I’m looking for novels, series, or movies (I stress the first two I can enjoy it for a while), where the reader or audience sympathizes with adversaries or both the protagonist and antagonist. While sympathizing with two characters in, say, opposing sides of a war is ok (like a German soldier and an allied soldier in WW2), I’m more interested in two characters in direct conflict with each other. Game of Thrones comes to mind of, course, where Danys fights Jaime Lannister. My mind is foggy at the moment, but I think a similar dynamic might have played out in the Stormlight Archives.
I don’t care whether the two come to a rapproachment at the end - I just like the tension of a conflict coming wherein I don’t know whom to root for, or hope they somehow see the good in each other. Any genres are acceptable. Looking forward to your recommendations and thanks in advance!
My favorite example of this is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and the film version directed by Fred Zinneman*. Both are excellent.
If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s a thriller set in 1962-3 in which the OAS, an organization of Algerian War veterans, hires a professional assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle in retaliation for his liberation of Algeria. The assassin, code-named “The Jackal”, goes about his planning with meticulous and detailed care, and the audience follows along. At the same time, the French authorities learn about the plot. But because the assassin is a hired man, with no connection to the rest of the OAS (which is filled with informers), they don’t even know who he is or what he looks like, or when, for that matter, he intends to carry out his crime, so they go into an all-out effort to identify and locate him before he can act. The effort is headed by Police Commissaire Claude Lebel, who knows that he’ll be crucified if he fails.
The Jackal learns that his cover has been blown (the OAS has its sources, too), and wonders if he should go on. In the book, this quandary unfolds in a coffee shop, but in the film, it crystallizes in a scene where the Jackal, driving his Alfa Romeo (in which he is smuggling his tricked-out assassin’s rifle) comes to a fork in the road in Southern France, with a sign having two arrows, one pointing to Paris, the other pointing the way back to Italy. He idles the car as he contemplates the choice.
Then he pulls up the roof on his convertible and speeds off towards Paris.
When I saw this in theaters (multiple times) during its initial release, the audience actually cheered at this scene. You know that the Jackal is a criminal, and there are very few OAS sympathizers in the audience, so killing de Gaulle is viewed as a Very Bad Thing, but you have to admire his nerve and his as-yet-undisclosed secret method for getting at de Gaulle.
At the same time, the audience sympathizers with the much put-upon Lebel, who is fighting against almost impossible odds to identify and isolate The Jackal. Throughout the rest of the book and film we seethe two gaining small victories against each other, and admiring Lebel’s ingenuity in finding another method to track the Jackal down, and admiring The Jackal for finding another clver way to avoid capture. Disguises and false identities are used (more in the novel than in the film), but they are believable, not absurd transformations as are often depicted in such stories. These are disguises that could pass muster up-close.
At the end, The Jackal comes within a moment of achieving his goal, and Lebel spots a last clue that leads to a surprisingly subdued climax.
And, of course, as in all Forsythe novels, there’s a Final Twist.
But definitely a case ion which you’re rooting for both sides.
Avoid the awful remake, The Jackal, like the plague
- I hadn’t seen Zinneman’s masterpiece, High Noon when I first saw Day of the Jackal, but after I did, I recognized the same hallmarks. In High Noon Zinneman makes us deeply aware of passing time as noon approaches, constantly having clocks in the frame. In Day of the Jackal he is similarly concerned with passing time, although on a longer scale. Dates are constantly referred to, and we see calendars frequently onscreen, even though, in this case, it’s not clear exactly why, since we don’t know what we’re counting down to.until near the end.
Tunes of Glory, starring Alec Guinness and John Mills. Two military officers, one aristocrat, one who came up from the ranks, vying for control of a regiment.
Dead Ringers, starring Jeremy Irons as a pair of identical twins.
At the beginning of each movie, you are shown one saintly Good Guy, and one cartoonish Bad Guy. As each movie progresses, the bad guy gradually earns your respect, and the good guy alienates your affections. At the end of each movie, you just want to slap both of them.
But both are good movies.
This one may be borderline, but I’d suggest the TV Series Farscape. Since it has episodic as well as long term storylines, you aren’t going to see the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist as regularly as you would in a lot of shorter form works. But the relationship between John and Scorpius is a thing of wonder.
I would include The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, and its various film versions, here. The titular protagonist is a murderer and deserves to be brought to justice, no matter how much he tries to justify his crime to himself. You sympathise with the victim’s friends and family who are trying to find out what happened. But at the same time you sympathise with Ripley and rejoice each time he narrowly evaded being revealed.
Cobra Kai. The first two seasons are on Netflix, and a third season is “Coming Soon.” It’s a direct sequel to the movies The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid II, with Ralph Macchio and William Zabka reprising their roles.
It makes Johnny Lawrence, the main antagonist of the first film, into the protagonist, decades later. It does an astoundingly good job of making him a sympathetic character while still being a jerk, and making it clear how from his point of view, he was the hero, and Danny LaRusso was the villain. At the same time, as the series progresses, Danny LaRusso becomes more and more of a co-protagonist, and it does an astounding job of making him a nice guy who can also be a jerk at times. For such a goofy premise, it really does an amazing job as a dramedy portraying two equally sympathetic protagonists/antagonists.
Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro squaring off on opposite sides of the law is a famous example of this.
A little bit less known is Hell in the Pacific, with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune as an American pilot and a Japanese soldier trapped on a lonely island in the Pacific during WWII.
Finally, sort of qualifying (and highly recommended viewing) is Red Sun with Charles Bronson as a train robber and Toshiro Mifune as a Samurai guard in the old west.
To add another war movie, there’s also The Enemy Below, with Robert Mitchum as the captain of an American destroyer, stalking a German U-boat whose captain is played by Curt Jurgens. The two are evenly matched as strategists, and grow to respect one another even as they try to sink each other’s ships.
Mitchum’s character is brand new to his post, having previously served in the Merchant Marine, and his crew is unsure of his fitness to command a warship. Jurgens’s character is a thoughtful man who’s disgusted with the Nazi regime, but too much a creature of duty to consider disobeying his orders, trying to keep his crew’s nerves together in the face of regular depth charge attacks. Both of them are smart guys who are good at what they do, and care about the men under their command.
The Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” is largely based on this movie.
I’ve observed before that Toy Story doesn’t have a villain. Woody and Buzz are both right for the most part and neither one has to be defeated for the movie to have a happy ending. The movie was about both of them learning to put aside their own mistaken views and reconcile their two different approaches to their common goal.
Sid was the TS villian, albeit not a particularly compelling one, a coward in the end.
9 posts in, and nobody has mentioned the Fugitive [both the TV show & movie]? Tho the real antagonist was Nichols and his ally, not Gerard per se.
As much as I love Red Sun I don’t think it quite fits the OP. It is more like a western 48 Hrs. where the two protagonists, who have little in common and don’t particularly like each other, have to work together to catch the common foe (the guy who tried to kill Bronson). And there is little sympathy for that guy ! (can’t remember his name)
My contribution is The Rock. Except for the fact that Ed Harris is threatening with the worst poisonous gas imaginable, his reasons for holing up in Alcatraz are noble: to have those soldiers who have died on covert missions (in places they should not have been) be remembered and handled the same as those killed in (regular) action.
The movie was different, but the TV series made Gerard a largely unsympathetic character. (YMMV) In fact, after the network test showed the pilot to an audience they came back to the producer and suggest that he “get rid of” Gerard. “The audience doesn’t like this guy at all.” He replied that was the whole point. Having a character that the audience was supposed to dislike wasn’t really a thing back then.
Fair enough-the show was outside of my parents’ viewing habits (I was ~7-9 years old at the time).
I feel Sid was more of an obstacle than a villain. He was not part of the main narrative, which was about Buzz and Woody competing for Andy’s attention.
A villain is a central element of the story; it’s someone or something that the protagonist has to defeat to reach the end of the story. An obstacle is just an event that happens along the way; it can be removed from the story without changing the narrative.
So the hostility between Buzz and Woody was the villain that had to be defeated and Sid was just an obstacle they encountered.
HBO’s Westworld is a lot like this. At least in the first season. There are a few corporate baddies, but they’re not so much main villians, as much as obstacles, as described by @Little_Nemo.
The characters who get depth and story are all sympathetic in some way, and they are often opposed to each others’ goals. Of course this is also a show where the audience can think some characters are villains, and some characters may think of themselves as villains, and both can be wrong.
The second season moves the corporate henchmen from obstacle to villain, to give the audience somebody to root against, so it isn’t nearly as nuanced in the sense the OP asks for. If you liked the first season though, it’s entertaining enough.
I haven’t bothered watching the third season yet, because I hear it ends on a cliffhanger, so I’ll wait until they bother to finish the story.
Maybe Enemy Mine? You first root for the earth guy, but in the end just like the characters you arrive at a mutual human level of understanding.
The antitrope for this thread of course is “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly”. They are all so rotten and ruthless that you don’t know who to root for in the final shoot-out.
How about Rocky? Apollo Creed was arrogant but never really treated Rocky poorly and certainly respected him by the end of the movie. Maybe he’s not all that sympathetic though.
Showtime’s Billions has a fascinating dynamic between Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and Axelrod (Damian Lewis).
They’re both anti-heroes of a sort. Each has devious tendencies as well as redeeming qualities, and you find yourself swinging back and forth regarding which one to root for in any given episode.
Watch old-school Dallas and try not to secretly admire for J.R. He was so charming with his evil doings.
This is one of the things I love about Princess Mononoke. The creatures of the forest and the people of the town are both, by their own perfectly reasonable standards, in the right, and both seek to do good… and yet, they’re also locked, apparently unresolvably, in a struggle to the death.
Yes, in the end of the movie, there’s also another, unsympathetic greater evil, that both unite against. But defeating the greater evil doesn’t really do anything, in the long run, to resolve their differences.