Strawman Has A Point / Live-Action Films

• The Sixth Day: Drucker does do plenty of evil and vile things to try and protect his secret, but the fact remains that his cloning technology could be used to save many lives, and is already used in-story to clone organs for life-saving surgery, and to provide food after fish stocks have been depleted. His arguments on saving lives by conquering death and allowing eternal youth are not given any serious rebuttal, but are treated as wrong because he's the villain, absent, perhaps, the simultaneous existence of an individual and his clone demonstrating the difference between "eternal life" and "printing" a new xeroxed copy. Even him being willing to take desperate measures to protect his secret is lessened by the fact that under the 6th Day laws he faces execution simply for existing and in fact already has been murdered once by a religious zealot.
• 28 Weeks Later:
  • The film portrays Don as a Dirty Coward for abandoning his wife Alice when she runs back into a house being overrun by zombies to save a little boy, but it's later established that the boy died anyway (along with everybody else who was hiding in that house at the time, because they let the boy in, with Alice only surviving because she's immune to the infection). Don was the only other person in the house who survived the outbreak, and it's explicitly because he ran. To say nothing of the fact that his only real alternative at the time was to engage around fifty infected in what amounts to hand-to-hand combat, and fighting even a single infected in this manner is effectively a death sentence.
  • The movie tries to pull the Armies Are Evil card by portraying the Army as the villains when they decide to kill the immune Alice and implement their "all targets are open" (kill everyone: survivors and infected alike) strategy to contain the outbreak. Trouble is, their options are pretty limited. Alice is a dangerous vector who can spread the virus to others, and risking keeping her alive to develop a vaccine would be pointless when the virus will burn itself out in weeks anyways. The virus spreads so swiftly that other options are extremely risky considering the necessary time, ability or manpower. The ending shows infected in France: those few survivors who escaped spread it to the mainland, meaning all of Europe and Asia will likely be lost to the infection.
• In 101 Dalmatians (1996), the evil fashion exec Cruella Deville is dismissive of the idea that Anita, her employee, should leave her job in the event of marriage. This is meant to show Deville as callous and cynical, but her observation that marriage tends to deal a massive blow to a woman's career was unfortunately all too often true leading up to the 1990s, when the film was made, and continues to have some weight even in the decades afterwards.
• The closest thing that 2012 has to a villain is Oliver Platt's heartless presidential adviser, who's an obvious Take That! to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — his surname is Anheuser, presumably as a reference to Anheuser-Busch breweries. However, after the fifth or sixth argument where his level-headed pragmatism is contrasted with the Honor Before Reason Save Everyone bleeding-heart attitude of the rest of the cast, you kind of have to wonder if maybe the writers did not secretly agree with him. Some examples:
  • He is heavily criticized for keeping the impending disaster a secret from the general public, although announcing the end of the world would've caused massive panic and hysteria and helped no one.
  • Dr. Adrian complains that "only rich people" are being let onto the Arks, to which Anheuser responds that the money they spent buying tickets is what funded the Arks in the first place. That and snarking "Oh, you mean life isn't fair?!" No one seems to point out that those "rich people" won't be rich after the catastrophe. Even if they could take all their money with them, it'll be worthless in a world without an economy to back it up. They'll have to work just like everyone else, and will find it significantly harder than those who have developed skills that might actually apply in rebuilding society, such as construction, science, logistics, or agriculture.
  • When Adrian wants to open up the Ark to save one more family, Anheuser chews him out for wanting to risk everyone's lives just for a slim chance of saving five or six more people. For starters, they had 15 minutes before the water hit the boat (and it took a long time for the door to open), and if the door malfunctioned and wouldn't close (a legitimate concern, considering how quickly such complex boats were made), every person on the boat would be in danger, dooming the human race (which is exactly what almost happened). On top of that, people are going to be on that ark for years, if not decades, therefore they have a limited number of supplies. If they started running out of food, they would have to either start rationing food to ridiculously low extremes, and people would go crazy and kill people so they would have more food for themselves, or some people would just starve to death. Yes, Adrian claimed you could fit 10 people in 1 room, but being confined with 10 people for years would not only be uncomfortable, but create major antagonism between the passengers, something you don't want when they are the last surviving humans. Which is made even more glaring in hindsight after this supposed heroism results in the horrific deaths of Gordon and Tamara.
  • The scientists gave the world governments a set timetable for when the world was supposed to end, and the world governments began their doomsday preparations based upon the timeline given to them. But when the end of the world started earlier than what was projected, Anheuser essentially has to make decisions on the fly which are morally ambiguous but are also realistic. He's supposed to be seen as evil for not wanting to save certain people, but considering the scientists keep feeding data that is consistently wrong, it's hard to blame him for having to make such drastic decisions.
• In Accepted, a high school senior rejected by every college ends up inventing one out of thin air. The thing spins out of control and becomes an actual, factual school based out of an old mental institution. The Dean Bitterman at the nearby traditional college wages an accreditation jihad against the upstart. The guy's a Jerkass, and the new school (with its emphasis on the students) is presented as a brave bastion of new educational methods. But as Dean Dick points out, the new place doesn't have a health center, more than one faculty member, or even a library. One doesn't have to be a crusty old academic to argue that a college should at least have a library.
• Derek Vinyard from American History X makes several good arguments throughout the film about black crime and immigration, and the film's events largely support his point of view. His father is killed by a black thug while putting out a fire (something that actually happened during the Rodney King riots), his home gets broken into at the beginning by a trio of black criminals, blacks bully White kids in Daniel's school, and Daniel gets shot by one of these same blacks at the end. His fellow prisoner Lamont and school principal Dr. Sweeney are the only exceptions, and Lamont even admits to stealing a TV. While we're shown that the Nazis, both in and out of prison, are just as bad if not worse, no one ever refutes Derek's arguments and he leaves the Nazis purely for the wellbeing of himself and his family.
• Dean Wormer's point of view in Animal House is understandable — no sane college administration would want the Deltas around, and the rest of the student body might well have been good and tired of their endless pranks, hell-raising and rule-breaking. The Deltas may have been Affably Evil, but evil they were nonetheless — a lot of the stunts they pulled would get people who tried them in Real Life tossed straight into jail. That Wormer goes overboard, and goes out of his way to target the Deltas when his favored Omegas aren't much better, ultimately justifies him being the villain.
• American Beauty makes the uptight Carolyn seem like another one of Lester's problems we are to sympathize with him for having. Yet she is absolutely right when she criticizes him for abruptly quitting his job and putting the burden of supporting the household on her; later, when the two seem about to reconcile and have afternoon sex on the living room couch, she stops when she realizes he's holding an open beer bottle. She could have just asked him to put it down so they don't spill it over expensive upholstery, which would require some extensive cleaning to get the smell out.
• In Brüno (2009), Sacha Baron Cohen's goal as the titular character is to "expose the undercurrent of homophobia in American society". But he does this by assuming the character of an outrageously, nauseatingly flamboyant caricature of the worst stereotypes of homosexual men (to say nothing of idolizing Hitler as Austria's greatest national character despite Hitler persecuting LGBT people), and then engaging in what ranges from sexually inappropriate behavior to outright sexual harassment of any men who cross his path. The "homosexual hate" he encounters often feels less like homophobia and more like normal responses to being accosted by such an unpleasant, highly offensive individual.
• In Cape Fear, Bowden gets the chief of police to try to drive Cady out of town before Cady has done anything illegal. Cady hires a lawyer who is portrayed as fussy and over-liberal, but who makes the entirely legitimate point that Cady is being harassed for no reason. While Cady doesn't stay innocent for long, the lawyer had no way of knowing that would happen.
