“April Fool’s Day”, that might be a spoiler.
The Game.
Forest Gump.
Um, the waiter?
How about many war films? For example, in Zulu, the Zulus are enemies but not bad guys; similarly, in The Longest Day, the Germans are enemies but not bad guys.
**Marooned
Earthquake
The Swarm
Koyaanisqatsi
Fantasia*
Journey to the Beginning of Time
The Andromeda Strain****
Most of these are, I have to admit, really bad movies. Koyaanisqatsi (and its lesser-known sequels) don’t have a plot. *Fantasia doesn’t, either, but you can see the T. Rex in the Rite of Spring sequence as a villain, and Chetnobog in the Night on Bald Mountain piece, but otherwise, there aren’t any Bad Guys. Fantasia 2000 is similar, although it’s easier to see the Firebird in that last segment as a Bad Guy.
in principle, any Man-against-Nature thing doesn’t have a Bad Guy, but a lot of these are insipid 1970s-era disaster film like Earthquake. I suppose you could throw The Towering Inferno in there too (faulty wiring isn’t necessarily Bad Guy stuff.) In monster films, the monster serves the same function as the Natural Disaster in the disaster movies, but because it’s concentrated in one being, it gets taken as the villain. So Godzilla and Jaws and the like have “Bad Guys”. If you can view a space virus as such a being, then Andromeda Strain has a Bad Guy Too. And all those Hot Zone/Infection, etc. movies.
I think that Roger Simmons is pretty clearly the bad guy of the film. He knowingly installed substandard wiring. Then later tried to escape the tower leaving everyone else to die, instead of staying to oversee the evacuation and being the last to leave.
Almost no one has ever read the novelization of Star Trek IV, but I did. Some scenes are told from the probe’s perspective - it didn’t view humans and other aliens as intelligent, just the equivalent of interstellar ants. It may be complete disregard, but it certainly wasn’t intentionally evil. “Bad guy” is debatable.
The Quiet Man
Red Will Danaher is a stubborn cuss, but not truly a bad guy (he and the Duke are pals by the end)
I read it. Vonda McIntyre was a Hugo-winning author who you’d think was above doing movie novelizations, but when you read what she did for Star Trek II, III, and IV, it’s clear she was having fun with fleshing things out and seeing what she could get away with. And, yes, like any good writer she cast herself into all roles from their perspective.
Napoleon Dynamite No real bad guys, just odd awkward people.
You mean besides almost all the popular high school kids (“Napoleon, give me some of your tots.”), the jerks who screwed over Napoleon and Pedro at the chicken farm and the martial arts guy? Etc.
The confrontation between the high school jerks and Pedro’s relative’s crew is great. Reverses the expectation of who the good and bad guys are.
And don’t get me started on Rico.
Gosh.
It was surprisingly good and well-written! I never read the novelizations for II or III, but it sounds like maybe I should have!