Great Fictional Villains: Ashur

The seedy, greedy world of Spartacus: Blood and Sand has produced many memorably heinous yet compelling characters. We’ve had ruthless social-climbing Batiatus with his all-consuming ambition and monstrous temper; his cold-hearted, viciously conniving bride Lucretia; and haughty, brutal Glaber. Yet by the final gore-spattered frames of Spartacus: Vengeance, one member of the show’s pantheon of evil stands out. Ashur, the slave who became a gladiator, the gladiator who became an odd-job boy and sometime assassin, who became the slyest, most cruelly manipulative fiend ever to walk the mean streets of Roman Capua.

If he wasn’t so steeped in blood and treachery, you could muster sympathy for Ashur. After all, he begins the series as much a slave as all the other gladiators, damned to an inhumanly savage existence of relentless training and sadistic blood-sport. He has no choice but to hone his body to heights of chiselled perfection, only to offer it up for mutilation at the hands of fellow slaves, for the amusement of a baying crowd. Yet unlike Crixus or Barca, Ashur does not even have the hollow consolation of glory and celebrity as a God of the Arena, as he is the least of the Brotherhood, his victories of little note or tainted by underhanded ploys. Then he is crippled by Crixus and even his forlorn dream of becoming a true gladiator is snatched from him. Truly he is a victim of slavery, brutalised into a foul echo of the prosperous and respected man he might have become through his natural talents had he not found himself in Roman shackles.

Yet his catalogue of misdeeds is so creatively vile that by the time the first season has drawn to a close, any potential sympathy for him has evaporated like morning dew. A faithless betrayer, a gleeful rapist and a smirking torturer, not even the actor’s hammy charms or his plucky campaign to carve out a private empire under the noses of the snotty, arrogant Romans can make him remotely redeemable.

In the moral world of Spartacus, violence and mayhem are a necessary way of life and means of self-expression, even for our relatively sympathetic rebel-heroes. There is a certain coarse honour in their open, doomed defiance of the tyrannical Roman Republic that oppresses them. Ashur’s self-serving deviousness, his desire to co-opt his oppressors in enabling his own rise to power rather than fighting back against them, undermines and mocks the bravery of Spartacus and his followers. If Ashur had been successful in his plan to supplant the fallen House of Batiatus, who could possibly believe that he would have become a callous, abusive slave-master even worse than Batiatus himself, massing wealth and influence through the exploitation of the slaves who were once his fellows?

A monster obviously shaped and moulded by the despotic society that captured him, Ashur may have been. But he was still a monster, nonetheless. Though his agency was limited, he still had to make choices. By the hour of his final confrontation with the rebels, he had long since left choices of grim necessity behind, and was walking a path of brutal, bloodthirsty hubris. 

Great Fictional Villains: Morgoth

We've previously touched on Sauron, Morgoth's understudy-turned-successor in cosmic-level unpleasantness, but the original Lucifer-figure of Tolkien's fictional mythology is vivid enough as a study in morbid fantasy totalitarianism to earn his own spot in the pantheon of Great Bastards. While Sauron's story is the tale of his rise from rebel spirit and manipulative shape-shifter to all-powerful god-king, Morgoth's is of a long and miserable descent, through boundless humiliation and destructive rage, from a god-like being with pretensions to trademark the very matter of creation down to a mere despot who sacks civilizations out of frustrated spite; mighty yet wretched in the hollowness of his glory.

The consistency and attention to detail with which Tolkien handled the guiding themes of his invented universe really helps to keep Morgoth and his followers in Evil a compelling a threatening presence, hovering grimly over the long and glorious history of Middle Earth. Morgoth is the original model for the basic nature of evil as imagined by Tolkien; arrogant rebellion against a natural order in the name of jealousy and ego. From before the very beginning of time, according to the Silmarillion, Morgoth, formerly known as Melkor, nursed an insane, impossible ambition to nab the credit for the creation of the cosmos from Iluvatar, Tolkien's actual creator-God figure. Instead of collaborating with the other Valar (an order of archangel stand-ins sent by Iluvatar to mould the young Earth according to his intent) Morgoth tries to wrestle the divine plan into a new shape, turning the world into his personal empire and temple to his sole glory. This rampant megalomania only ends of perverting and corrupting the world, supposedly causing everything harsh and dangerous in the environment; Melkor's evil is so primal that he's ultimately responsible for natural disasters!