• In Catching Faith, John Taylor gets caught drinking alcohol while underage at a party. His family pressures him to accept responsibility by confessing, even though that meant that he could not play any more games during the rest of the football season. Later, his coach talks to John on this issue. John, while still resentful, does bring up the point in that many other people, especially members of the same football team, engaged in underage consumption of alcohol, yet they appeared to be getting off scot-free. The coach instead doubles down on the "take responsibility of your actions" moral. Indeed, not only does the film never touch upon what exactly has happened to everyone else at that party, but, also, none of the other football players got the punishment that John got. So, it's only wrong if you do it?
• Chairman of the Board combines this with Harsher in Hindsight: Bradford, the antagonist, blasts Edison's management of the company while the latter is shown driving up the stock price and getting magazine covers amid his antics running the company. The only problem? He was running the company in almost exactly the same manner as a lot of dotcom startups at the same time, almost all of which went broke. Had Bradford not violated numerous laws in forcing Edison out, his fight for control of the company would have been justified to save it from Edison's "interesting" management style. In the meantime, Bradford seems like he would have managed the company competently even if he was only looking to sell... one presumes he would have gotten more for a functional company than an asset-stripped wreck, after all.
• Christmas with a Capital C: Mitch's points about the town being in breach of the Establishment Clause due to the use of religious displays using taxpayer money on public property do have legal validity, but since he's an embittered atheist his points are treated as invalid.
• Christmas with the Kranks expects the viewers to side with the neighbors who harass the title characters for deciding to celebrate Christmas by taking a cruise. Their daughter went off on a Peace Corps assignment thus making the first time in almost two decades they have time for themselves, except the annual Christmas lights competition in which the neighborhood competes annually would count against them having a family out of town and not competing, and they could not have that. The entire plot of the movie is because the neighborhood wants a certificate or a trophy to put in Town Hall for a year. The ending moral is about Christmas being about togetherness and love, the husband portrayed as being selfish and petty for resenting the neighborhood finally getting him to join their traditions (complete with Unsportsmanlike Gloating and insults) and still wanting to go on the cruise. Said cruise was a romantic gesture and an attempt to spend long deserved time alone with his wife, a much better symbolism of Christmas' virtues than bullying someone in excess for the sake of winning a contest.
• In The Class (2008), a French teacher (François Bégaudeau) struggles to teach grammar to his often apathetic students. Though the students are fleshed out and late in the film the teacher is disrespectful and called out for it, thereby avoiding Straw Characters, the audience is expected to take his side about the necessity of grammar. Not all agreed with it, though.
  Roger Ebert: As the students puzzle their way through, I don't know, the passive pluperfect subjunctive or whatever, I must say I sided with them. Despite the best efforts of dedicated and gifted nuns, I never learned to diagram a sentence, something they believed was of paramount importance. Yet I have made my living by writing and speaking. You learn a language by listening and speaking. You learn how to write by reading. It's not an abstraction. Do you think the people who first used the imperfect tense felt the need to name it?
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Roy Neary, the protagonist, makes his dreams come true when he meets the aliens and leaves on their ship. All is great and uplifting and wonderful... except the guy has a wife and four kids, who are dependent on him. His wife is presented as being vindictive, but this does not change the facts: chasing his dream, Neary got himself fired from his job, which was the main source of income for his whole family, and now leaves them altogether for a journey across space he dreamed of. His wife is absolutely right when she describes Roy as an overgrown kid without any sense of responsibility. Interestingly enough, the director himself noted later that now, being married and with children, he would not endorse Neary's actions.
• In the dystopian film The Condemned (2007), main villain Ian Breckel has a surprisingly convincing argument against Think of the Children!. Since he's the villain, he's in the wrong (although he loses points for taking it too far in the other direction).
  Ian: Look, Donna, we, as entertainers... cannot tailor-make everything we do for children. It's the parents' responsibility to monitor what their kids watch.
  Donna: That's a cop-out, Ian, and you know it. You have to take some responsibility.
  Ian: Donna, I'm not forcing anybody to log on and tune in. I create shows people like to watch. I didn't create the demand. People like to watch violence. They always have. Probably always will.
• Crossroads (2002): Kit. Did Mimi really think she would become famous in spite of being heavily pregnant simply because she had a good voice?
• In the hilariously anvilicious and narmy Lifetime Movie of the Week Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life, the mother of the protagonist freaks and panics upon learning that her son is looking at Internet porn. The father is very unconcerned and does not think there is anything abnormal about a teenage boy looking at porn, and the viewer is expected to consider the father an oafish buffoon. Admittedly there are some types of porn no-one should be looking at, but the film treats the protagonist looking at pictures of scantily-dressed models (who were still fully-clothed, mind you) as some kind of grievous moral failing that inexplicably ruins his whole life.
• The Day After Tomorrow has a scientist who is a lone dissident among the scientific community that global warming will happen at a very immediate pace. His peers disagree with him. The vice president (an expy for then-Vice-President Dick Cheney) rejects the claim of the lone scientist. However, if one scientist is rejected by his peers, it could be argued that it's sound scientific policy to allow for peer review.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951):
  • The humans are lambasted for "striking first". But after the alien spacecraft landed with little warning in a capital city, Klaatu walks directly at the humans wearing a face-obscuring (and unnecessary) helmet with an object that snaps open unexpectedly within melee range. While the soldiers are still in error for shooting, their error is entirely understandable, because making sudden moves during a very tense situation where people are already pointing weapons is not going to end well.
  • In a greater scope, humanity in general. Klaatu arrives with zero warning, shuts down all power on Earth (though not in a way that would cause harm) all to deliver a message of complete annihilation if they pursue space travel while planning to conquer other worlds solely because Earth has the theoretical capability to attack them, not because of any action Earth intentionally or unintentionally made against them. This makes Klaatu's planet look extremely hostile and xenophobic, ruining the film's intended message.
• In The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), various characters from the government and military are depicted as being callous, paranoid, and inhumane when they immediately imprison the injured alien visitor and attempt to interrogate him about what he's doing on Earth. Even though the viewers are supposed to be disgusted with their behavior, there's one minor problem; Klaatu is indeed planning to destroy the entire human race, taking all of a day and a couple interviews to verify it as the right course. The "inhumane" government officials were completely correct to treat him as an enemy.
• Dead Poets Society:
  • This essay by a literature PHD sympathizes more with the rigid administration than heroic Blithe Spirit John Keating. Keatings tells the class to ignore actual literary study and just enjoy the feeling of the poems, telling them to act as fans instead of scholars, which kind of defeats the purpose of a literature class. He quotes a number of poems out of context in ways that completely change the message of the poem, and all his talk about learning to think for yourself really means learning to think like he does, and his classes really are disruptive to the school.
  • Neil's father also counts: he is depicted as a typical tyrannical and over-protecting father, but then, Perry has committed a felony - he forged his father's signature on a falsified letter. Had his father informed the authorities, Neil would likely have faced some decent prison time. And the man has a point when he presses Neil to become a doctor instead of an actor: being a licensed MD practically guarantees a steady, decent income, while even a good actor has a rather small chance to break through and become a highly-paid star, and likely Neil would end up with a very meager pay and little perspectives.
  • In a kind of reverse situation, Keating still makes one good point when he tells his students to rip off the pages that describe how to quantify a work's importance by drawing a graph - which kind of defeats any scholar purpose: who needs to study literature deeply when you can simply draw a graph and figure out a literary piece's worth and importance in a minute's work?
• In The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to her poor, put-upon assistant Andrea, who just wants to be a writer and doesn't understand why everybody looks down on her for not being a fashionista. The problem is that she works for the editor of a fashion magazine. Miranda's speech shows quite nicely that, problematic though it is, the industry influences everyone and is ignored at one's own peril. Moreover, thinking that you're "above" the field you work in is not a professional attitude or one you should display in front of your boss and coworkers, who have slaved and sacrificed to succeed in an intensely cutthroat line of work.
  • Later, Andrea is chewed out by her friends for getting involved in her work, instead of remaining an aloof hipster like them, but she's in a high-risk high-energy industry, and she only took the job to get the credentials she needs for the job she wants, so actually investing herself in the job is what's expected of her, where if she treats it like a 9 to 5, she'll never get a good recommendation, to say nothing of basic work ethic of doing your job well.
