As the Summer 2011 movie season begins to die down, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this Summer was a bit of box office letdown. While Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes did a great job of salvaging things, too many sequels and underwhelming superhero tales has left myself and the rest of the UTG feeling shorted. So in an effort to aide Hollywood (and mankind as a whole), we decided to do what few studio execs can these days and brainstorm some new ideas.

At first, our ideas were scattered. One-off tales of spies or slashers with plenty of blood and sexual innuendo, but then we realized the best way to change Hollywood would be to keep it simple. We scrapped our original ideas and thought of how to tweak today’s formulas. We realized the bulk of the quote/unquote superheroes have been done in movie form over the pas decade (some are even being rebooted already), but noticed no one had told the obvious flipside: Villains.

Think about it. We watch tons of increasingly similar tales of underdogs rising and overcoming supervillains, but what about the rise of said “supervillains.” Not every bad guy started a bad guy and most have quite a compelling story, so why not cash in?

We put together the nerdiest group of staffers we could and came up with 5 villains we think Hollywood should consider giving the movie treatment. We know it isn’t the most original idea, but anything is ether than another 90 minutes with Ryan Reynolds and that f*cked up CGI mask.

While many people haven’t ever heard of Deathstroke the terminator, this villain is one of DC’s leading bastards. An expert mercenary, Slade Wilson first debuted in the pages of New Teen Titans. At the time the book was one of the best sellers in the industry, and along with titles such as X-men and Legion of Super Heroes it worked hard to define an entire era of comics. Even today the comics influence is felt over at DC, so much so that when they relaunch their entire line of comics this year the Teen Titans and Deathstroke himself are going to be front and center in brand new #1 issues. So with all of that in mind, it seems like it would be a good time to give Deathstroke a run for his money on the big screen. The character has bridged various media over the years in various forms, some true to the character and others grossly divergent. This would be a chance to take all the things that make the character work and scrap the things that hold him back (see: Teen Titans).

Taking from his comic history fairly liberally, we’d likely see an origin movie that cuts through the crap (being an origin movie) and gets to what people really want (even if they’re all brainless media addicts). Explosions and blood. Lots.

The origin is fairly simple and will seem very familiar to movie goers who have been exposed to Marvel’s string of movies, especially Captain America. Taking part in a military experiment that enhances his physical capabilities and reflexes, Slade Wilson becomes the perfect soldier. When he finds out the U.S. Government has sent his best friend on a suicide mission, he disobeys orders and uses his new skills to save him. But the key difference between Captain America and Deathstroke is simply this: Before the drugs and training, Slade was already a bad ass.

Good story beats to lift would likely have to include the moment where Slade fails to save his son from an injury that costs the boy his ability to speak. In an attempt to extort information about someone who hired Slade, The Jackal kidnaps his son. Confronting Slade, he brings the boy and holds a knife to his throat. His offer is simple: The boy for the information. Slade refuses, adamant in maintaining his code of honor and keeping his clients information safe. Instead, he attacks and kills the kidnappers, but in the process his son’s throat is cut. They manage to save the boy but his vocal chordes end up completely severed, leaving him mute. This causes a falling out with Slade’s wife, who refuses to accept the decision he made. Enraged, she fires a gun at Slade, which causes the injury that left him with only one eye.

And this is how easy it is to see how cool the character is and how much fun the movie could be; Instead of giving up his career as an assassin due to the vision impairment, Slade boldy announces the injury to his enemies by wearing a mask that covers the side of his face with the impaired vision. Just by looking at him you visually understand this isn’t a man to be messed with. He has the confidence to ably use a katanna and even long ranged firearms with extreme precision, and this is after an injury that impaired his eye sight.

Play it up as a movie about an assassin for hire who kills B and C list super heroes, and you get a highly intelligent villain who can be unrepetently monstrous in his actions while feeling no remorse.

Vandal Savage, much like Deathstroke, is a prominent figure in the DC universe. He started life as a cro-magnon man around 50,000 BCE. Exposed to radiation via a meteorite, Savage was transformed and pushed up the evolutionary ladder. Giving him immortality and an evolutionary edge over his fellow men, he quickly began to manipulate his way into higher and higher positions in tribal society. Having belonged to almost any secret society in history you can think of (the thule society, the knight’s templar, the illuminati) and even being a prominent figure in Nazi Germany, this character has been shown to have been around many important people at very important times in history. Like the polar opposite of the Rosicrucian St. Germain, Vandal Savage has cut a path through history conquering civilizations and then abandoning them to rot and decay, collapsing into decadence. Never satisfied and always hungry for more power, Savage is brought into confrontation with various “super heroes” throughout history, but the real appeal of the character comes from seeing the weight of history gradually increasing on his shoulders.

