Marvel Movie Villains Ranked from Worst to Best

insanely-smart:

1. Loki – ‘Thor’ and ‘The Avengers’

But when it comes to the ultimate Marvel villain, come
on, it’s Loki. Not a single MCU villain to date comes close to touching
the pathos of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, who basically stole Thor even before he was revealed to be an antagonistic force. We care
about Loki, even when he’s doing awful things, and his story is
ultimately one of tragedy. That’s what makes him compelling, and that’s
what no other Marvel movie has been able to replicate. Granted, Loki got
to build his pathos as a friendly face first before being outed as a
baddie, but even in The Avengers there’s a
dynamism to the performance and the role that makes it utterly
watchable. Here’s hoping Loki sticks around for a very, very long time.

I largely agree with the ordering and analysis – especially #1 and 2 – but I would have put Thanos higher on the grounds of his background presence in The Avengers and the utter creepiness of his role as Gamora and Nebula’s “father” in the GOTG movies. I also would have put Red Skull lower, because I found him kind of a boring, predictable cartoon “I vant to take over ze vorld” villain in much the same way as Malekith and Hela. (Yeah, I know, the Nazis really were like that… except that Red Skull isn’t really a Nazi, and doesn’t care about the race stuff, so his motivation is just sort of confusing. Just like Hydra’s motivations in general, as the discussion of Alexander Pierce notes.)

I definitely would have put Ultron higher than Red Skull, precisely for the reasons the writer describes:

Writer/director Joss Whedon is asking big, difficult, and dark questions with this film concerning parentage and basic humanism, and James Spader’s evil robot Ultron is something of a mouthpiece for these ideas and concerns. Ultron is essentially Tony’s legacy in humanoid form, and this is a story of a son denying his father and carving out a legacy of his own. While the visual design of the character is a bit underwhelming, his motivations and Shakespearean-like dialogue are delectable, and Spader makes a meal of it. That final scene between Ultron and Vision, discussing the value of humanity itself, is something that could only come from the mind of Whedon in the context of a massive blockbuster sequel, and Ultron makes for one of the MCU’s very best baddies.

This writer – free of Tumblr’s self-righteous, aesthetically indiscriminate animus against Joss Whedon (and probably a white dude, which of course automatically discredits him, except in certain circles when he ranks Loki #1…) – recognizes what still makes Whedon an interesting writer: the philosophical issues he’s willing to take on even in an action movie. Maybe it wasn’t very effective if audiences didn’t really get what was going on: the question whether humanity, considering all its horrors, deserves to exist; whether logically infallible computerized intelligence would do better morally; whether it’s immoral to destroy a form of life whose existence is, on balance, a bad thing; whether and how AI, as a human creation, counts as a successor to or even a descendant of humanity… Black Panther makes its moral/philosophical issues pretty obvious and accessible; and perhaps people on Tumblr will say that the issues Age of Ultron raises, abstract as they are, are ones that only white men could care about (in the way that so-called Effective Altruists in Silicon Valley have decided, absurdly, that the most urgent moral problem is preventing the AI revolution because, even though it’s having no effects now, if/when it does come the consequences will be so cataclysmic). Admittedly, I am white (in most contexts), and as a reasonably successful analytic philosopher I might count as an honorary man, so perhaps it’s no counterargument that I find it interesting and still like Joss Whedon’s writing.

Marvel Movie Villains Ranked from Worst to Best