  • Andrea's boyfriend Nate has taken a lot of abuse online since the film's release for being unsupportive of Andrea and self-absorbed, especially when he complains that she missed his birthday party due to the Met gala. However, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna invokes this trope when defending him to ''Entertainment Weekly'' in 2017:
  I think that now, however many years later, what people focus on is that he's trying to restrict her ambition ... But her ambition is going towards something that she doesn't really believe in, so he has a point.
• In Dragonslayer, King Casiodorus is presented as a villain whose great crime is creating the lottery by which innocent virgins are sacrificed to the dragon Vermithrax. The thing is, though, the lottery worked. Casiodorus tells the story of how his brother Gazerick, a brave warrior king, went out to try and slay the dragon. Vermithrax killed Gazerick and all his men, then laid waste to whole towns in retaliation. The point is underscored when Galen's first bungled effort at dragon-slaying provokes a slaughter. Casiodorus's solution of pacifying the dragon with a handful of sacrifices was far better. Even though Casiodorus is later shown to be a hypocrite who accepts bribes to keep rich ladies out of the lottery, then jettisons the whole scheme when his own daughter offers herself up, no one ever presents a compelling answer to his argument: better a few should die so that many may live.
• Dirty Harry suffers from the same problem as most Cowboy Cop movies, where the wishy-washy liberal superiors chastise Harry for his flagrant abuse of the rights of the suspect and disregard for police procedure. But the thing is, they're right, and Harry would be a terrifyingly dangerous person in real life. This whole issue is deliberately acknowledged in the first film, Dirty Harry, where the superior turns out to be completely right: it's not good to be a loose cannon. Its sequel Magnum Force acknowledges this with the primary antagonists being a group of loose-cannon cops who cross lines Harry wouldn't.
• In Dobro Pozhalovat, ili Postoronni vhod vospreschen ("Welcome, or No Entry unless Invited"), a Russian film about a child expelled from summer camp, the camp director Dynin is a horrible Obstructive Bureaucrat who clearly doesn't understand children while sucking up to his superiors. Yet his reasons to expel Innochkin (the main protagonist) are absolutely valid. Innochkin already taught everyone to fence with sticks, resulting in injuries, broke the curfew repeatedly, and now swam across the river despite this being strictly forbidden. Not only is Dynin right in no longer wanting to be responsible for Innochkin (though he is a very good swimmer, he could still drown), but unless an example is set other children may start crossing the river too — and not all of them are such good swimmers. Removing Innochkin from camp was the only sane thing to do-especially as they might be liable for anyone getting hurt.
• In Eagle Eye, the antagonist has a pretty good point. The President of the United States spent billions of dollars on a Supercomputer, only to completely ignore its conclusions, and the advice of his own Secretary of Defense, and then bombed a funeral procession full of innocent people, leading to an increase in acts of terror against the United States and washed his hands of the whole thing by blaming the entire incident on the hardworking scientists who built the Supercomputer in the first place, even though it very explicitly told him that the bombing was a very unwise idea. Honestly, if Operation Guillotine hadn't involved the deaths of dozens of children and other innocent bystanders as collateral damage, she probably would have been in the right because this guy is clearly too self-centered to be an effective leader.
• In Fantastic Four (2015), after the teleporter to Planet Zero is perfected, a scientist announces that he's going to call NASA to get some astronauts to go explore. Victor and Reed protest this because they want to be the ones known for being the first to explore the new planet. Victor even goes on a drunken rant about how everyone remembers the astronauts of the Apollo missions and not the engineers who made it possible. We're clearly supposed to sympathize with them, but given how they do everything wrong on their drunken exploration trip (wandering off, touching weird rivers of energy, and suchlike), it obviously would have been much better to send trained professionals on this important and likely dangerous mission. As the inventors of the technology, they're too valuable to risk sending on dangerous missions and would be needed to perfect any errors during the tech's first use.
• Edward Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's his job to prevent truancy among his students and ensure attendance. While he clearly oversteps his authority by the end of the film, and although Ferris had a parentally excused absence, that doesn't change the fact that Ferris was skipping school, has done so at least nine times prior, does so by blatantly exploiting the good will of everyone, including his parents, and was also taking other students out of school while they were under Rooney's care. And Ferris's sister Jeane is also treated as an obstructive stick-in-the-mud who just wants to catch Ferris out of spite, even though she never does anything immoral — rather, she counters several of Ferris' immoral acts.
• The villain of the 1978 film FM, now remembered primarily for the Steely Dan theme song, are the executives who want to run more ads and run ads by certain advertisers (like the military) that the station's DJs consider so objectionable they barricade themselves in the station in protest. But early in the film one of them makes the perfectly valid complaint that even though the station has the second largest listenership in the Los Angeles market, it's not making much money, if any. No one who has ever been involved in running a for-profit business would disagree that that's a problem that must be addressed.
• Freaks (2018): The viewpoint characters are a small family of superpowered people who naturally think it terrible that society calls them Abnormals at best or Freaks at worst, and is hunting them down. We learn during the film that Abnormal children managed to devastate the city of Dallas, and the child of the family has strong Mind Control powers, so "hunt them down" doesn't seem to be too out of place.
• Ghostbusters:
  • Walter Peck is portrayed as an Obstructive Bureaucrat, and his recklessness ultimately triggers the film's climax when he orders the Ghostbusters' containment turned off. But he has a point: the Ghostbusters' technology poses considerable risk to the public, as it uses dangerous technology and is untested and poorly understood by anyone but them. Indeed, Venkmann lampshades this earlier in the film when he notes that the three of them are carrying unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their backs. The Ghostbusters certainly should be subject to some sort of government oversight.
    • Peck's initial approach, while antagonistic, is also highly measured; he asks to inspect and states his credentials. Rather than complying or even being amicable but refusing, settling things with lawyers, Venkmann turns it into a contest of egos and escalates the matter while being just as obstructive to a lawful authority, the EPA.
  • Besides Peck, the early scene in which the gang has their grants pulled and are fired and evicted from the university they were working at is supposed to set up the administrator as a crusty Dean Bitterman. But his objections have merit: The fields of paranormal studies and parapsychology are not traditional sciences, lack the foundational pillars of other scientific disciplines, and have generated no valid or useful research breakthroughs to justify their continued funding. Worse, Venkman is repeatedly shown to be every bit the charlatan and conman that the Dean accuses the group of being, as his immediately prior scene consisted of him shamelessly rigging an ESP experiment so he could flirt with the cute co-ed while tormenting the nerdy other subject for no good reason.
    • Charlatan and conman are too nice for Venkmann's antics; they are unethical experiments on human subjects. He shocks that man on fraudulent pretenses. We can rest assured no IRB approved that.
• At the end of God's Not Dead, despite Josh getting Radisson to admit he hates God, Radisson tells Josh that this doesn't prove anything and Josh hasn't proven God exists. Radisson is correct; Josh hasn't proven anything. Everything Josh has stated over the course of the lecture has not given any actual proof. One could say he simply sought to put on a good case for God's existence, a.k.a. the God-in-Gap Defense ^note  Essentially science can't be sure, therefore God , which may have been his actual intent. But this is negated as they treat it as fact that God does exist (which is a logical fallacy called "Begging the Question" — essentially, Josh is assuming that his premise of God's existence has already been proven, when it hasn't). Radisson also makes a fair point by noting that free will can't explain natural evil (e.g. disasters caused by weather events), a standard counterargument to this, which goes unanswered by Josh.
• God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness: One news anchor mentions in a segment what could be a legitimate reason for opposing the church on public university grounds: apparently, it's funded by the school, while no other sect is. This raises a lot of church-state separation issues. While it wouldn't mean demolishing the church is necessary, at the very least they might financially separate, since the university is no longer private or Christian. However, this is never brought up again in the film.