Moving through the early days of man we would see the various beats that define the character, creating a period piece vibe that would allow for thorough commentary on the world we live in today and how it came to be what it is. Savage’s true enemy doesn’t need to be a masked hero, because his real enemy is the world around him. Truly able to affect real change in the world, he is constantly frustrated to see the things he destroys recreate themselves a generation later. Born in a time when man was short lived and the hazards of ones environment were far more dramatic, he has constantly usurped control of the most powerful cultures, and used them as weapons to strike the death blow against the groups he sees as inferior. It’s all tribe mentality and brutal aggression masked by the sophistication of an aristocrat and the regal quality of a king. Deep down Savage knows he will always be that cave man, and there is nothing he can do to change that. Not even die.

He was Cain holding the Rock that committed mans first murder, he stood in Rome as the fires consumed it, and he watched as the world fell into dissaray under the threat of the Nazi party. He advised great men throughout history, and not always the clearly evil ones. The message this movie would be underlining and trying to send through subtle parralels between various cultures and civillizations at their peak would be a message that speaks true to an american audience today: Civillizations always collapse when they reach decadence, and without a rennaissance we will always be doomed to struggling for revolution. The violent, child like lashing out that we as a country are guilty of always preceeds a society’s collapse, and the worst part is the oblivious nature of the populace, who largely struggle just to survive and cannot be bothered with such large, abstract concerns. This is a trait Savage embodies clearly, the struggle for human survival in face of the hazards of simply living.

Before super heroes took on a prominent role in comics the funny pages were filled with things that would make even the bravest movie goer cringe. The top sellers were all titles based on Horror and crime. It was a lot like modern television, with an over abundance of tough cops and sadistic murderers. And when it veered off into the territory of the supernatural, it created some of the most twisted and imaginative horror stories you could imagine. It is with this in mind that I look to the classic Spider-man villain Morbius. Having appeared in the 90’s cartoon series and having had a few major story lines in the comics, Morbius has been associated with other Marvel heroes and villains as well including the well known Vampire hunter Blade.

What makes this vampire so interesting is a very obvious but subtle twist that greatly shifts the vampire narrative into a different territory. Morbius wasn’t some guy who was transformed when an anemic albino with sharp teeth gave him a hicky. Instead, following the typical tragic Marvel formula that makes characters like the Hulk so great, Morbius is a victim of science gone wrong. Formerly a Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Morbius was obsessed with curing a rare and untreatable blood disease that was plagued with. This is a very modern heroic conflict in the mythological sense. Something beyond man’s control is threatening it’s safety, and to overcome it will take astounding will.

That conflict may only need to be a brief scene revealed in flashback (as it was in the characters early appearences) but even time spent briefly with these ideas establishes the most important part of Morbius. His own audacity to understand the impossible has caused his down fall, much like the story of Icarus and his wax wings. His attempts to cure his blood disease only made it worse, transforming him into the terrifying living vampire. It caused an aversion to sunlight, pale skin, and eventually various mutations that made his body quite similar to the classic vampire. This included the need to feed on blood to survive.

The thing that hightens the narrative beyond the typical arc for the vampire is the way it comments on biology and chemistry, drawing parralels to man’s attempts to perfect it’s genetics and the terrifying monsters of our myths. We spend obscene ammounts of money on things designed to either mask or eliminate the horror of age. We prolong life and minimize our needs to maximize our potential for survival. The archetypal brash scientist driven by his passion and understanding of the world is a very familiar figure in modern movies, and the growing debate and concern surrounding the modification of personal genetics is one that future generations will be struggling with much more openly than we are. As the science surrounding our DNA is peeled back we approach increasingly bizarre effects on our everyday lives, and that fear many feel when confronted with the notion of cloning or genetic modification calls many horror archetypes to the forefront of the imagination. The character embodies not only the supernatural vampire but mixes in the tensions and fears of Frankenstein’s monster.

Remember that awful super hero movie that took one of the most memorable villains in comics and turned him into a floating cloud of smoke? No, not Green Lantern, i’m talking Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Marvel had a big chance with the FF to do something great, but instead the only memorable contribution to pop culture they gave us was being dumb enough to cast Jessica Alba as an Invisible Woman. They even seemed to realize how stupid this was in the movie when they started coming up with any and every excuse to strip her naked and parade her ass around set.

