My New Action Film Villain

[evildave]

In a lot of two-bit computer game and action movies, we have the leftovers of communism trying to become communist again, or some wacky individual who wants to make a lot of money by starting something with the commies.

Ho-hum. We're running out of commies, and there really isn't much sign they're going to go back to being that, and I think the instability of these waning powers is as nothing to the more probable threat to our future:

I'm thinking we should have a Televangelist type be the big world-threatening villain.

Think about the influence they wield, and their calls for a more theocratic government. Who best to become leader? Naturally the guy who keeps people mesmerized with his god talk the best.

OK, now many people don't have a problem with that, since they don't really realize the fact that their own flavor of religion will probably not be the officially supported, and only legal one left when the United States of America becomes the Holy States of God.

But here's the twist: Like a "GOOD CHRISTIAN" who believes in getting beamed up to God, or being raised from the dead for judgment day, or whatever, he believes he should BRING ABOUT DOOMSDAY for his god's prompt return. He plans to increase international tensions to dizzying new heights, stir up all the TRIBULATION he can, surround himself with only TRUE BELIEVERS, and then get his hands on "The Football" and press "The Button" at his earliest convenience.

Naturally, the SIMPLE MAJORITY loves him, as does the media. The Christian right-wing has been working to produce this political climate and this man for decades now, and they believe it means power for themselves.

How to stop this villain when he has the single most powerful military force on the planet at his disposal, ready to act at his whim?

[justsaygnosis]

His followers are ordered to exterminate a radical band of pacifist muslims and become disenchanted with their leader.
An internal gang war breaks out in his ranks.
He get's HIV from a hooker and his regime collapses.
At this point sanity should prevail and the world population seeks rational science as the organic successor to religion however the simple-minded can't cope so shamanism becomes the new world religion.

[evildave]

Does it? Or does the instability when one falls merely invite the next, even more unstable guy?

Or does our protagonist stop it all just in time by comming in through the window, guns-a-blazin'?

[corplinx]

Can the movie star Hulk Hogan?

[Blue Monk]

Stop it! Stop it!

You guys are scaring me!

I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight, thank you very much.

[justsaygnosis]

Originally posted by Blue Monk


I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight, thank you very much.

Try counting believers who follow like sheep.

[triadboy]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by evildave
But here's the twist: Like a "GOOD CHRISTIAN" who believes in getting beamed up to God, or being raised from the dead for judgment day, or whatever, he believes he should BRING ABOUT DOOMSDAY for his god's prompt return. He plans to increase international tensions to dizzying new heights, stir up all the TRIBULATION he can, surround himself with only TRUE BELIEVERS, and then get his hands on "The Football" and press "The Button" at his earliest convenience.


Evil,

For realism, you will need to abandon the "football/button" idea. Thankfully, there is NO way an Xian could cause a Nudet through the channels of the National Military Command. Even if the President woke up with a wild hair and wanted to do it - he couldn't! We have a great system in place to prevent that. You will need to go the route that the show '24' did this last season - the rogue nuke smuggled into the country whose detonation will be blamed on a muslim country.

[justsaygnosis]

Originally posted by triadboy

Evil,

For realism, you will need to abandon the "football/button" idea.

It's a game, it doesn't need to be real, kinda like religion.

[thaiboxerken]

In the XMEN 2 movie, I think they shoud've kept Stryker the same as in the comic books. In the comics, he was an evangelist minister that wanted the extermination of all mutants in the name of god.

[evildave]

The "permission" to "press the button" is only a matter of getting the international climate to be inflammable enough, and then providing lots of sparks until general war is ignited.

Easy.

If the president can START wars and fire conventional cruise missiles into other soveriegn nations with practically nobody's permission at all, he can certainly engineer a climate where shaky fingers are on hair triggers, and then (failing through troop deployments and air strikes to get a response he wants) get something to go "boom" on an American target through one of his connections to militias and other organizations that also want judgment day sooner than later.

