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Wanda chastises Doctor Strange over a perceived Double Standard regarding the times they had previously broken rules and harmed others in the pursuit of their goals. The main problem with this is that Wanda trapped an entire town in an And I Must Scream situation for selfish intentions (admittedly unwittingly) and had to be forced to resolve the situation after an unknown period, while Strange sacrificed half the population in the universe in a gamble to ensure that it was only a temporary sacrifice. While both of them had caused incredible emotional suffering on others, Strange had searched for other solutions and was making the best of a bad situation, while Wanda was allowing her inability to move on to spread her suffering to others while refusing to take accountability for her actions. Then Wanda immediately reveals herself to be the Big Bad attempting to justify causing further harm (knowingly this time) to get what she wants, and her argument is rendered void anyway by the fact that she's clearly gone off the deep end.
• The inbred hillbillies in The Millennium Bug are willing to kidnap and rape innocent people, but acting like their captives killing one of their own is horrible.
• In The Mist, a supremely annoying hellfire-and-brimstone preacher lady is shot by a good guy after commanding her flock to sacrifice a young boy to the monsters that invaded (being cooped up in a Walmart for a week with monsters outside will make you try anything.) The response from the flock: "You murdered her!" Note that the preacher lady had already "sacrificed" (read: murdered) several people herself by that point.
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life:
  • In the scene set during the Zulu wars, a trooper comes up to John Cleese's character to report on the extensive casualties in the horrific battle raging outside, but Cleese replies that "We've got a bit of a situation. One of the officers has been injured" (his leg disappeared in the middle of the night... long story). The trooper reacts with shock that one of the officers has been injured, and forgets all about the many soldiers killed or horribly maimed, as someone important has been hurt.
  • Later in the scene, a British soldier remarks that while killing more than a dozen Zulu would probably earn him a medal, killing Britons would earn him the death penalty. That's a paraphrased quotation from Bertrand Russell at the outbreak of World War I: "Two weeks ago if an Englishman killed a German he was hanged. Today if an Englishman kills a German he is a hero."
• In the 2005 film Mysterious Island, Nemo's rant against greed when he mistakes one of the protagonists for a treasure hunter rings pretty hollow, since it's delivered from the comfort of his opulent island compound. Moreover, despite being a veteran who lost his wife and daughter to war and abhors violence, he evicts the protagonists from his compound and leaves them at the mercy of the island's Dire Beasts the moment he doesn't get what he want from them.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Davy Jones fully expects those he makes deals with to pay back their debts to him, demanding good faith at all times, but is treacherous and feels no obligation to return in kind.
• In Polar the Big Bad Mr. Blut is utterly incensed when protagonist Duncan Vizla kills Blut's girlfriend and her team of assassins while they are trying to kill Vizla, and declares that now It's Personal. His underling Vivian is quick to point out the obvious:
  Vivian: Stealing his pension, trying to kill him, twice, and kidnapping his cute little neighbor... that is personal.
• The Proposition:
  • "There's a little something called the law of reciprocity. You kill one of theirs, and they kill one of ours. Here's a piece of general advice: if you're going to kill one, make sure you bloody well kill them all."
  • One of the main themes of the movie is civilization versus savagery, with Arthur Burns representing savagery. He thinks like a wild animal and only cares about his family. Everyone else is fair game to be raped and/or murdered.
• In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Pink and Mr. White express outrage over Mr. Blonde shooting a number of people in the bank. White later admits to having killed a few cops during the escape. Pink asks, "Any real people?" White responds, "No, just cops." Later conversations establish that White and Pink believe that "a professional" will kill people if they try to block them from their goals, but not without reason.
• Resident Evil: Extinction: Alice gets ambushed by a family of rednecks who attempt to rape, rob, and then kill her, and their comments imply they have done this before to many other survivors. When she fights back and kills one of them, they are completely horrified and mourn their comrade. They call Alice a monster and throw her into a pit filled with zombie dogs, but she turns the tables and sets the dogs on them.