But this isn’t about Jessica Alba’s mediocrity or the terrible fantastic four movies that we were subjected to. This is about the one thing the movie’s did seem to understand: Doctor Doom.

Doom has been said by Stan Lee to embody feelings of shame and isolation, symbolized by the thick iron mask that conceals the truth of his identity. Beneath the mask he is a scarred and terrified boy, but with the mask he is a triumphant and confident ruler.

King of the country Latveria, Doom is a villain with serious resources at hand. A super scientist that could give Reed Richards a run for his money, he creates death traps and super weapons and plays games of chess with the heroes of the Marvel Universe. This is also augmented by his intense study of the Occult, and his attempts to increase his hold on the world through mystical studies. Like any good Occultist, Doom realizes that magic is just another word for “science we don’t understand.”

One of their top tier villains, much like DC’s Vandal Savage, Doom is a terrifying figure in Marvel’s political arena. Beyond just typical supervillainy and mad science, Doom causes a sense of uneasiness when you see him standing on balconies addressing his nation. This is a monster who is standing in plain sight for the entire world to see, and he doesn’t even flinch. He commits countless atrocities, but doesn’t hide them at all. In the series “Ultimate Fantastic Four” Doom is shown to be a decendant of the Dracul family, famous for Vlad Dracul the Impaler. He rules his people with a similar ferocity, and isn’t above murdering a common man for dissent. He’ll even put the man’s head on a pike out infront of his castle to remind the people where they stand.

Literally keeping Latveria in the grip of his iron fist, he subjects the country to all manner of terrible experimentation both in social engineering and the sciences. They accept his torture because of the things that it provides them with: free health care, highly advanced technology, and a chance to take their formerly impovershed people and turn them into high society. Doom wins them over much like Hitler won over Nazi Germany, by giving them enough luxury that they can over look atrocity.

A good Doom movie would show the internal struggle he experiences as he attempts to validate himself as a great man, a deep need he is compelled to satisfy because of an abusive father that never believed in him. Like all great Marvel villains Doom is a tragic figure, driven to the terrible things he does by feelings of inadequecy.

The first cover to the acclaimed John Ostrander run on Suicide Squad was adorned with bold text that read, “These 8 people will put their lives on the line for our country. One of them won’t be coming home!” A bold series that stood out from DC’s line up at the time, this book took many obscure villains from around the DC Universe and put them together under the authority of Colonel Rick Flag. Recruiting from the prisons, Flag finds villains with life sentences or on death row and offers them freedom for a hefty price. If they can complete a suicide mission without dieing, they get to walk.

An ensemble movie loaded with action and adventure, these villains would have to put their country above their own petty and selfish needs in order to survive. Featuring characters such as Deadshot, Bronze Tiger, Captain Boomerang, Blockbuster, and Enchantress. Over the years various versions of the squad have appeared with various members in the cast, but the thing that stays true is that these are the villains no one is going to miss, both in story and out of it. The thing that made the book so popular was the way the quality writing propelled the villains into a greater position in the DC Universe, making characters that seem patently ridiculous such as Captain Boomerang take on compelling and exciting roles.

Flag is a character of special interest as well, as the suicide squad was his father’s project originally. Taking the idea and making it work is his goal, so while our cast of nefarious villains bicker and fall out of line he has to play damage control.

Another prominent character from the book was Amanda Waller. She recently appeared in DC’s Green Lantern movie in a relatively diluted form, but in the comics she’s the personification of intelligence and power. She’s Flag’s boss, and they don’t always get along. Formerly a congressional aide, she helps restart the squad after researching the history of two failed attempts at getting the project to work. Lifting heavily from the two, she helps Flag create the third squad. Often at odds with the heroes of the DC universe, she’s a polarizing figure with motivations driven by a deep sense of justice and patriotism.

The most important part of a good Suicide Squad story is that it has to be exhilerating. Hot women, big explosions, and huge consequences. These are people with nothing left to live for rediscovering their purpose, and struggling to escape the deaths they were once resigned to. For some, it’s simply a chance to go out in a blaze of glory instead of rotting in prison.

Written by: Ben Howell
Forward by: James Shotwell

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Benjamin Howell

Benjamin is a photographer and videographer specializing in live event coverage.

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