• Godzilla:
  • In the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, Mayor Ebert is already intended to be a character the audience should hate because he's clearly based on Roger Ebert, who criticized some of Emmerich's previous films. Therefore, he's set up as a whiny moron who constantly badgers the military and makes terrible decisions in light of a mass panic. However, most of them are dead on — at one point he chastises the commander for doing more damage than the lizard himself (at which point he is comically thrown a bag of chocolates because HE'S FAT). He's dead right though — at the time he shouts that line, the military's blundering, clumsy efforts and lack of regard for life and property in containing Godzilla have caused far more on-camera casualties than Godzilla himself has. One of the highlights being the military's destruction of the Chrysler building when they miss Godzilla... No doubt there were still people inside given how many people were still trapped inside the city (and a building of that size going down would cause a lot of collateral damage...), which prompted the outburst in the first place.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): The film does portray the Well-Intentioned Extremist Emma Russell, who wants to set all the dormant Titans loose on the world (so that the creatures can reclaim their dominance of the planet and heal the manmade damage done by Global Warming, whilst coexisting with what humans aren't killed during their awakening instead of destroying them) as a case of Villain Has a Point and The Extremist Was Right, with their plan only going horribly wrong because they released Ghidorah; who is actually an alien Titan and threatens life on Earth instead of replenishing it. However, what the film scarcely addresses as anything more than a momentary afterthought is how Monarch debatably lose quite a lot of their moral highground against Emma when they point out that Monarch have done practically nothing to address the impending situation in the five years since the previous film even though the fate of all humanity hangs in the balance. Between the prejudiced government who are only interested in trying to kill all the Titans without any regard for how that will most likely backfire on an apocalyptic scale, and the eco-terrorists whose concerns about the government being on the verge of taking over Monarch by the time of the film's start are valid, Monarch are doing the least about addressing the Titans' impending awakening (or the threat of the government screwing the human race over) at the start of the film. The only time Monarch are seen doing squat about how the Titans' awakening will affect humanity is when they attend a senate hearing at the film's start, a hearing which Drs. Graham and Serizawa clearly aren't taking all that seriously.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong:
    • While Apex Cybernetics callously disregard the deaths that have come from their actions, and building Mechagodzilla with parts from Ghidorah as the computer was a terrible idea, their goal of giving humanity a way to actually stand a fighting chance against Titans doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Even assuming Godzilla, Kong, and the other Titans are not hostile to humanity and will continue to act in a protective role, they have come dangerously close to defeat by hostile Titans before.
    • The scene where Walter Simmons insists on uploading the Hollow Earth energy formula to Mechagodzilla immediately, ignoring Ren Serizawa's protests that they have no idea how the energy source will affect the Mecha without having conducted even basic testing on it first and that Godzilla (who's currently in the city looking for the Mecha) will pinpoint their exact location and come straight for them the moment they come online; is supposed to be a demonstration of how arrogant, hubris-filled and Too Dumb to Live Simmons is being. Whilst Simmons is indeed being all of those things, it's easy to feel Simmons has a slight point: if Mechagodzilla isn't activated ASAP at that point, then Apex's Evil Plan would likely be irretrievably ruined: either because Godzilla will find them anyway and destroy their Mecha even if Simmons and Ren escape (since Godzilla is actively scouring the city for the Mecha), or because Monarch (who, in the novelization, are at this point getting hot onto the fact that Apex are responsible for instigating Godzilla's rampage and are hiding something that's producing Ghidorah's bio-acoustics inside Victoria Peak^note Whilst it wouldn't be out-of-character for Apex to be recklessly unaware of Monarch's presence in Hong Kong growing suspicious of them, the novelization states they have moles in Monarch who could very well alert them to Monarch's suspicions) will come in to investigate, they'll discover Mechagodzilla and/or the Skull Room, and they'll get a full investigation launched which will surely see Apex's Mecha project shut down and the company sued to hell and back.
• In Gross Anatomy, the protagonist, Joe Slovak, lambastes the administration of the medical school where he is a student after David, his roommate and best friend is "invited to leave"; that is, informally expelled. The problem is that David was caught using amphetamines. Slovak argues that medical students are only human, not superhuman, and that the school's expectations of them are too high, and that the school should be more understanding and compassionate toward a student who needed speed to get through his classes. We're clearly meant to side with Slovak and David — but here's the thing: no one would want to be the patient of a doctor who needs amphetamines just to pass his first year of medical school. Moreover, most doctors passed their first years without speed, and if the school did decide to allow him to stay, there's no indication that David will be able to manage his second year either, and they'll just be repeating all this a few months down the line. Frankly, the school is being compassionate by washing out a student who can't hack it as a first-year, rather than waiting for him to accrue tens of thousands of dollars more in student-loan debt when they have to expel him later. A doctor who washes out as an intern after graduating from medical school doesn't get all his student loans magically forgiven. He still has to pay them back, but without the income of a full-fledged licensed physician.
• Heaven Is for Real: A lot of people state more logical reasons for the boy's "memories of heaven", such as studies that state the person just sees what they want to see to him just parroting everything he has seen or been told. However the movie doesn't even try to debate them, we are just meant to believe these people are wrong because the father fully believes what his four year old son says to be true.
• In Heavyweights, the villain is Tony Perkins, a fitness guru (played by Ben Stiller) who buys a weight loss camp and subjects the campers to rather cruel and extreme measures that would get the camp shut down and him arrested in real life. The movie tries to imply that not only are Tony's measures pointlessly cruel, they're also ineffective as illustrated in one scene with the campers doing a weigh-in, and Tony discovers most have actually 'gained' weight. He has a breakdown and starts screaming about how his system is not what failed but the campers are the failures, and accusing one of being a cheater. The thing is though, Tony's rant is correct. The campers earlier discovered their stashes of confiscated junk food and have continued to engorge on that throughout the film and aren't showing any real commitment to weight loss. While nothing can justify Tony's extreme and abusive measures, he's not wrong in that the campers themselves are the ones primarily to blame for their failure to lose weight.
• The title character of Hitch makes some very valid points about continuing with one's life, adapting, and moving on after a relationship goes sour. He gets called out on this by one of his clients who outright calls him a coward for not chasing after one's love; granted, in the client's case, the breakup was because of a misunderstanding, but in Hitch's case there was a very clear and valid reason for it. As expected, since the film is a Romantic Comedy, Hitch gives in and goes great lengths to get back his love interest even after several rejections, incurring extreme behavior and injuries to himself.
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York:
  • After the card Kevin used at the Plaza Hotel comes up as "stolen," the hotel concierge has every right to want Kevin arrested for credit card fraud. As far as he and the rest of the hotel staff knew, Kevin's story was a complete lie. And even though the card did belong to Kevin's dad, Kevin was still using the credit card without permission, and Kevin really was lying about how he got a hold of it. Sure, the concierge may have been trying to snoop in on Kevin, but the fact remains that the concierge was acting well within the law.
  • Later on in the film, Kevin's mother slaps the hotel concierge for telling her not to go out looking for Kevin by herself, even though he points how huge and dangerous New York is, especially in the middle of the night, which is when she wants to go looking. Even Kevin's dad tries to tell her it's a bad idea, but she's insistent. We're supposed to take her side as a concerned parent. She's not really in danger - New York's crime even at its worst was overblown, and by the early 90's things were improving, not to mention Kevin wasn't exactly in the worst parts of the city. The odds of her finding him by chance, however, are not that good in a place as large as New York City.
• i am sam. More than a few critics and viewers couldn't help agreeing with the "bad guys" that, no matter how wonderful of a person Sam was, he wasn't capable of raising a child. Having said that, it's clear at the end that the would-be adoptive mother is still in the picture, even if Sam is legally the father. Presumably she helps out with the various things that he can't handle by himself, but the movie didn't make that explicit.