All the malevolent forces that confront chirpy Hobbits, even thousands of years after Morgoth's defeat, are the sad, twisted end-results of his attempts to imitate Iluvatar's ineffable ability to create life; trying to breed new species that exist to serve him as slaves and soliders, the would-be world-shaper only ends up fashioning violent monsters. In every single mention of him in Tolkien's writings, he seems to be poisoning or wrecking something, so given over to vengeful hostility and an almost mindless power-lust that he ends up earning his suitably sinister name for acts of murder and treachery; Morgoth, "Dark Foe of the World", a being so violent and cruel that it's effectively locked in battle with the entire planet at once, apart from pawns that follow him out of fear and shared hatred of anything beautiful.

The most noteworthy thing about Morgoth is how his immense power relative to his Elven enemies in the Silmarillion never stops him from seeming contemptible and somehow pathetic, because his motives are so crude and his egotistical obsession with talking himself up as the Supreme Master of Everything so clearly desperate and forced. He might eventually overrun most of the continent and end up victorious everywhere, but the Elves, lesser creatures supposedly beneath his notice, undeniably give him a run for his money before their kingdoms are smashed, and he even demonstrates the very un-godlike emotion of fear when the Elf King Fingolfin actually dares to challenge him to a duel and comes close to winning (directly inspiring an awesome power metal song by Blind Guardian countless ages later).

Morgoth is ultimately flattened by his former colleagues the Valar, when they are persuaded into a one-time-only intervention that reduces the Dark Lord's vaunted empire to flaming rubble. They find a ranting, hideous shell of a being, whose military power and sinister trappings managed to disguise the fact that he had literally wasted away on a diet of Evil, pouring his essence into the world to try and control it but only succeeding in tainting it with his bottomless hatred.

In fairness, if a Dark Lord is going to exit the scene in style, being wrapped in an unbreakable chain and shoved through a door in the edge of the universe to fall through empty space forever is a suitably epic fate that any self-respecting Dark Lord would be happy with. Still, perhaps the transformation of Morgoth's infamous "look" into the most easily-mocked cliche of popular fantasy is the suitable final humiliation for the overgrown thug?    

Great Fictional Villains: Obadiah Hakeswill

Richard Sharpe has had to tangle with many unpleasant foes over the course of his long and bloody career, but none have lingered in the memory of his fans as much as the grotesque and bullying Obadiah Hakeswill. A larger-than-life fiend who is just flagrantly evil enough to be fascinating, Hakeswill’s TV incarnation never quite struck home as well as the swaggering, scummy original book version did; I theorised that Pete Postlethwaite was just too classy an actor to go overboard with the gruesome mannerisms and become the evil cartoon character that Hakeswill really is.

A nemesis to Sharpe from his earliest days in the army, Hakeswill is defined by his utter sadism and sociopathy (balanced only by his reverent devotion to his long-dead mother) and a quasi-supernatural ability to cheat death. By a bizarre fluke, Hakeswill survived being hanged and escaped his native England for a life in the army, mirroring Sharpe’s own flight from his criminal past. Like Sharpe, Hakeswill demonstrates an uncanny ability to make it through outrageously dangerous situations (he believes that his apparent immunity to the noose has made him destined to be unkillable). Like Sharpe, he discovers that the British Army is an environment he can thrive in; but while Sharpe eventually takes the opportunity to prove himself a brave, dedicated and gifted soldier, for Hakeswill the army is a playground where he can indulge his appetites for petty tyranny, rape, deceit and general cruelty to the upmost, playing the system of army discipline to his advantage and sucking up to the gullible officer class to secure his position.

He’s just hissable to the extreme, a skulking fiend plotting the most spiteful acts of vengeance against our wronged anti-hero. While Sharpe is no saint, he at least confronts his foes with upright, bluff courage; making the unmanly, brutal yet cowardly Hakeswill the perfect anti-Sharpe.  

