Fallen. Denzel sets a very neat trap for the demon… but not neat enough.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog as well. While the Doc may have been mostly noble and Hammer mostly awful, it ends (somewhat ambiguously) with the Doc actually turning into a villain.
Fallen was the one I was going to add. Glad to see it here!
I’m still disappointed we never got the Dr. Horrible sequel…
The Usual Suspects is the first one that comes to mind that isn’t horror and the villain winning by getting away. Does that fit the ‘evil wins’ concept you are looking for?
Would Reservoir Dogs also count in that case?
In The Company Of Men
Devil’s Advocate
Interview With The Vampire
Se7en
Nightcrawler
American Psycho
Arguably No Country For Old Men
A lot of documentaries e.g: Paradise Lost.
Devil’s Advocate
I’d say evil loses quite definitively in that one - although the final minute or so makes it clear the contest of wills isn’t over.
The reason why I think it wins is it becomes obvious Satan can have do-overs and he’s already falling for one of them. He hasn’t actually escaped, and Satan is still having fun at his expense.
Gone Girl (2014). Then again, maybe that one counts as horror.
Nah, I’d call it a thriller.
Pretty much any Batman movie. It’s subtle, because it’s not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d’entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.
I’d argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.
Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that’s standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.
Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it’s so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.
To add to the star wars situation, the jedi are just as bad for the force as the sith, if not worse. They enforce a rigorous dogma that forces their own to suppress all emotion from a young age out of fear that they may be corrupted by the dark side. Not only does this literally make Darth Vader, but it leads to an entire society of emotionally stunted psychics who apparently go rogue very often. They’re not sustainable.
Ignoring the new movies because I genuinely can’t figure out what they’re about, Anakin fulfilled the prophecy at the end of the original 3, destroying the incredibly powerful dogmatic regime of the jedi and killing both master and pupil of the sith leaving only independent, self governed force users dotting the galaxy.
No, they aren’t.
Why the hell don’t Star Wars fans understand Star Wars, it’s not that deep and even when they go looking they splash around in the shallow end of the pool
It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU
A Scanner Darkly, the drug epidemic is controlled by the pharmaceutical companies and they are still rich at the end.
spoiler
But the movie ends with the brainfried undercover cop picking a drug-producing flower to send to his friends as a gift. It’s implied that’s what they need to bring the drug empire down.
It’s implied that it could go either way, but the ending it has ended before that could be decided. Also that undercover cop burned out his brain for a cause he never really signed up for.
Half of US «War movies» It’s not like the US soldier were less evil than the person they fight
Are you familiar with Nazi Germany?
Just making sure.
Nazis certainly were evil at their core and may be an outlier. War though? It’s difficult to not call war and it’s atrocities evil. Even if you can prove irrefutably that you are on the “good side”, two barracks down, the next town over, a 1000ft overhead something evil could be taking place specifically because war exists, and what’s evil hides easiest in chaos and death.
Conflict happens. To the single soldier. The lonely wife. The stricken Mother and Father. War rarely has a true meaning. “Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer” Javik (Mass Effect)
People tend to defend war because of their agreement or disagreement over the reason for a conflict. While there is often a morally right side and wrong side, all I really see are the lives lost.
Nice speech. Not terribly relevant, but I’m sure it made you feel nice.
Don’t forget Imperial Japan! Everyone leaves them out of the discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1gcipAvplY
The Americans never fought the Nazis. The Nazis fought them.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’d just like to point out that it wasn’t the Americans who beat the Nazis, it was the Soviets
All while killing nearly 15 million civilians and undesirables, after being allied to the Nazis and invading Poland and then only going against the Nazis when they kept invading.
The Soviet’s were happy to carve up Europe with the Nazis.
The soviets didn’t win it single handedly by any measure, but funny joke and all.
The Soviets weren’t the good guys, they just happened to be double fucked by their bad guy ally.
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Good point.
There Will Be Blood
I am going to put in little shop of horrors since it is a musical. And I really would not consider it horror.
For those of you that don’t know there are actually 2 versions of this movie. The original release version where the plants lose and the ORIGINAL test audience version where the plants win.
Globo Gym wins in the original version of Dodgeball, but the test audiences hated it so they added the blindfolded stand-off. I’m mostly happy they changed it, but that original ending would have been so ballsy. Also would make the subtitle better, since most “true” underdogs do lose.
Heh. Ballsy.
The director insists the alien plants winning was the original ending he wanted, but he was forced to give the film a happy ending at the last minute. The director’s cut gives you the original ending in all it’s evil glory.
There’s also an original Little Shop of Horrors released in 1960 that stars a young Jack Nicholson. That film has a different ending than both endings of the 1986 remake.
The original ending was included on one of the recent home video releases. If you like the movie and haven’t seen it yet, you really need to.
No Country For Old Men.
Also from the same year, There Will Be Blood.
He drank their milkshake.
Time Bandits
Don’t touch it!
I’m not convinced evil won in that one, mostly cuz the ending made no sense
I guess the iron giant
Law abiding citizen
Cabin in the woods
I love Cabin in the Woods, but it arguably falls under horror.
I know, but I didn’t feel like it’s horror in the spirit of the question. OP would need to weigh in.
Glad to see Law Abiding Citizen listed, I hate the ending with a passion.
Many people do, but the whole point of the movie was that the prosecution didn’t go far enough to stop the original perpetrators. The whole point of the ending was that the entire law enforcement system came together to try to determine what it would take to stop one person, and when he tried to stop that he signed his own death warrant.
I’d argue that the whole damn system was either corrupt or broken beyond repair. The fact that they “won” in the end and got to simply go on with their lives is pretty much evil winning out.
It would also have been a much more interesting story if they let Clyde win or escalated the havoc he unleashed even further. But it seems they ran out of ideas and or budget by the time they started wrapping up the final act. So that’s a second time evil wins again.
Fight Club
That was more chaos winning than evil. Blowing up credit institutions and wiping everyone’s debt is far from evil in most people’s eyes.
Blowing up buildings with people inside them is evil.
From what I remember there were no people inside
It’s a point raised in the movie. There were no people in the buildings because the bombings were done at night and the only people that would be in the buildings were a part of the group and knew to be out of them.
Fair point. Although I suspect you could still kill people that just happen to be walking by the buildings and such.
There will be blood. Oil mogul thrives while america plunges into depression. Plainview and people like him will go on to be more influential down the line. Like prescott bush or hw bush.
