The Good, Bad, and the Ugly

Part 1

 

 

 

I hope that if you’re reading this that you’ve already read The Good, Bad, and the Ugly introduction. If you haven’t, please it first, right here___.

 

Now that have, assuming so anyway, it is time to talk about villains and evil masterminds, the bad guys of the movies I either enjoyed or felt disappointment due to the villain's strengths or weaknesses within the dramatic storyline.

My first villain to discuss is General Chang, played by the masterful Christopher Plummer, in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country.

What did I like about him? Let me count the ways. The Klingon Empire and the Federation were on the brink of peace after years of mistrust and hostile conflicts. The Chancellor and his wife, and General Chang among others, board the Enterprise for a dinner meal with Kirk, the captain of the flagship which is escorting him to the territory of his former enemy. What does Chang do as soon as he meets the legendary captain Kirk? Ever the warrior at heart, he sizes him up and makes a comment about the kind of warrior Kirk was and how it felt to finally meet his former enemy face to face. In Chang's mind there were not thoughts of future peace, but of former war. Then there is the dinner session and ill feelings were brought out from both sides, indicating that mutual trust and acceptance would not be as easy as they had hoped. Afterward, there is a sneak attack on the Chancellor's ship and it is boarded by assassins who delivered a deadly blow to both the Chancellor, as well as the potential for peace between the two sides. Of course, Kirk is blamed and branded the enemy, accused of a war crime due to his own personal feelings which are revealed in his trial. It is known that Kirk is bitter toward the Klingons due to the death of his son at Klingon hands, so the assassination, planned and carried out by him and men under his command makes sense. Chang blames Kirk in a fit of rage, shocked at being so betrayed by an envoy of the Federation. Due to all of this, Kirk is sentenced by a Klingon court, and the peace is at a shaky standstill.

In the end, it turns out that Chang himself was behind the attack and assassination, carried out by a cloaked ship under his command. So Chang turns out to be the villain mastermind after all, but there are others involved. Federation conspirators, as well as Romulan co-conspirators, who conspired along with their enemy to carry out a plot that would ensure peace does not happen; all due to racism and mistrust. Chang and his participants, who hated the humans of the Federation and did not want peace with them, conspired along with humans from that very Federation who felt the same way about Klingons. Chang was revealed as the mastermind behind the insidious plot, and strove to attack the Enterprise afterward to ensure that Kirk's attempts to hold the peace together do not succeed.

What is noteworthy, and chilling in the dramatic sense of the story, is that the two sides who hated each so much as to avoid working for peace, worked quite well together for the sake of working to ensure war and continued hatred. I don't remember if Kirk said the following during his little speech at the end after saving the president of the Federation from assassination, but if the two sides could work together so well to keep the division between them, imagine how much they could accomplish together in peace. The last thing I want is for this thread to turn political (which it won't, I promise), but imagine if the Israelis and Palestinians, the Kurds, Shiites, south and north Korea, and all other divisions throughout the world, could heed that message and follow it. A lot of people consider The Wrath of Khan the best Trek of the series, and it was one of the best no doubts there, but IMO The Undiscovered Country is the best and most important Trek of the entire series. May we all find the undiscovered country in our lifetimes. What a place that would be. And that brings me back to my statement in the first post, about war being the ultimate villain. The undiscovered country should be the ultimate hero and goal of all the world. But, no politics here. Back to movie villains!

Why did Chang work for me as a good villain? He was not some power hungry tyrant trying to take over the galaxy or conquer a planet, something seen over and over in story after story. No, he was a being who felt in many ways as humans of our reality do; so racially biased toward his (former) enemy, mistrusting and unforgiving, that he literally could not accept a peace with a race/government that he had considered an enemy for so long. This story was likely and probably inspired in part by the end of the Cold War and the start of peace and cooperation between Russia and the U.S. in the late 80's, and it worked partly because you could relate to how combatants on both sides, or in the case of Russia and U.S., longtime mistrust and separation, felt accepting as friends the government and people of a nation we had so long mistrusted and partly feared due to the Cold War.

Yes, Chang worked as a good villain because his motives, though immoral and evil, were relatable to how we did, could, or might feel in the same situation. He also worked well for me because his secret was not revealed until the end, and all along he was portrayed as a man who agreed with the peace and blamed Kirk for trying to disrupt it. All along, the story revealed and dwelled on Kirk's racial feelings and mistrust, as well as hatred for his son's death, and that led up to the revelation that Chang was not only the true enemy, but that the feelings revealed about Kirk were nearly the same feelings of Chang himself. All that Kirk was blamed for, his accused motives, actually prepared us to realize that they were Chang's motives in reality. So, no real set up was needed to explain Chang's motives and his plans, because by that point, all that was said about Kirk during his trial was easily attributed to Chang.                

And so, that is why Chang worked well dramatically and logically as not only a villain but also a villain mastermind, and why his feelings, those revealed and those to be realized, carried the plot forward and kept the thought process (mine) going through it all. He was the plot itself in symbolic ways, his bias, mistrust, and hatred, in which the whole movie was centered on. There were 3 villains in that film to overcome. Chang himself, Kirk's inner demons, and of course the mistrust between the 2 sides, demons shared by those who sought to disrupt the peace process. The story brought a fitting end to the first, a growing change in the second, and a chance for change in the third.

And those are my feelings on General Chang.