• In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, two government agents angrily interrogate Indy after Russian spies kidnap him and an old partner of his, murder several American soldiers at a top secret test facility and make off with an alien corpse. This doesn't seem that unnecessary, considering what just happened and that Indy's old partner was working with the Russians (the movie is set during the Cold War).
• In the Fade: Haberbeck, though written as the opponent and thus "wrong", seems in the right when he objects to Katja being in the courtroom while other witnesses are testifying, since it could result in her adjusting her testimony to fit theirs. This is why witnesses are separated ordinarily, after all. She's the co-plaintiff in the trial, so she has a right to stay though, the judges decide.
• James Bond:
  • The unofficial film Never Say Never Again introduces us to a new M who orders Bond to go to a health farm after he fails a training exercise — an act which we the viewers are clearly meant to believe makes him some kind of tinpot dictator or Obstructive Bureaucrat that is unable to register just how badass Bond is. But if you take off your fan hat for a second and analyze the situation from his point of view, you suddenly realize that he is absolutely correct. He has an ageing senior field agent of the elite 00 unit who failed an exercise because he wasn't being careful enough, drinks heavily, smokes like a chimney, frequently gambles, is open to all sorts of S.T.D.s thanks to his womanizing, is not a team-player and has a diet rich in fatty heavily salted foods. Even by the standards of the 80's you simply cannot let an active agent licensed to kill anyone he pleases behind enemy lines carry on like this.
  • In Skyfall, Bond is cleared by M to go back on active duty, despite having failed his physical re-evaluation (and her hiding the fact from him). When he's informed that he's been approved, Gareth Mallory points out that "it's a young man's game" and that there's no shame in admitting that he's too old for the job. It seems as though the audience is supposed to take the side of Bond (who is the main character), but Mallory isn't exactly far off the mark. An agent with a previous injury (that, by his own words, nearly killed him) and borderline-inadequate physical health shouldn't be the sole resource for a mission, even when Bond's machinations play into Raoul Silva's plan to attempt an assassination on M. Even Bond wonders if Mallory had a point. By the end of the film, however, it is reaffirmed that sometimes, old dogs have to learn new tricks to stay relevant in the modern age.
• In Jaws, Mayor Vaughn dismisses the concern of the protagonists and refuses to close the beaches when terrorized by the shark. However, Amity is a beach town dependent on seasonal beachgoers for its economy. Then again, a mix of Adaptational Heroism and Science Marches On lead some fans to side with the mayor since he lacks the corruption of his novel counterpart (who was in debt to the mob, and possibly in fear for his life), and modern science has shown that shark attack fatalities are greatly exaggerated. Vaughn also admits he was wrong when an public attack finally provides good evidence.
• In JFK, the opposing argument to Jim Garrison's conspiracy scenario is laid out nicely by Bill Broussard (played by Michael Rooker). While yes, Broussard was secretly working with the FBI against Garrison, he nonetheless raises an excellent point when he criticizes Garrison's scenario regarding the assassination of President Kennedy — which, according to Garrison, involves the CIA, the FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, the Dallas Police, right-wing oil billionaires, and the military-industrial complex to name just a few parties. Broussard lays out the best argument for lone gunman proponents when he says that such a conspiracy would be impossible to successfully pull off and keep a secret, owing to how complicated such a conspiracy would be and how many people would have to be involved (something real people have also argued). True, Broussard's own theory isn't great either, but his criticism of Garrison unintentionally undermines the film's pro-conspiracy message. Given that Garrison is mostly a mouthpiece for Oliver Stone to voice his own views, and that the person whom Broussard was based upon was claimed by the real Garrison to have undermined his case from day one (and Stone largely believed whatever Garrison said), Broussard is treated as a villain while Garrison is portrayed as in the right, regardless of the at best dubious and at worst nonsensical nature of his entire premise.
• Johnny English has Pegasus, the M stand-in for the film and clearly designed to be either an Obstructive Bureaucrat or just blind to what's in front of him. Johnny is obviously right about Sauvage from the word go. The problem is that his evidence is entirely circumstantial. The fact that two of his employees turned out to be assassins for example is no more an example of Sauvage being behind anything than the head of any other company would be if two people working for him turned out to be criminals. And then of course we have the obvious: an aged James Bond is still James Bond, whereas Johnny English in his prime is an agent of dubious competence with an obvious dislike of the French who only got the job because there was no one else left. It's not unfair for Pegasus to subject him to higher scrutiny than he might have done to anyone else.
• In Knives Out Harlan's personal nurse Marta inherits his entire fortune while his family are left completely out of the will. Harlan's daughter is meant to seem especially unhinged when she accuses Marta of sleeping with Harlan. But from the family's perspective, this would seem like a reasonable interpretation of a shocking revelation. The people most deserving of punishment weren't even Harlan's children, but his cheating son-in-law and thieving daughter-in-law, whose transgressions were unknown to the rest of the family. While Harlan had told his son and adult grandson why they were being cut out, it seems like a fairly severe way to teach them to be more independent and responsible, respectively. Harlan never expressly states why he thinks his daughter, granddaughter, and underage grandson deserve the snub. While Marta is objectively a kinder and more deserving person than any of the family, it would still hurt quite a lot for your own father or grandfather to imply that he thinks you're so awful you don't deserve to have so much as a family photo album.
• In Land of the Lost, Rick states that he doesn't want Cha-Ka sleeping in the cave with them and, when his friends take offense to this (implying Fantastic Racism), Rick points out that Cha-Ka was about to be executed when they found him and may have done something to actually deserve it. While Rick is being racist, his claim is a valid concern. Especially when later in the film when the Big Bad takes advantage of their trust to escape and nearly Take Over the World.
• Ebert's review of The Life of David Gale, which is a different type of this trope wherein the movie's central characters go so ridiculously far to show that their position is right, you cannot help but be disgusted with them. The characters were going for "the death penalty is wrong because an innocent man can potentially be executed". What they actually proved was "if you deliberately conceal the evidence that you are innocent from the court until after it's too late to do anything, it will arrive too late to do anything." Well, duh.
• Many critics who disliked Lions for Lambs felt this way about Tom Cruise's character. A senator with presidential ambitions, his role in the film is an interview with anti-war journalist played by Meryl Streep discussing his new plan for Afghanistan. The Senator outlines a reasonable plan and makes some good points, but the film expects us to side exclusively with Streep's character simply due to her being anti-war and it being an anti-war film.
• In Look Who's Talking Too, the mooching brother-in-law is essentially a strawman for everything that is not a Proper New York City Attitude, including the fact that he has a gun. However, it is a little difficult to argue with one of his rationalizations for having it. Notably, the other characters scoff at him, but don't ever really counter his argument.
  "You know, you people really amuse me, stockpiling your canned food and your water in case of disaster. But when the shit really hits the fan and you're sitting over here with your stuff, and the guy next door has a gun, who do you think is gonna go hungry? Him, or you?"
• In The Lost World: Jurassic Park the villains, InGen corporation, are portrayed as evil because they want to recapture the dinosaurs from Isla Sorna to recoup their losses from the first film. While they were pretty ruthless, as well as massive jerkasses (hunter Roland Tembo and his buddy Ajay excepted), their argument that the dinosaurs are their rightful property does have merit. When the heroes call them out on destroying the island's "natural" environment, the Corrupt Corporate Executive points out that they created the dinosaurs and introduced them to the island in the first place, meaning they are just an invasive group of species. The heroes have no response to this other than having Nick try to start a fight. This is one of those cases where what's right legally may or may not be what's right morally, but it's certainly not as cut-and-dried as the film would like to present it.
  • There's also a deleted scene of an InGen meeting where they discuss the millions of dollars already lost on Jurassic Park and the ensuing lawsuits. Between the cleanup and the wrongful death suits alone, they're a hair shy of 200 million in the red, and they do have a right to use their assets to try and recoup their losses. You could argue they actually have a duty to the shareholders.