Great Fictional Heroes: Wallace and Gromit

If you don't love Wallace and Gromit...well, I just don't know what to say to you. The sheer concentrated charm and ingenuity of the madcap duo is the perfect echo of the charm and ingenuity that goes into making the show itself, a labour of excruciatingly-detailed and protracted love that takes years at a stretch. For this reason, the arrival of a new Wallace and Gromit special (barring the twee little Expanded Universe of audio dramas and adventure games) is a rare event, guaranteed to be fixed in the imagination forever. The fact that a full-length movie (2005’s Curse of the Were-Rabbit) even exists is actually kind of mind-quivering.

Wallace is a bumbling Lancastrian inventor, faintly oblivious but basically loveable, whose eccentric mechanical prowess tends to land him in the glaring headlights of trouble at every opportunity. Gromit is his mute, yet plucky, pet dog/lab assistant/business partner/best friend, whose mix of good sense and heroic resourcefulness tends to land him in the thick of the action trying to rescue his misguided master from whatever rampaging space robot/penguin supervillain/Were-Rabbit is menacing Merry England this time around. The neatly-calibrated mix of light-hearted adventure, inventive animation and the simple brotherly comradeship between the two quirky leads ensures that W and G become national treasures with a permanent place in the nostalgia pantheon. 

Great Fictional Anti-Heroes: Richard Sharpe

Everyone’s favourite Georgian hero-thug started life as the put-upon protagonist of Bernard Cornwell’s blood-and-thunder historical action novels, before a certain gruff-voiced heart-throb made him a small-screen icon of British TV in the 90s. While Sean Bean’s portrayal is a sympathetic soul with some endearing rough edges, Sharpe as originally envisioned is a damaged, brutal man, whose difficult military career and troubled private life are as likely to provoke him to sullen bitterness or berserk rage as to plucky defiance. 

The lowest of the low in his class-stratified society, the Army life was the only hope for young Richard Sharpe, and he soon found himself in strife-torn India during a turbulent period that would make his name. Bumped up to the officer class for conspicuous derring-do and transferred to Spain as the Peninsular languishes in the grip of Napoleon’s legions, he found himself sneered at by blue-blooded peers who resented him for his origins and (at first, at least) despised by his own men for much the same reason. Yet through stubborn ferocity and an undeniable talent for competent soldiering, Sharpe survived and thrived, winning over a loyal circle of friends and comrades and coming alive through countless large-scale battles and other violent scrapes, while bedding an unseemly number of well-born ladies along the way.

Sharpe is neither idealistic nor likeable by nature, being often boorish, sometimes bloodthirsty and useless at anything that doesn’t involve war and killing. He freely admits his dearth of patriotism, having the self-awareness to know that he would have fought just as fiercely for Bonaparte had he been born French. However, his harshness is softened by redeeming virtues, like intense loyalty, endless physical bravery and a Solomon-like affection for the women in his life. Enough, in short, to make him a tailor-made protagonist for this sort of work; a daredevil barbarian hero as likely to take savage revenge on one of his innumerable foes as he is to charge headlong into the powder-smoke of battle for the sake of a friend.

Great Fictional Villains: Sister Miriam Godwinson

Rargh Rargh Rargh

I’m aware that the good Sister isn’t supposed to be an out and out villain, but play Alpha Centauri (the cult favourite successor to Sid Meier’s world-conquering Civilization games) enough times and you’ll inevitably come across Miriam and her faction, The Lord’s Believers, playing that role. Miriam’s here to represent every mindlessly hostile, pig-headedly stubborn AI opponent in Sid Meier’s sprawling oeuvre; from the despot who refuses to surrender and insists on bleeding your armies even when past all hope of survival, to the superpower that mechanically spits on endless treaties and steamrollers your peaceful civilization with marauding elites.

While related games have their share of unwavering aggression (the Multiplayer Gold edition of Civilization 2 somehow turbo-charged AI hostility and made diplomacy a near-pointless endeavour in a world of endless bloodshed and backstabbing) and Miriam’s peers among the Great and Good of Alpha Centauri are all capable of tormenting the player in their own way, there’s something about Sister Godwinson’s particular brand of raving zealotry that really gets on the nerves.

