I understand that in the books that the movie “Master and Commander” is based on, the original “bad guys” were the American Navy, but the scriptwriters changed their nationality to French.
Which famous and/or significant works of literature or movies have “The Americans” as the main villian?
I am not really asking so much for examples in which the main villian is simply an American citizen who is criminal or corrupt (lets say like a mobster or a singular corrupt politician or Corporation CEO who is acting outside the law). Rather, I am looking for works in which “The Americans” are considered villians as a group.
Of course, there have been a lot of Civil War films telling the story from the South’s point of view – but that doesn’t really count, because the Rebs also considered themselves “Americans”.
Has a Mexican filmmaker ever told the story of the Mexican-American War from the Mexican pov? How about a Spanish director doing the Spanish-American War?
I’m sure there are a lot of Japanese films about WWII, but I’ve never heard of one that portrays the Americans as “villains” rather than ordinary enemies.
It’s more complicated than that. In most of the 19 volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, the main characters are fighting against Napoleon’s France. However, there are some later books in the series which deal with the War of 1812, where Aubrey and Maturin encounter American ships.
The movie happens to be based on one of the novels dealing with the War of 1812. However, this would be the very first time movie audiences would be seeing the characters on screen. Since the book series is really mostly about the Napoleonic Wars, it made sense to switch the enemy to the French. I’m sure the fact that US audiences would be uncomfortable with the US as an enemy played a big role in the switch, but it’s also true that having the French as the enemy is in many was truer to the spirit of the books as a whole.
(I should also point out that the books never paint members of either the French or US navies as “bad guys”–nasty villains. They’re always treated as honorable enemies. The real “bad guy” of the series is Napoleon.)
Getting back to the original topic – the Americans are the bad guys in The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
Tora, Tora, Tora is fairly even-handed in its treatment of the Japanese and Americans, so the Americans are looked at as the enemy in the Japanese scenes.
There are lots of movies and TV shows where the US government (or some rogue element therein) is the heavy, but the protagonist is also American:
The X-Files
Clear and Present Danger
All the President’s Men
Dr. Strangelove
Billy Jack
I’d love to see movies about historical events where the US was clearly the bad guy against foreign parties, like Monte Cassino, massacres in the Phillippines, the Allende assassination, My Lai, etc.
Americans came off surprisingly well in MacArthur’s Children.
A couple of those wouldn’t fit the original poster’s criteria, since at My Lai it wasn’t “America” that was the bad guy but a small group of Americans who were later prosecuted for their actions. Monte Cassino is an incident where Allied bombing caused the tragic deaths of hundreds of civilians, but it is not clear that those making the decision to bomb knew this would be the case. While there was bad decision-making, America wasn’t “the bad guy.” That was still the Nazis.
This reminds me of Roland and Emmerich’s Godzilla. In the Japanese flicks, Godzilla was birthed by America’s atom bombs during WWII. In the Hollywood version, he was created by French nuclear testing.
Master and Commander is a pastiche from a dozen different O’Brian stories. The book “Far Side of the World” took place in the South Pacific, not as far north as the Galapagos, and they were chasing after USS Essex, the smallest of the American frigates which was only slightly larger than Surprise. “Master and Commander” was entirely in the Mediterranean, with Aubrey commanding the brig Sophie.
Platoon
Apocalypse Now
Hiroshima (TV miniseries)
Little Big Man
The China Syndrome
Rules of Engagement
The Rock
Fall of Saigon (Vietnamese ca 1990)
JFK
Get the picture? Since the 1960’s it has been fashionable for Hollywood to make films depicting America as the villain, which explains their political bent. They will make a dig at their own country at the drop of a hat, inventing all sorts of evils, directly or indirectly.
My grandfather was one of the engineers who positioned the artillery at Cassino. He said that when the American commanders drew up the disposition of forces, they did so with the map upside down.
So no, they didn’t know - but only because they were criminally incompetent.
No, they didn’t know because they had no way of knowing. They were being constantly shelled and it was their opinion that the Nazis had spotters in the abbey. There was much debate over bombing it because it was a piece of history, but no one knew civilians were taking shelter there.
the X-Men movies. The godlike heroes fighting the closed minded neandrathal American government. The first scene has Nightcrawler putting a knife to the President’s throat.