• The Christian propaganda movie Let There Be Light (2017) deals with an influential and famous over-the-top atheist thinker who suffers an accident and has a near-death-experience in which he sees his dead little son; the experience leaves him shaken and ultimately causes him to convert to Christianity. At one point, the neurologist who treats him for his accident gives the completely rational and medical explanation for his visions, she is never proven wrong, but the movie simply dismisses her as just another atheist (you know this because she immediately introduced herself as a fan of the pre-converted protagonist).
• In Maid in Manhattan, Designated Villain Caroline files a complaint with hotel management when she discovers that Marisa, the maid in question, had been wearing her clothes and using her identity. The audience knows that Marisa doesn't have any ill intentions, but Caroline doesn't and has every right to be upset. What's more, such an action is an offense worthy of termination (for example, Gaylord has a policy that even abandoned items cannot be taken by staff - they are to be given to charity - and taking them is cause for automatic termination), precisely what happens.
• In Mean Girls, during Janis's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, Cady defends herself by calling out Janis for using her as a pawn for an eighth grade revenge. Cady is entirely correct but the narrative is painting Cady as someone playing the victim and not owning up to her actions.
• Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation: The audience is supposed to disagree with the committee chairman who shuts down IMF, calling them reckless - except this comes immediately after a field mission that clearly was reckless. Mission Control had no idea Luther was involved in the op, and no one had any idea where Ethan was, so it was poorly planned even before the hacking fails. Furthermore, in refusing to discuss IMF operations with Congress given the present vacancy in the vaguely defined role of "Secretary", Brandt has effectively positioned IMF as being above the law, which should scare the hell out of anybody concerned with the increasing power of the US national security apparatus following 9/11.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla (2014): Just a little bit. The military's plan to attempt nuking the kaiju is presented as Nuke 'em (albeit with more reasonable assumptions than in most other examples, even if it's still proven to be the wrong option by the story), but Admiral Stenz makes it clear to Drs. Graham and Serizawa before finalizing the plan that he's listening if they have any better suggestions. Graham doesn't have any suggestions beyond saying the use of nukes in this instance is insane, whilst Stenz dismissing Serizawa's Idealist sole suggestion seems slightly more understandable given that said suggestion is based more on naturalism than science with what little they know for a fact at this point about Godzilla's true nature.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Besides how The Extremist Was Right in the end about the benefits the Titans could create for the world if awakened, Emma Russell's criticisms about the government taking over Monarch and attempting to kill off the Titans come off as highly valid concerns; even more so when one considers all the Fridge Horror of the government's plan. Drs. Graham and Serizawa themselves seem to consider attempting to get the Obstructive Bureaucrats to see reason to be largely futile in the senate hearing. Monarch insist in this film that humanity's best chance at survival is finding ways to coexist with the Titans, yet they never give any suggestions for how they would go about doing that, and in the meantime they seem to be more interested in maintaining the status quo by keeping the Titans contained than doing anything else.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: While Apex Cybernetics callously disregard the deaths that have come from their actions, and building Mechagodzilla with parts from Ghidorah as the computer was a terrible idea, their goal of giving humanity a way to actually stand a fighting chance against Titans doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Even assuming Godzilla, Kong, and the other Titans are not hostile to humanity and will continue to act in a protective role, they have come dangerously close to defeat by hostile Titans before.
• In Mrs. Doubtfire, Daniel (as Mrs. Doubtfire) lectures Miranda about how it's far too soon to be introducing Stuart to the kids. While it's presented as Daniel being jealous and interfering, he's perfectly right about this — the kids are still dealing with the divorce and it's inappropriate for Miranda to bring a new man into the house who immediately starts acting like a father to the kids when they already have one.
• The 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty has Captain Bligh brusquely refusing to marry one of his younger crewmen to a Polynesian girl he wants to sleep with, laughing contemptuously in the guy's face (apparently the only time he is noted to have actually laughed during the entire voyage) and telling him to 'get that slut off of [his] ship.' This is brought up later as just another sign of what a callous prick the captain is, but Bligh is probably on to something in that it would irresponsible as the captain of the ship to marry a man to a woman (who doesn't even speak the same language as them) just because he wants to bed her and has some religious reservations about it. The ceremony would likely be legally binding considering they're on an British warship, and the affair is almost certainly meaningless and going to burn itself out rather quickly. In essence, Bligh may be being a jerk about it, but he's right to think the guy is an idiot who's thinking with the wrong head.
• Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition: Reverend Hicks miraculously survives being bitten by a zombie, and at the end goes on a deranged rant that the zombies are demons from hell. He is supposed to come across as The Fundamentalist, but his fanatical belief that the zombie plague is supernatural in origin isn't really any more preposterous than it being radiation from a space probe or some sort of virus. First, he is in fact spared, which does come across as miraculous, and second, it takes Willing Suspension of Disbelief for Hollywood Science to explain movie zombies with a virus; even undergraduate level biology would reveal it's a scientifically silly (if fun) idea. Science-based zombie explanations are invariably Techno Babble, but magic or divine intervention has no such constraint.
• Nine Months is all about a man (Samuel) who finds out his girlfriend (Rebecca) is pregnant; needless to say, it's a surprise pregnancy and neither of them are really sure if they want to go through with it at first. Samuel himself doesn't really accept it until close to the end of the pregnancy, but Rebecca accepts it pretty early on and starts preparing for motherhood. Great pains are taken to paint Samuel as wrong for being reluctant to have a kid, veering into Strawman territory at several points, but the kicker has to be early on when Rebecca gets worried that the cat Samuel owns might be a problem, as a cat can lie on a baby's face and smother it (an idea which is, at best, implausible). She tries to convince Samuel to get rid of the cat, and we're supposed to side with her and think Samuel is an uncaring jerk for putting his pet ahead of his baby...except that, as Samuel says, the cat is fifteen years old, so it would be a surprise if it lived long enough to see the baby born, the cat has no teeth left, and the poor thing hardly moves. No vet would agree to put down an otherwise healthy pet that's just old, and giving it up to a shelter would be heartless because a cat that old is unadoptable, so it would be put down after a few months anyway instead of living its final days in comfort with a loving owner.
• The heroine in One Magic Christmas is not sufficiently excited about celebrating Christmas, so she's made to go through a Trauma Conga Line to make her thankful for what she has and get her in the holiday spirit. The thing is, she's depressed because her husband is out of work and out of money and their landlord is preparing to foreclose on their home — no one would feel merry or festive in those circumstances. And putting her through a barrage of terribly traumatic life experiences will hardly make her feel better.
• The 70s film Over the Edge presents police officer Sgt. Doberman as the face of authoritarian evil for trying to do his job and treats his shooting of a teenager as a Moral Event Horizon because the kid was pointing an empty gun at him while screaming "Die, pig!!" The intended sympathetic characters immediately dismiss Doberman's point that he had no way of knowing the weapon was unloaded, conveniently ignoring the fact that it's a damn good point. Anyone who's had firearms training — especially police officers — knows they absolutely cannot afford to assume that any gun aimed at them isn't loaded. Common sense dictates that anyone pointing an empty gun at somebody guaranteed to have both the means and ability to shoot back is either Too Dumb to Live or trying to die.
• In the Lindsay Lohan remake of The Parent Trap, not only did the girls immediately take a hating to Meredith simply because she wasn't their mother, but during the camping trip (to which she told them she wasn't an outdoors person) they filled her backpack with rocks, put a lizard on her head, replaced her bug repellent with sugar water, made her look like an idiot by telling her there were mountain lions, and finally push her mattress into the middle of the lake while she was asleep. Meredith is meant to look like a terrible person for freaking out and wanting to send the girls away, but anyone would have lost their shit and want to be rid of those little devils at that point. To make it worse, in her very first scene Meredith seemed to truly attempt to befriend Annie; and pushing a mattress with a sleeping person into the middle of a lake qualifies as attempted murder.