Of course, being the self-appointed preserver of humanity’s yearning for religion on their adopted planet doesn’t automatically put Miriam in the wrong, though she can come across as self-righteous in some of the flavour text. Nor is her personal nemesis, ultimate nerd Prokhor Zakharov (the cold-blooded lovechild of Nikola Tesla and Richard Dawkins) immune to lapsing into his own brand of villainy, depending on how your game unfolds. Miriam’s fervent, even noble belief in the importance of maintaining spiritual traditions, even light-years from Earth and centuries into the future, is more than understandable in a world of murderous fauna, frighteningly advanced technology and ruthless utilitarianism. However, the Believer’s inbuilt intolerance for neighbouring civilizations, combined with their distrust of scientific progress, means that games in which they play a significant role often lapse into a grim cycle of holy wars, as Miriam lashes out at any unbelievers within range with endless legions of poorly-equipped and hopelessly indoctrinated plasma-fodder. Her penchant for impulsive offensives means that she is the faction leader most likely to spur Planet’s descent into a repeat of the bloody tragedies that have blighted Earth’s history, and for that, war-savvy players can take great pleasure in routing this ranting would-be prophet off a continent or two.    

Great Fictional Villains: Yuri

    No Comrade Premier, it has only begun.

OK, so we’ve now entered blogging silly season. While nuanced villains with complex and engaging motives are all very well, there are times in the life of every seasoned armchair hero when he wants to gaze at his computer screen and find pure, calculating, cartoonish evil staring back at him, stubbornly, creepily refusing to blink.

The true mastermind behind the Soviet invasion of America in Red Alert 2, Yuri is the power-obsessed spawn of a Communist plot to create mind-enslaving psychics, booted up by none other than Stalin himself (my biggest disappointment with the Red Alert sequels was the lack of a snarling, zombie Stalin, so Yuri has to step in as the deceased despot’s successor). Thanks to his knack for snapping the wills of Allied spies, the Soviets are able to able to storm the mainland United States and sweep through their major cities with total surprise.

In the Allied campaign, Yuri is an unnervingly focussed and competent antagonist, an island of soft-voiced and understated malice amongst the pompous preening and hammy hostility of the other Soviet villains (outrageously larger-than-life characters are a franchise staple, which makes Yuri stand out even more). His strategic ploys have a markedly sinister edge, even for the atrocity-prone Soviets; as early as the vanilla game he’s mind-controlling the ordinary people of Washington D.C. and sending them swarming into the teeth of their countryman’s guns like zombies. His contributions to the Bolshevik war machine include bubbling cloning vats and throbbing psychic beacons, helping to push the Red Alert franchise away from any tenuous realism and into the realm of full-blown pulp-science, where brightly-coloured livery, thunderous firepower and sizzling ultra-tech swirl and collide in an endless, glorious ballet of mass death.

The giddy excess continues in the expansion pack, where Yuri defects from the Soviet cause and unveils his private army of leather-masked cultists, corrupt mutants and the single most evil feature of any Command and Conquer game ever; the sadistic Grinder, a towering device that mashes its occupants to a pulp and breaks them down into raw materials to fuel Yuri’s egomaniacal cause. By this point, with his tattooed skull, twisted arsenal and creatively deviant followers, Yuri has basically graduated into a Warhammer 40,000 villain.

But he’s at his most unsettling in the original Soviet campaign, where it soon becomes obvious that’s he’s just as dangerous to his own side as to the enemy, thanks to his single-minded fixation with power at any cost. Steering the Premier like a puppet, invading the mind of any Soviet bigwig who outlives his usefulness, overseeing Stalin-flavoured purges and infighting, before finally unleashing packs of his psychic clones on any homeland forces opposed to his takeover; Yuri is truly the foremost bloodthirsty supervillain of the C and C universe. There’s one exception to that, of course, but I don’t play the Tiberium games. Not enough cartoon Communism.   

Django Unchained Review: Horror versus Cool

Whatever you think about the work of Quentin Tarantino (either his body of work in general or his latest movie in particular), you have to give him some credit for the sheer gutsy determination with which he pursues his ferociously geeky projects. In Django Unchained, his almost pathological obsession with honouring and referencing his influences is married to a new creative hunger, an unusual one for a director who so frequently uses violence as a cheap thrill; the desire to tackle the depthless horror of American slavery.

