Bona fide villains: On the nature of contemporary villains and relative evil in cinema

In this thesis, three popular movies: Kingsman: The Secret Service (Vaughn, 2014), Inferno (Howard, 2016), Avengers: Infinity War (Russo ve Russo, 2018), which have been released in the last ten years and have controversial antagonists with similar intentions and motivations are has been discussed in terms of whether they are bad characters as they are placed in the narratives. In the study, first of all, a comprehensive semiotic method which developed in the direction of Greimas was used. Accordingly, in addition to discourse analysis, narrative analysis and basic logical structure analysis, dialectical basic structure analysis was carried out. Then, a different and more inclusive ethical perspective was proposed by centered on the intellectual basis of existential ethical systems, and the characters assessed were evaluated according to the proposed ethical perspective. As a result of the study, it was seen that two of the characters (Zobrist: antagonist of The Inferno film and Thanos: antagonist of Avengers: Infinity War film) discussed had a nature outside of the traditional character categories, and in this context, a new character type was proposed under the title of Negative-hero. It has been concluded that the characters defined as Negative heroes cannot be considered as villains in terms of the ethical perspective put forward. And lastly, it has been seen that the last character (Valentine, the antagonist of the Kingsman: Secret Service) who didn't defined as a Negative-hero is pretty much an accustomed villain in parallel with the moral point in which he is positioned.