• Patch Adams:
  • Siskel & Ebert agree with the villains. Yes, while they were shown as insisting on being coldly professional at all times, which apparently includes things such as flatly telling someone they had a few weeks to live and then heading off to complete your rounds without another word, Ebert and Siskel said they would run if they got a wacky doctor like Robin Williams' character who is never actually seen treating patients. The option of having a reasonable amount of bedside manner without going overboard is never offered. The real Patch Adams himself was upset regarding his depiction in the movie, saying his method was more like the middle ground; help patients keep a positive attitude with good humor, but still, you know, practice real medicine. The film also focuses entirely on patients' mental well-being and neglects to consider the doctor's well-being. Becoming emotionally invested with a patient only to watch helplessly as they die will make anyone an emotional wreck.
    • On top of that, while Patch Adams is supposed to be the good guy, he commits numerous violations of professional ethics, as well as outright crimes, such as stealing medication from a hospital and practicing medicine without a license. (The real Patch Adams never did either.) The establishment doctors are fully justified in being horrified at Adams' antics.
  • Patch's roommate is supposed to be a Jerkass whose hostility is motivated by his frustration over Patch's subversive antics. When Patch calls him out after he turns Patch in for suspected cheating, the roommate replies he has seen how little Patch actually studies and asks how Patch still manages to get such high marks. The viewer has yet to see Patch do much studying either, so it seems primed for Patch to defend himself to show he knows the material. Instead, Patch launches into another speech attacking the roommate for being a Jerkass, and the viewer is left to assume Patch wears his smart hat offscreen because he is the protagonist, so he could not possibly be cheating to excel in an academic system he has such little regard for. (So...Patch doesn't study because he's "too smart" for the class?)
• Plan 9 from Outer Space: If, and only if, such a device that could blow up not only the world but the universe were plausible — then these visiting aliens would have a good point in trying to prevent it from being built. They really need to work on their methods though...
• In Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, Captain Harris believes that Commandant Lassard's idea of recruiting/volunteering people who are not qualified to do police work is dumb. While they may have helped towards the end, it's easy to see why Harris got annoyed when he said that no policemen's job or pay check would be safe. And despite his status as the resident antagonist, Harris did generally in the first film want to train some good hard working police officers even if his way was a little strict in some. If they're not full-fledged officers why should they be trusted with law enforcement, or encouraged to put themselves at risk? Lassard never really thought of the "citizens on patrol" program through properly. A neighborhood watch is one thing, but the "C.O.P." idea is actually one step away from vigilantes and lynch mobs. Sure, this was before George Zimmerman, but it was after Bernard Goetz.
• The Princess Diaries: Clarisse is portrayed as too harsh for getting angry at Mia for (unintentionally) embarrassing the family. While yes, Clarisse was indeed too harsh, she's not completely wrong for at least feeling mortified, considering that Mia was going to be the princess of a whole country in a few days. Princesses are usually supposed to be portrayed as classy, so having those mortifying photos of Mia in only a Modesty Towel in the newspapers for everyone to see would do a damage to the image of Mia's family.
• In Proxima, Mike is somewhat dismissive during his first meeting with Sara, and thinks she should ask for a more relaxed training timetable. Sara calls him sexist and assures him she can cope with the training, and the movie goes to show she indeed can endure it, but still Mike has a good point: Sara is about to begin one of the most demanding and grueling training regimes on Earth, and jumping head first in the full training regime can be outright dangerous to her. (The movie tries the woman-having-to-prove-herself-in-a-mans-profession angle for a while, but it does not work in this particular case at all. European Space Agency already qualified Sara for the astronaut training in Star City. That fact alone shows she is really good - no sane space agency would send a person for a costly training for a mission that itself costs billions of dollars just because she has a couple of 34DDs.)
• In Rampage: President Down, the FBI agent Vincent Jones is intended to be in the wrong for loudly opposing Bill Williamson's actions, when he makes the very valid point that Bill's goal for social reform is completely undermined by how his methods of accomplishing his goal involve killing many innocent people.
• In RoboCop 2, the titular hero has been given a massive reprogramming effort, including such gems as "discourage feelings of negativity and hostility" and "don't run through puddles and splash pedestrians or other cars". This is the same titular hero who previously wound up blowing up a multi-million-dollar gas station in order to stop an armed robbery that would have taken the cash in the register (and, depending on your level of analysis, even did so because he had a personal vendetta against the perpetrator). Although of course the movie is a send-up of the excesses of the U.S. in the 80s, OCP was actually trying to make him behave a little more like a real police officer instead of a reckless gung-ho killing machine devoid of emotion or remorse (which is played with a lot in the RoboCop (2014) remake). The two directives listed above, for instance, are basic common sense that every real police officer is supposed to do. On-screen, however, the programmers insist "they screwed him up!" At least they've already proven that he was, indeed, screwed up by the additional programming — but that's because he was already certifiable to begin with. The only saving grace is that the future was so dystopian that it needed him to be a loose cannon.
• Christian in Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas raises several valid and true points about the commercialization of Christmas, such as how modern Christianity has absorbed several religious symbols (such as Christmas trees) from Pagan beliefs, or that the mass overspending on personal goods could be used to help feed the needy. Cameron's character easily brushes off every complaint with Insane Troll Logic (i.e. It's okay to be greedy and gluttonous for material things because Jesus sacrificed his material body, or that people should see a stack of Christmas presents as the skyline of the New Jerusalem) that the film presents as actually being a Logic Bomb, as made clear as whenever Cameron is finished explaining something, Christian sits back in awe at the incredible wisdom he's just experienced.
• School of Rock:
  • Dewey has been bumming at the apartment of Ned and Patty for months if not years, while continually refusing to get a steady job and therefore doing little to contribute to the rent. Ned keeps doing whatever he can to accommodate him because they were in a band years ago, while Patty is just supposed to put up with this. It doesn't change the fact that Patty seems to take joy in Dewey's suffering, but anyone would be frustrated by that point. Patty is equally right to call out Dewey for impersonating Ned; by pulling such a stunt Dewey is messing with Ned's career prospects and likewise (as pointed out in the musical adaptation) his behavior could have potentially cost Ned his teaching license and ruined his whole career.
  • It's hard to blame Dewey's band for firing him — just watch Dewey in action during the opening scene. The fact that they win the battle of the bands without him only proves their point.
  • It doesn't exactly make parents "tightly-wound" for being upset that their kids are learning nothing but rock music, and no academics, for weeks or months on end. Even many rock-loving parents would be bothered by how this would set their kids up for some serious educational problems later in the area (for being behind all the other classes in their grade). In their case, it's not as extreme as the others in the movie as they are shown to just want what's best for their kids (as seen by their horrified reaction when Dewey accidentally implies he molested the students). Furthermore, the parents are right to be upset that a random stranger was impersonating a teacher, not the least being that from their perspective, the stranger could have been a dangerous person. They might even sue the school for not checking Dewey's credentials.
• In the film version of Sgt. Bilko, the villain is a military higher-up who wants to run Bilko out of the Army for essentially running a team of Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters out of an American military base, and also for getting him blamed for a crime Bilko committed and getting the villain transferred to Alaska. Since this is actually a completely reasonable thing to do from any objective viewpoint, the villain is made to accomplish his goals through methods even more criminal and underhanded than Bilko's, in order to make sure he doesn't get the audience's sympathy.
• Captain Skroeder from Short Circuit is the movie's villain... who makes the best sense of the characters. After all, he has to deal with a malfunctioning military robot that escaped; a robot that has, for example, no idea about the concept of death. Everyone's lucky it did not end in a major Terminator-style carnage.
• Space Mutiny tries to present the mutineers as evil, but look at it from their perspective. They didn't choose to spend their entire life on a ship — that decision was made for them. Space is clearly inhabited beyond the Southern Sun, so there's no reason why people who want to leave shouldn't be allowed to just leave. It's not hard to see the mutineers as simply trying to escape the flying jail they were unlucky enough to be born in, even if they are going about it in a bad way. The best the movie can muster against them is that the mutineers are wrong because their plans go against some nebulous, ill-defined "law of the universe."
