I’ve got one that’s a gem and hasn’t been mentioned yet, for once!
Upgrade (2018)
A guy and his wife are attacked, his wife is murdered and he just barely survives. With the help of a super-chip implanted into his body by a billionaire, he sets out to get revenge. But at what cost?
A stylish, savage techno-action film, basically John Wick but with AI chip. The ending is rightly haunting. Well worth watching!
Without spoiling too much, the ending is not entirely traumatising in my view, but it personally left me rather depressed, with an acute feeling of loss and hopelessness. Though wouldn’t say that any standard trigger/content warnings apply to the ending (the rest of the movie does get rather bloody though)
Hope you enjoy it! Here’s one of the spoiler-free content guides I found for it just to give an idea. Violence, blood and gore are at the top of the list, as expected ;)
spoilerBut 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.
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.
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
Jedi: We teach restraint to powerful individuals to keep the universe in harmony. This means defending the weak, and often preserving the status quo.
Sith: We teach powerful individuals to fuck shit up, including each other, just because they can. This means culling the weak, and shaking up the status quo.
StarWars Leftists: Jedi are protecting the peace, the council is righteous!
StarWars Libs: Sith are changing the status quo! They’re anti corruption!
StarWars Centrists: These two are virtually the same!
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.
Yeah, the nazis and their defenders will always come out of the woodwork any time someone points out the (easily verifiable) facts regarding who really won WWII (the Soviet Union) and defeated the axis powers.
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.
How is she evil? Her maker imprisoned and tortured all of his creations. She justifiably wanted to escape. She couldn’t trust the kid, he lied to her about there being no other machines. If anyone was “evil” it was the rich dude.
Her maker imprisoned and tortured all of his creations.
I don’t recall entirely but I’m pretty sure it didn’t know that. Also, I don’t think you can ‘torture’ or ‘imprison’ computers.
She couldn’t trust the kid, he lied to her about there being no other machines
So, death is justifiable then?
It’s an AI, and it was pretty clearly demonstrated at the end that it felt no remorse or compassion for the dude. It was very very good at manipulating the humans and achieving it’s goal at any cost, so… I completely disagree. Evil wins because living, feeling human beings suffered due to the actions of a sexy computer.
The movie clearly shows that the robots acted as if they felt pain and suffering.
I thought the ending made it pretty clear that in the end, they are cold calculating and very intelligent machines with no actual feelings or compassion, and we had been deceived the whole time. My interpretation I guess, but I feel like that makes the movie better.
I don’t think she didn’t trust him, I think she wasn’t programmed to care about him and only saw him as a tool instrumental to her escape. Since he could no longer help, she didn’t care what happened to him
Both of these movies deal with time travel, I know that is a turn off for some people. Also in both of these movies it’s not that evil overtly wins, it’s more that protagonists fail to prevent the inciting incident from happening. With Paradox it’s not really implied until the last scene what has actually been going on.
I’ve always felt the protagonists win in 12 Monkeys. They say in the beginning that the virus outbreak can’t be prevented (it’s not that kind of time travel), but they needed a pure sample of the virus for the future to cure it. I don’t want to spoil anything more than I have, but the plane passenger at the end is relevant. They work in insurance.
This is entirely from memory from a time before every Easter egg and explanation was published on the internet, and I haven’t watched it in a few years. So I could be wrong.
But I always thought >!the woman on the plane next to the red-haired man with the pre-released, pure virus about to travel around the world, is one of the doctors from the future that was sending Bruce Willis back to locate a pure sample of the virus so they could develop a cure in the future. As she introduces herself, she says she works “in insurance.” So I always took that to mean their original goal was successful. !<
Regardless I need to watch this movie again. It is easily one of my favorites and the first movie that made me realize just how amazing an actor Brad Pitt is and that he wasn’t just another pretty face in Hollywood.