Last weekend I finished playing The Witcher (2007). I thought it was brilliant in the way it handled in-game plot decisions and the consequences of neutrality. Unlike in some games, there is no truce to broker: playing Switzerland just means that everybody hates your guts. Alas, The Witcher 2 (2011) is one of the most graphically demanding games made to date, and my poor laptop can’t handle it. So instead I got to look for movies that handled moral ambiguity similarly.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
Why is it so difficult for movies to portray two sides of a conflict sympathetically? Are they afraid of looking like commie-sympathizers? Is the hero not heroic enough to withstand a little bit of doubt? Must the villain not allow themselves to show an iota of kindness?
Games have a one up over movies in this case. It’s much, much easier for a game to portray two sides of a conflict sympathetically, due to a less linear structure and no fixed time limit. Mass Effect’s Geth/Quarian war, Dragon Age II’s Mage/Templar conflict, Skyrim’s Stormcloaks/Imperials war, and the whole Assassin’s Creed series are good examples of developers trying to make the player decisions difficult.
Here are five movies that make at least a half-assed attempt to allow the audience to sympathize with both sides of a conflict, in order of least to most successful.
V for Vendetta (2006)
In the late 2020s, the UK is the last stable country in the world, though such stability comes with a totalitarian rule by the governing party. A masked vigilante known only as V (Hugo Weaving) plots to overthrow the fascist state. Evey (Natalie Portman) is swept up in the war against terror…
According to Alan Moore, the filmmakers totally missed the point when adapting the comic to the silver screen. The comic is a comparison of anarchy and fascism, but the film is a fairy tale of overthrowing The Man. Nowhere are the consequences of anarchy acknowledged or addressed, and I’m sure that the citizens of the former UK were ignorant of that too, preferring to gape in awe at flashy stunts.
However, V for Vendetta is effective in delivering its chosen message with a PG-13 rating, even if such a message is not in concordance with Moore’s intended message. The ideas and motifs were powerful enough to launch Guy Fawkes masks as a sign of resistance against oppressive governments.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Caesar (Andy Serkis in motion capture), is the son of a chimp test subject for the Alzheimer’s drug ALZ-112. Will Rodman (James Franco) rescues Caesar from euthanization after a fiasco in the animal testing facility. The drug gives Caesar incredible intelligence, but because of Caesar’s innate strength Will is forced to place Caesar in a primate shelter. He comes to the bitter realization that he will never belong in human society, and so seeks to create an independent order of primates.
This is a good movie, and Caesar is a great character. His struggles against The Man are spotted with moments of triumph and jubilation as he accomplishes goals against staggering odds. Caesar’s revolution is also spotted with blood, as his primate compatriots exact their revenge for years of abuse and confinement.
The humans, on the other hand, are less personable and less sympathetic. They would rather that hyper-intelligent primates not go out and establish an independent society in the California redwood forests, thank you very much. Apes are scary and violent. The most sympathetic of them is Will Rodman, who would just like everything to go back to the way it was and ignore Caesar’s potential as an independent entity. Booo.
Maintaining grey morality in both sides of a conflict is more than making both sides have questionable means to legitimate ends. The audience must sympathize with both sides roughly equally, and alas, Caesar is a much more compelling character than anyone else in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Transcendence (2014)
Scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) dies of a polonium-laced bullet, courtesy of an anti-technology terrorist group, but is brought back as an immensely powerful artificial intelligence… or is he?
Can machine ever comprehend man? Or, can man ever understand machine? Transcendence would like to say “no” to both questions. The conflict between the anti-tech terrorists and computer-Johnny-Depp is based on a lack of understanding and empathy between sides. The anti-tech terrorists fear the technological singularity that computer-Johnny-Depp’s scientific advances may usher. Computer-Johnny-Depp is too deeply involved in his research to bother explaining what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, in a manner unthreatening to humans. As a scientist he should know how important PR is to getting research grants and not getting mugged by terrorists.
But alienation and misunderstanding are boring, boring motivations. What audience wants to sympathize with a group that can’t even try to get their heads out of their asses?
Bride Wars (2009)
Two childhood friends (Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson) share a dream of getting married at the Plaza Hotel in New York, but the wedding planner overbooks them. The friends turn on each other to free up the dates for their wedding.
How could someone make a movie this awful? My theory is that Bride Wars was produced by Bride Magazine to sell swathes of tulle and childhood dreams. It is difficult to believe that any two women could be as shallow and stupid as Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson’s characters in this movie, but utterly inconceivable to think that Bride Wars would find enough wedding-brained, consumption-centred viewers to make back what this film cost. Alas, Bride Wars grossed $114M domestically on $30M. For shame.
I was probably supposed to sympathize with both deuteragonists equally but I hated them both equally. In that perverse way, Bride Wars succeeds.
X-Men: First Class (2011)
In 1962, young mutants Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) join up with the CIA to recruit fellow mutants and apprehend Sebastian Shaw, a former Nazi colonel bent on starting World War III and mutant supremacy.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Marvel canon knows how this ends. Erik Lensherr (Magneto) somehow becomes the head of the mutant exceptionalism movement, while Xavier (Professor X) will become the wheelchair-bound headmaster of a school for mutants and advocate for peace and equality between humans and mutants.
This is the only movie of the five that truly succeeds in maintaining moral ambiguity. The two mutant philosophies are equally sympathetic, as are their champions. Erik Lensherr was in a concentration camp and rightfully distrusts humanity’s ability to accept those who are different. Charles Xavier, as a result of his optimism and privileged upbringing, believes that mutants and their powers could be integrated peacefully within human society. And both are right. The world is full of good people and bad people. Individuals have good traits and bad traits. Accepting that both states could coexist within a single society, movement, or person is a key to maturity – and to making a good movie about moral ambiguity.
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