• Road to Perdition offers a heart breaking example: Mafia Hitman Michael Sullivan asks his boss John Rooney for justice against Rooney's son, Connor, who killed Michael's family. Michael has been loyal to Rooney all his life, and maybe Rooney loves Michael more than his own son, so when Rooney calls out Michael for this trope it is not only a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, but Rooney makes clear that everyone in the Mafia has crossed the Despair Event Horizon. You can see it at the quotes page.
• The Spy Who Loved Me: At the very end of the movie, Bond's russina ally/Bond Girl Anya Amasova suddenly pulls a gun on him, accusing him of having murdered her lover. Said lover was part of the hit squad attacking him during the Cold Open, but she makes it sound like Bond murdered an innocent man. It's Played for Laughs, however, as Bond is played by Roger Moore and just seduces her instead.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan is enraged by the deaths among his crew on Ceti Alpha V and condemns Kirk for them, while managing to completely forget that he was also nearly responsible for killing Kirk's crew.
  • John Harrison in Star Trek Into Darkness genuinely cares for his crew and would do anything to avenge what he thought was their deaths but gave very little thought about using Kirk and the Enterprise crew, even after they risked their lives to bring him in alive against orders. Then it's revealed he's this timeline's Khan and he gets even worse.
• Scream 2: Ghostface, aka Nancy Loomis's main motivation is to kill Sidney and re-enact the Ghostface killings from the previous year in order to avenge Billy, her son and the first Ghostface killer, completely ignoring that Sidney killed him in self-defense, Billy and Stu committed several murders just to spite Sidney's family and Billy killed Sidney's mother and committed the killings because she left the family after her husband slept with Sidney's mother.
• Star Wars:
  • In A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin promises to spare Princess Leia's home planet of Alderaan if she tells him the location of the Rebel Alliance's headquarters. He blows up Alderaan anyway once Leia tells him. When it turns out that the location of the Rebel base was false, he acts shocked that Leia lied to him.
  • In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin kills a helpless Dooku, but he is shocked when Mace Windu is trying to kill an apparently helpless Palpatine, to the point of attacking Windu to save the Sith Lord. Mace calls him out on the hypocrisy in the novelization and Anakin doesn't have much of an answer. He actually expresses some remorse over killing Dooku, saying it wasn’t “the Jedi way”. It is ultimately subverted though, as Anakin's reaction was less about morality and more that he needed Palpatine alive and while Dooku is his despised enemy who cut off his arm, seriously injured his master, and attempted to kill the woman he loves, he views Palpatine as a father-figure (and his ticket to saving Padmé).
  • In The Force Awakens, what does Kylo Ren, the one who betrayed his mentor, the Jedi Order, both his parents, and the whole galaxy, have to say when he comes face to face with the defected Stormtrooper Finn?
    TRAITOR!!!
• Taken 2: Done by the Big Bad. Bryan is the bad guy for killing his son... who had abducted who knows how many women and sold them into sex slavery. Bryan tries to remind him that the son started it first by kidnapping Bryan's daughter, and not only does the Big Bad ignore it, he promises to complete his son's work.
• White Man's Burden: Megan shames Thaddeus for his casual racism throughout the film, yet she seems visibly uncomfortable when their child brings home a white date.
• Youth (2017): After some guys see Liu Feng hugging Dingding and accuse her of corrupting him, she blames Liu Feng and runs away to her dorm, crying about him being a creep. Shuwen points out that she's been with other guys and didn't call them scamps, but she insists that it's different, holding Liu Feng to another standard because of his model citizen reputation as a "living Lei Feng".
  Shuwen: You'll let a doctor and a secretary touch you, people from all professions. So why not a living Lei Feng? […] Doctor Zhang and Secretary Wu touched you, but you didn't call them scamp.
  Dingding: That is different.
  Shuwen: How is it different? Anyone has the right to pursue you.
  Dingding: But not him.
  Shuwen: Why not?
  Dingding: No reason. It's because he's a living Lei Feng. A living Lei Feng isn't allowed. Not allowed! Not at all!

---