• Spider-Man: Far From Home: Mysterio thinks Peter Parker, a teenager, should not have access to the world-spanning deadly drone system he has inherited from Tony Stark. It's hard to not agree with him, since Peter nearly blows up himself and all of his classmates when he first gains control of the drones.
• Spy Game. The CIA officials are shown as ruthless Obstructive Bureaucrats that are fully willing to let Tom Bishop be executed. On close examination however:
  • Bishop was caught red-handed by the Chinese — a Chinese spy caught red-handed by the US would likely get a life without parole (if s/he were lucky). As cruel as it sounds, this is a professional risk of a spy. Especially when, as Bishop was, operating on a non-official cover.
  • No one knows if the Chinese are actually willing to execute Bishop — in diplomatese, such threat is often a call to the bidding table, to see how much the US are willing to sacrifice in order to get their man back. The fact that the CIA officials do not talk about any negotiations doesn't necessarily mean they aren't happening. (Especially considering that the US and China are about to sign a major trade agreement; Bishop's capture is a good opportunity for the Chinese to negotiate some benefits in exchange for the spy.)
  • Bishop's action was unauthorized by his superiors — by going rogue, he jeopardized multiple other cover agents in China. Sacrificing one agent to save an entire network of spies is cold, but hardly irrational.
  • Muir finally saves Bishop by faking a written order and sending a navy SEAL team to retrieve him and Hadley by force. This is an act of war, considering the relations between the US and China at the moment are far from an open military conflict. (And it's against a major economic and military power, that is...) It's rather unlikely that Muir began World War III, but still, some more or less nasty international repercussions will follow.
  • Beatings and Chinese prison conditions notwithstanding, numerous Chinese prison guards were shot and in all probability killed to save a single captured person detained in lawful custody, not to mention the risk posed to the American soldiers themselves. From a utilitarian perspective, that's a lot of innocent or barely-complicit lives traded for the life of one renegade agent.
• Star Trek: First Contact: The movie tries to portray Starfleet Command as being their usual Obstructive Bureaucrat selves when they refuse to allow Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E to join up with the task force intercepting the Borg because they claim he is too unstable when dealing with the Borg. However, while Picard disobeying their orders is what saves the day at the battle of Earth, their fears prove to be well founded when his Revenge Before Reason mindset nearly hands the Borg victory on a platter later on.
• Star Trek: Insurrection: This is a common criticism of the film, as Picard and his crew mutiny rather than remove people who aren't even native to a planet, number less than 1000, who're sitting on a literal fountain of youth that could save the lives of millions... all during the Dominion War, a conflict the Federation is badly losing at this point, where it could turn the tide in their favor. What's even worse is that if the Federation and its allies lose the war, they predict that over a hundred billion people will die. Strawman villains are used to shore up Picard's side as being right — the bad guys are dog-kickers who want revenge on the pacifist Baku (plus they're ugly), so by the movie's logic this makes it okay. Even many cast members (including the director, Jonathan Frakes), felt that in this case removing the Baku would have been acceptable. The sad part is that this could have been easily avoided by having the reveal be that the slaving drug-dealing Dominion allies they were working with were lying about the benefits. This is never so much as suggested.
• The Stuff: When Jason tries to tell his family that The Stuff is sinister because it's alive and moving, his Stuff-stuffed father responds that the yogurt everyone eats has active cultures that are moving on a level too small to be seen. He's defending The Stuff because he's already been brainwashed by it, but he's not incorrect in asking for more evidence that it's evil.
• Lex Luthor in Superman Returns accuses Superman of selfishly withholding the advanced alien technology he inherited from his dad, so that the planet is forced to stay dependent on Superman. While he is wrong about Superman's motives for doing so, he has a point. Sharing, say, what Kryptonian science knows about medicine or space travel or producing food would probably save a lot more lives than individually putting out fires with super breath. There are a few hints at an explanation in the first movie^note there is some form of Alien Non-Interference Clause in place that prohibits Superman from interfering with human history, but the lack of detail of what is permitted, why it's in place and how this is supposed to be enforced — if it even has enforcement — leaves it somewhat lacking as a response (in addition to not being raised in the same film).
• In the Killer Bee movie The Swarm (1978), Michael Caine's character, Dr Bradford Crane, is clearly supposed to be the hero and Richard Widmark's General Slater the villain. The trouble is that all of the schemes for dealing with the bees suggested by Slater all seem eminently sensible but are shot down by Crane on the grounds of the "environmental damage" (even after the bees have already blown up a nuclear reactor, killing upwards of 30,000 people) whilst none of Crane's schemes actually work until the end. On top of that, Crane defeats the swarm of bees by setting an oil slick on fire, even though that is not exactly great for the environment.
• Teaching Mrs. Tingle: The title character is a high school Sadist Teacher who has it in for the lead character, who is just trying to become valedictorian. At the start of the film, Mrs. Tingle gives a C grade to a project she worked six months on, a historical recreation of the diary of a girl accused of being a witch during the time of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. Except that the diary describes witch-burnings, whereas the accused witches at Salem were all hanged, except for the one man who was crushed^note Technically speaking, he was never tried as a witch, the crushing was because he refused to make a plea, meaning the teacher was well within her rights to mark the assignment down. Later, Mrs. Tingle tries to report the lead for cheating — after she finds a copy of an upcoming test in her backpack. One needn't be a villain not to be convinced by the girl's claim that "Someone else put that there, I didn't want it!"
• In The Time Machine (2002), the Uber-Morlock is ostensibly heartless for justifying his clan preying on the human Eloi as "800,000 years of evolution," but his arguments come off as far more convincing than those of the protagonist. Alexander simply claims that it's a perversion of natural law, only based on the standards of his time and ignoring what went on for those 800 millennia. The Uber-Morlock retorts that his Time Machine is just as much a perversion, made as an attempt for Alexander to control the world around him, and he goes into detail explaining how fate has led to his current state just as it had led to the Uber-Morlock's existence.
• Nobody has to like the villain of Wall Street, but Gordon Gekko's infamous "greed is good, greed works" speech is tougher to refute than it's comfortable admitting. Within the limits of the character's context, human greed very much does end up resulting in certain benign outcomes—some of the time, and for some people. And quite a lot of the time human greed takes an easy-to-predict course that makes it a useful tool to achieve one's desired ends, which ends might or might not be villainous. That's not an inherently comfortable or welcome message, of course, but Oliver Stone is asking us to shoot the messenger here.
• The Wizard of Oz: Miss Gulch is understandably annoyed that Dorothy continually walks home past her house, with Toto "one or twice a week" running into her yard and chasing her beloved pet cat. Miss Gulch is also right to be angry about Toto biting her on the leg. Sure, Miss Gulch does go wrong in demanding that Toto be destroyed, in one of the most famous cases of Disproportionate Retribution in film which has forever earned the enmity of generations of children. But the movie tries to treat her complaints as entirely unjustified, when the fact of the matter is, after all, Dorothy really should have put her dog on a leash, or just carried Toto past Miss Gulch's home, after the first or second time it happened. Not helping is Dorothy's refusal to even try and reason with her, instead threatening to bite her too. Hunk, one of the farmhands, even bluntly points out to Dorothy that she could have taken a different route to get home so that she wouldn't have to go by Miss Gulch's house, Toto wouldn't get into her garden and they both could have stayed out of trouble, to which Dorothy weakly retorts that "You just won't listen!"
• In the made-for-TV movie Zenon: The Zequel, General Hammond (no, not that one) arrives to decommission the station, which was still suffering the after-effects of the sabotage in the previous film. His actions are seen by the main characters as evil. Here's what he really does: decommission an unstable space station before it falls to Earth, doing untold damage, attempt to apprehend a girl who thinks it's okay to smuggle aboard a shuttle, chase after spaceship thieves, and other actions perfectly in line with what any good soldier or police officer would do.

---