A "good" villain makes a good story..

Lol.. Am I on the side of the villains now? Well, it's all fiction for a reason..
Okay, on to the content of the above topic. Have you ever wondered how your favorite superhero movie would be if the villain was all dry, soft and boring? You will certainly not call it your "favorite" right? Now this isn't meant to disregard the good guys.. We have and will always love them for their actions and perspectives. But really, you just gotta appreciate the bad guys' performance even if the character is portrayed as the ultimate bad guy or a lackey or a sidekick or a minion or whatever he or she or it is called.. 😆

I'm going to make this very simply by comparing two superhero movies.. One from MCU and the other from DCEU: Avengers: Age of Ultron and Justice League. Now this is just my opinion about the villains in the story. The presence of Ultron, a peacekeeping intelligent system built by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner which turned out to be the opposite of everything its creators wanted it to be in the Avengers movie was so cool. His genocidal plan to destroy the world starting with Sokovia was one of a kind (lifting the entire building structure of a country so high to be plummeted back to the ground). And not just his plan, everything just clicked with his portrayal - his unending speeches 😆, his kinda scary presence and his resourcefulness. It took the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D's interference to stop him; a final showdown in which one of the Avengers died and there were casualties (part of what led to Civil War). That's what I call a "good" villain 😊.. On to the second movie, its villain (Steppenwolf) had quite the opposite feeling from me. He led an army of parademons to Earth to search for mother boxes and take over the planet. His portrayal is something I will call "just there 😒". Sure, he was threatening the safety of the planet and it looked like he was winning at first (a regular move in most stories), but he was easily defeated especially when Superman showed up. We can't honestly say his effects will be felt except for the memories he's given the Justice League. In the end, he was made to feel like Spider-Man webbing up burglers for the cops or Daredevil leaving defeated criminals at the police department's doorstep.

Point is, fictional stories are as good as the villain(s) in it. A "good" villain brings unending action, makes intelligent moves and drops interesting quotes/speeches (this one always make me laugh).. A very recent example is Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.. What a villain! 😂 Google even acknowledged his presence with the "snapping off" of things. Joker in "The Dark Knight movie" is another worthy example among so many. Villains are driven by different things like greed, selfishness, their perspective of the world, hatred for the hero, revenge etc. And all these coupled with the other complexities of the story just makes it "so cool". In whatever manner the villain is portrayed (either as a very strong ultimate bad guy or an underrated criminal or something else), you just hope for a really "good" performance. This doesn't mean the good guys should be "just there", that's where the balance comes in. Like one of my favorite villains said.. "Perfectly balanced as all things should be" 💯