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Movie Heroes Who Killed Innocent People

Neo, the Terminator, and Luke Skywalker are supposed to be the good guys, but they're all movie heroes who killed innocent people!

By Ben KharakhPublished 6 years ago 7 min read
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What so many people liked about Obama was that he was a cool guy with reasonable ideas. He liked Kendrick Lamar, had sensible policies, and made us feel re-assured when we were faced with tragedy. But he also had the blood of civilian life on his hands. It was a responsibility Obama took very seriously.

Unlike Superman, Luke Skywalker, Austin Powers, or other movie heroes who killed innocent people, Obama was very aware of the weight that rested on his shoulders. He only seemed like a movie hero because too many of us had unreasonable expectations of the 44th President; in reality, he was as much a person as any of us.

When we recognize the moral ambiguity in which Obama exists it's easier to cut him a break. But movie heroes who killed innocent people? Hey, we're walking here! Take it outside of town.

Pacific Rim, The Avengers, and especially Man of Steel feature movie heroes who kill innocent people. They really throw into question the whole "save the day" thing! Those cities are gone, the people are dead, the living are traumatized, and everyone's lives are now dedicated to rebuilding. Sorting the dead is all anyone can talk about! No more going to Starbucks to work on your screenplay 'cause you gotta be pulling rubble off children. Yeah, lotta those high rises had daycares and now you gotta sort through all those little arms and legs; everyone's doing it! Thanks, Superman! I thought your whole thing was that you don't kill people. You know what, you're "not so super, man."

A New Hope, The Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens all feature movie heroes who killed innocent people while trying to save the day. Luke Skywalker and Poe Dameron both blow up military installations that range in size between a small moon or an entire ice planet. You think the thousands of people who work on those ships were all bad guys? I'm not pulling a President Garbage Sack and saying there are "very fine people on both sides," but life is more complicated than action movies!

You can't reduce something as complex as an entire economy to narrow binaries like "good" and "bad." Just think of all those cafeteria workers on the Death Star. Or the doctors in the med bay. Are they supposed to deprive people of medical care just because those people are participants in a vast military industrial complex? Are you complicit in cruel factory farming practices because you eat meat? How should you be treated? Exactly. So many aspiring screenwriters got blown up just because the Starkiller Base had the best Starbucks this side of Coruscant!

It was all a misunderstanding! Nonetheless, Sir Lancelot is one of those movie heroes who killed innocent people. And now we're complicit in the deaths onscreen because we want him to kill all those movie characters because it's funny every time he does it! And that part where Sir Lancelot is running and the guard is looking at him and then they cut back and he's still far away running and they keeping cutting back and forth and then he finally shows up even though the last cut he was far away? That part's awesome!

You know what's cooler than a million dollars? Being complicit in the election of Donald Trump. Wait, that's not cool at all! And yet that's exactly what makes Mark Zuckerberg one of the movie heroes who killed innocent people. Although technically not a hero, Zuckerberg is the protagonist of The Social Network. And now Zucks is complicit in the election of Homeopathic Hitler by virtue of not doing more to stop Facebook from being coopted by a hostile foreign government intent on influencing the 2016 presidential election. The weight of all who suffer because of Trump's regressive and oppressive policy in part rests on the shoulders of Zuckerberg. It totally fits with the company's general ethos given that Zuckerberg makes Facebook deliberately addictive.

Get ready for some massive spoilers for the 2012 horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods. We may start rooting for Marty Mikalski and Dana Polk to survive the onslaught of terrors that they're subjected to, but we're singing a different tune by the time The Director reveals to us that the pair must die to keep Lovecraftian Ancient Ones from laying siege to the rest of humanity. We don't want to be laid siege to; we're trying to write our screenplays at a Starbucks! But the film delivers on the promise of Mikalski's ethos: that humanity has become complacent and complicit in too much suffering (see our President who is an openly bad person). So while this may make Mikalski and Polk two movie heroes who killed innocent people, we're left feeling satisfied because the film so epically delivered on the promise of its premise and that of its stoner protagonist.

Talk about the Lord working in mysterious ways! Actually, this is pretty straight forward: by killing every first born son in Egypt, Moses enters the ranks among the worst movie heroes who killed innocent people. Children, babies, tweens, old men, 30-year-olds, all dead because of Moses! One of the legendary Jewish superheroes he is not! That is straight villainy. Although, the blame really falls at God's feet because the Lord "hardened Pharaoh's heart." Yeesh! It really makes one think...

Wait a minute! What was that Star Wars quote?"Always two there are, Master and the Apprentice." I think Yoda may be on to something! What if God is the original Sith Lord? What if God is Supreme Leader Snoke?! Who else would be behind the First Order if not the alpha and omega?! It all makes sense! God flooded the Earth, he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and he poisoned Kylo Ren's heart. Wow. Really looking forward to the final installment of the new Star Warstrilogy now!

It's always been of some debate whether or not Neo from The Matrix is himself a program. It begs the question: how do we ascribe personhood in the first place? When we can't tell the difference between a machine and a human the machine is deemed a person. This evaluation is known as The Turing Test. The evaluation is made by studying how the subject of the test makes its choices.

So when Mr. Smith pummels Neo for what seems like an eternity before asking him, "Why do you persist?" he's setting the stage for a high stakes Turing Test. When Neo answers, "Because I choose to," it no longer matters if Neo is himself a program because in making a choice Neo is asserting his agency and laying claim to his personhood.

Neo also becomes one of the movie heroes who killed innocent people because all those Mr. Smiths are immediately deleted. And who were those Mr. Smiths if not ordinary people who were hijacked by a program? All those pods full of people are now full of duds! That's a whole city's worth of people kaput!

"I know now why you cry but it's something I can never do." OMG THAT ROBOT KNOWS HOW TO FEEL! Unfortunately, even if he melts himself in liquid metal, Arnold and every other cast member of the Terminator franchise are movie heroes who killed innocent people because they always play a part in kickstarting the robot apocalypse known as Judgement Day. Not to mention all the people they're fine with killing and maiming because they think they're going to stop Judgment Day. That's the thing with time paradoxes; you just can't escape 'em! It also goes to show you: when all you have is Terminators all your problems turn into John Connors.

By some accounts Austin Powers is one of the best trilogies ever. A lot of the humor is derived from the simple trick of humanizing characters who would otherwise have no humanity. It's a type of humor that would later become the bread and butter of Family Guy.

What makes bad guys anonymous is in part that we are never given the opportunity to sympathize with them. But when a bad guys screams in terror in the face of his own impending doom suddenly he is us and we are him. That makes Austin Powers one of the movie heroes who killed innocent people.

Austin shows no remorse! He says, "Let's go!" right away. He's so desensitized to violence at this point that it doesn't mean a thing. No wonder he has to party so much; he's trying to get away from the blood on his hands!

Oh, this is both deliciously John Carpenter and deliciously 90s! A theocratic president for life (President Sex Criminal, anybody?!) has created a device known as the "Sword of Damocles" that has the potential to shut down all electronic devices on Earth. Sorry to spoil this 22-year-old movie, but our hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) activates that satellite, turns off anything that isn't a simple machine, and becomes one of the movie heroes who killed innocent people. Immediately a bunch of planes fell out of the sky, surgeries were botched, pacemakers just stopped, and my screenplay wasn't saved on this laptop and I just upgraded to Writer's Duet Pro. THE WORST!

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About the Creator

Ben Kharakh

Manic pixie dream goth. With appearances in Fortune, Vice, Gothamist, and McSweeney's.@benkharakh

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