Get the Godless Chinese talking REAL tough by (for instance) carpet-bombing North Korea and occasionally "missing" and having incursions into their territory), then give Taiwan missiles that can strike anywhere in China, and build a big nuclear plant that produces plutonium, that will get China really, really mad.

Then set off a big bomb (even a conventional one) in California and blame it on them.

Nukes away!

Fallout gets on the neighbors, pisses everyone else off, conflict widens, tougher talk and more deployments, more shooting, more nukes, more, more, more.

Somewhere in there, we get martial law to "protect" us from "terrorists", and they mandate people be rounded up every sunday and transported to churches to pray for victory.

[SquishyDave]

How to stop this villain when he has the single most powerful military force on the planet at his disposal, ready to act at his whim?

Simple, a one man army, Arnold Schwarzenegger is Athiest Kane , the bad ass mutha who answers to no-one, not even god.

Good idea, but if you read not the end of the world (http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/book3.htm) by Christopher Brookmyre (http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/) you will see that something similar has already been done. It doesn't do the whole infesting the government thing like your excellently chilling story line does, but an excellent book, really sticks it to religious nut jobs.

[evildave]

Of course, to make the product marketable to the hollywood types, all sorts of miraculous stuff has to happen when the hero's not watching.

These gags can start off simple, like the typical terrible bad-guy marksmanship, and maybe culminate with God's hand visibly to everyone else (while the hero's back is turned) reaching down to disable some security measure blocking his way to the doomsday-launch-o-matic.

When he gets caught and thrown into one of those obligatory underground "doom" dungeon death traps, and while he's trying to pick the door lock, something blows up and a back wall collapses, draining the acid, revealing an armory and back-entrance into the main lair.

Maybe with an annoying "born again" side-kick (that he reluctantly rescued earlier in the story) who keeps interpreting everything as "God's Intervention", so the hero can say things like "Hey, that was just a lucky break!", and comes up with a decent explanation for what happened every time. "Those explosives we set off earlier must've ruptured a gas line somewhere, and it leaked until it reached the about right air mixture, found a spark, and blew up, and that caused the wall to collapse. That's all."

[SquishyDave]

Are you a script writer for hollywood? If not you bloody should be :)

You have the formula down pat, add in a talking pie and you've got a blockbuster on your hands my friend.

[evildave]

You don't need a talking pie, when you've got a fundy side-kick who says things like

"Last weekend, when I was knocking on people's doors and passing out these pamphlets like I usually do at 6:30 in the morning, I knocked on this one door and they just grabbed me and started telling me their plans for the rapture and stuff... until I said I my name wasn't Mark and they just sort of looked at each other and locked me up in this cell ever since."

[Checkmite]

No way. Script readers are becoming weary of stereotype characters. And they're already very tired of sidekicks. The protagonist's companion has to be stronger than the protagonist if the protagonist is smarter than the companion, or vis-versa. It also helps if there's a subplot between the protagonist and the antagonist besides the fact that they must destroy each other - a subplot which makes the simple destruction difficult. Without these things (amongst others, of course), your script becomes simply another Batman episode - and will only "work" if it's actually supposed to be a Batman episode.

[Yahweh]

I think you should a guy posing to be an athiest, but who secretly is a devout christian who wishes to speed up the coming of that Judgement Day I hear so much about. You could have him played by that same douchey skinny white boy from Spiderman... heres the kicker, the guy who wants to speed up Judgement Day is really Jesus Christ who has ressurrected hims (AGAIN?!?)... no wait, its not really Jesus but the delusions psychotic mastermind. See how many twists and turns I've made, I would love to see a movie or play a game like that.

[Yahweh]

Another idea: Make a game and write it so it is exactly like the Bible... except give it an Evil Dead plotline.

[evildave]

Other undead Jesus sites...
http://home.attbi.com/~andrewlarrison/
http://www.zombie-jesus.com/
http://www.jackasscritics.com/movie.php?movie_key=180

[Ladewig]

Wasn't there a minor James Bond villain who was a televangelist? License to Kill, maybe? What am I thinking of?