Like its spiritual predecessor, the often inspired but frustratingly self-indulgent Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is part revenge fantasy, part Serious History re-imagined as romp. But while Basterds only pranced around the vileness of Nazism, Unchained plunges head-first into the subject of slavery, depicting some truly queasy, unsettling scenes of violence and cruelty made all the more disturbing by the helpless innocence of some of the victims. While the titular hero is freed early on thanks to the intervention of Christoph Waltz’s daredevil bounty hunter King Schultz (another seemingly effortlessly charismatic turn from Waltz, one of the most watchable actors in Hollywood at the moment), the film never flinches from reminding the audience that for countless other black people, horrible suffering is an everyday event, with a single mistake, a frantic bid for freedom or sheer bad luck triggering agony, mutilation or death.

Whether you feel this is an appropriate subject for a director of Tarantino’s reputation to handle is probably largely subjective, and mostly dependent on who you are and how emotionally close you are to the history being portrayed here. You can absolutely respect the decision of someone like Spike Lee to avoid the film; his objections seem understandable in context, and it’s not like choosing to avoid something you find to be in bad taste is the same as calling for blanket censorship or something.

The problem with Django’s tackling of race relations is that Tarantino has staked out his place in the pop-cultural pantheon as a sort of maestro of “cool”. The idea of a man whose continuing success has been built upon glitzy foundations of hip and geek cred turning his eye upon something as painfully real and relevant as America’s bloody past was always going to raise somebody’s hackles, though the general critical consensus appears to have embraced the movie, albeit with some reservations. In fact, the Tarantino “cool” does sit awkwardly alongside the grittier stuff. The litter of blatant anachronisms (like the suitably epic shades thrown in to make Jamie Foxx look intimidating), the steady stream of genre homages and the standard-issue superhuman badassitude of Django in his vengeful clashes with grotesque Southern whites all plant the film firmly in a familiar cartoonish hyper-reality. This would be absolutely fine in normal circumstances, all good family fun with lashings of stage gore. But when this cartoon world is mimicking the American South of plantations under the baking sun, of floggings and hot-boxes, of chains and dogs and screams…it’s awkward at best.

In short, this is legitimately not for everybody. But if you’re able to put your misgivings aside and appreciate the gleeful wish-fulfilment of a freed slave-hero in a fancy blue suit laying into a squirming, disgusting slaver with his own whip in epic slow motion, then you get to enjoy a gruesome odyssey of flamboyant style, towering villainy and even some affecting emotional beats. The emotional heart of the movie is the bond of mentorship that springs up between Django and Schultz, the man who freed him out of a confused mix of cynicism and humanitarianism, then nurtures his natural abilities as a gunslinger and all-around badass to equip him to rescue his lost wife (who is oddly and unfortunately a cipher).

The real stars of the show, however, are the baddies, who are truly scumbags for the ages. Leo DiCaprio is a revelation as Candie, owner and overlord of Candieland, a notorious plantation where Django’s wife languishes. Who’d have thought that a hammy arch-racist who casually orders acts of obscene butchery would prove to be DiCaprio’s most fascinating and memorable role since when? Candie truly earns the audience’s hate, but he’s more than a faceless monster doling out atrocities; his actions are grounded in an unstable personality whose gaucheness, angry intensity, and excruciatingly shallow gentlemanly pretentions add up to a nicely-rounded degenerate.

Then there’s Sam Jackson, playing Head House Slave Steven, who in a truly chilling development turns out to be both the calculating brains and the driving will behind the evil of Candieland. In a casting decision that smacks of genius, Hollywood’s foremost black actor (after Will Smith), a walking cultural shorthand for cool, is aged-up and comprehensively de-cooled to play a hopelessly institutionalized domestic tyrant, who has clearly inveigled his way to the top of Candieland’s slave hierarchy and now, in exchange for the comforts of his relative status and behind-the-scenes influence, proactively and enthusiastically collaborates in the stomach-churning oppression of less fortunate slaves.

The inclusion of this character is the strongest piece of evidence in favour of taking a generous view of Tarantino’s lurid take on the era. It would have been so easy to hold up DiCaprio’s Candie for the public to hiss at and leave it at that. But the wrong-footedness, the sick confusion of Jackson’s appearance as a truly troubling villain, a walking example of how deep-rooted brutality can throw up the most twisted results, suggests that, underneath all the quips and references and studied “cool”, Tarantino might just have found something deeper than "cool" after all.

Skyfall Review: James Bond Returns, and Returns, and Returns, and Returns...

Skyfall, I have to say, was a weirdly underwhelming experience. After an extended hiatus brought about by financial trouble, the venerable James Bond franchise comes growling back to life, revamping the formula in time for the fifty year anniversary and doing so with apparent triumph. Daniel Craig reprises his well-received Bond persona, the ultimate spy imagined as a posh thug, an Angel of Death sporting the trappings of upper-class luxury, a lascivious Terminator. For all the bold statements of a fresh start that the filmmakers slip into the narrative, with Ben Whishaw’s spry young Q stepping in as belated successor to Desmond Llewelyn and John Cleese (among other twisty flourishes), there seems to be far more in the way of continuity than change. The Bourne-inspired freneticism of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace returns, though it trades it some of the po-faced professionalism, instead meshing the adrenaline of the modern action scene to a sort of playful savagery that evokes the storied history of the wider franchise, together with much nodding and winking towards certain staples of the Bond iconography.

All this adds up to what in the final balance is an intensely conservative, very backward-looking action movie. In fact, Skyfall seemed quite hollow, almost uninspired, riding on references to its illustrious predecessors but adding very little to the mix itself. Even its villain is derivative. Don’t get me wrong; Raoul Silva is actually the best part of the movie. The sight of a talented actor discovering better living through evil is almost always fun, and Javier Bardem is so blatantly having the time of his life as the loopy yet tragic cyberterrorist Silva that you can’t help but grin along with him as his murderous, convoluted antics unfold. But though the film mines the rewarding seam of his tragic, darkly Freudian back-story with Judy Dench’s hardy M, this is still an over-familiar villain type; the giggling apostle of small “a” anarchy with broad smiles and cruel eyes. It’s a very entertaining villain type, of course, that’s why it’s so popular at the moment. But the fact that Silva is so obviously retreading the same well-worn path to damnation walked by the villains of multiple recent superhero blockbusters takes some of the impact out of his performance.

To be honest, Skyfall’s devoted homage to the franchise, its sizzling greatest hits reel, only hammers home for me how dated the formula seems to have become, how chained to endlessly recycled pop-cultural fascinations it all is. Staples like the disposable woman (there is a really ethically-dubious liaison around the half-way mark) death as a punch-line, the rarefied luxury-porn of casinos and swanky offices, and the by now utterly tired theme of British post-colonial funk (how many Actually Existing British People are genuinely still angsting over Empire in 2013?) are all present and correct, but between the fancy-pants cinematography, assured acting and decent action, there isn’t much to recommend repeat viewings, nothing that’s going to get on many all-time great movie moments countdowns. Bond is as unlikeable and uninteresting a character as ever; the film delves into his rarely-mentioned back-story as an aristocratic orphan to try and humanise him, and his abrasively affectionate relationship with M is played up, but this incarnation is too dark and too smug to be a true hero, too brutalised to be a fantasy character, and too simplistic to be interesting as a compromised antihero.

And yet, Skyfall has made Bond history and cracked a billion at the box-office. However tired it seems to me, it’s obviously resonated with a lot of people, or at least entertained the hell out of them, and it deserves credit for that. Perhaps there is a pent-up hunger for more of a well-regarded brand after the extended pause? Perhaps a recession-boosted craving for pop cultural nostalgia is to blame? Maybe by looking both backwards and sideways so relentlessly, while providing just enough sound and fury to let the audience get their action jollies, Skyfall has found in Craig’s Bond the hero the people need right now?

Of course, there are the duller explanations of the rising ticket price and the marketing blitz. But still, Mendes and crew have managed to take something so seemingly stale and serve it up as something fresh. Whether this trick is going to keep working for future instalments remains to be seen.