It took the brain the size of a planet to come up with these genius schemes.
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00:00A really good plan can turn your fortunes around on a dime.
00:03It can deliver you everything you ever wanted and more,
00:06including the entire universe if you aim high enough.
00:10And not only did these 10 villains from across sci-fi movies
00:14have the ambition to turn effective plans into truly evil plots,
00:18but they also had the skills to pull them off as well.
00:21Well, with varying degrees of success.
00:24I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com,
00:25and these are the 10 smartest villain plans from sci-fi movies.
00:30Number 10, a super realistic simulation.
00:33The Machines, The Matrix.
00:35The idea of living in a simulation is present throughout sci-fi history,
00:39but nothing quite does it as well or as famously as The Matrix.
00:43And the sequels, yes, but, well, let's just stick to the first one for argument's sake.
00:48In this movie, through the eyes of Thomas Anderson, aka Neo,
00:52we learn that the world we believe to be real is actually a load of baloney.
00:56As Morpheus explains in an iconic expository sequence that was hilariously kind of incomprehensible to some audiences of the time,
01:05but pretty straightforward in our current age of multiversal crossover events.
01:09After a war between humanity and machines in the early 21st century,
01:14the super intelligent robots started placing people in stasis and draining their life force to use as energy.
01:20To keep them occupied, they projected an image of life in the year 1999 into their brains and convinced them that this was reality.
01:29Of course, this all falls apart when you factor in the whole resistance movement thing,
01:33and yes, it would have been even smarter to have another layer of Matrix simulation for those who thought they were quote-unquote free,
01:40but hey, it was still a pretty good plan in pretty good execution.
01:43Number 9, The Eels, Karn, Star Trek II, The Wrath of Karn.
01:48It's quite impressive how much of a following Karn has built up amongst Star Trek fans,
01:52considering he's only appeared in two films and one episode of the original series.
01:57The leader of a race of genetically altered superhumans,
02:01Karn's most famous role was as the main antagonist in the second Star Trek film, The Wrath of Karn.
02:06This big bad lad is revealed to be living on a barren planet after being exiled there by Kirk and his crew 15 years earlier.
02:14When Captain Terrell and First Officer Chekov arrive on the planet to test a terraforming device, though,
02:19he sees a chance at revenge.
02:21He captures the Starfleet men and implants a mind-control device in their bodies.
02:26And what sort of device is this, you might ask?
02:29Well, it's a weird eel thing, of course.
02:32The Eels are the last surviving native creature on the planet,
02:37and Karn makes good use of their telekinetic powers.
02:40He then uses his new pawns to infiltrate the Enterprise from the inside out.
02:44Using Kirk's trusted ex-crew against him is a pretty great way of exploiting his trust.
02:50Now, yes, Karn ultimately fails, but he and his wiggly assistants nearly caused a whole heap of trouble.
02:56Number 8, If at first you don't succeed, Skynet, Terminator Dark Fate.
03:01A long-standing criticism of the Terminator franchise is that Skynet, for all of its advanced intelligence,
03:07only sent one Terminator back at a time to kill John Connor.
03:12I mean, if you had time travel, then why not just send back a load of Arnie's until the job is done?
03:17Those stupid machines.
03:19Well, as it turns out, no, not stupid machines.
03:22Not stupid machines at all.
03:24In 2019's Terminator Dark Fate, we actually find out that Skynet did send back more than one killer robot,
03:31as one of them actually gets John in the year 1998.
03:36So, they did it then.
03:37Pop the champagne, or, erm, motor oil, or whatever the hell it is these machines drink.
03:42Well, again, not quite, because there's always another kid for them to have to kill,
03:47but still, their first plan did come through big time.
03:50Number 7, The Copycat Killing, Lamar Burgess Minority Report.
03:55Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick,
03:58Minority Report is set in a world where criminals are arrested before they've even broken the law.
04:03Through the use of clairvoyance, the pre-crime program determines that someone is going to commit a murder
04:09before they've actually done it, and then they can be arrested and taken into custody without any loss of life.
04:14Unfortunately, the whole thing is controlled by a corrupt director who used pre-crime to cover up a murder of his own.
04:22Lamar Burgess, who's played by Max von Sydow, so you know he's a rotter,
04:26killed the mother of one of his psychics after she tried to take her daughter back.
04:31The way he did it was kind of ingenious for a villain, though.
04:35See, he orchestrated an attack on the woman that was thwarted by his own pre-crime team,
04:40and then had her murdered in the exact same fashion.
04:43As the two visions were so similar, the team just wrote the actual murder off as an echo of the first attempted one.
04:50Number 6, Breaking Grey, Sten, Upgrade.
04:54An incredibly underrated film, Upgrade follows a man regaining the use of his limbs after being paralyzed in a mugging.
05:00The guy in question, called Grey Trace, yes, that is his real name,
05:04is implanted with a computer chip to help him regain his lost functions.
05:08This is Sten, and like all AI in sci-fi films, it's evil.
05:14However, Sten was placed inside Grey by Aaron Crean, a brilliant scientist who helped develop it in the first place.
05:21So after helping Grey track down his attackers and giving him enhanced mental and physical power,
05:26Sten eventually overrides its host, taking full control for itself.
05:31It convinces Grey that everything that happened after the mugging was just a dream,
05:35and as such the character is psychologically broken by cohabiting with an evil computer chip.
05:41Number 5, The Almanac, Biff Tannen, Back to the Future Part 2.
05:46After Doc Brown yells at Marty about his kids,
05:49the teenager and his girlfriend Jennifer hop into the DeLorean to travel to the far-flung future of 2015.
05:55Whilst trying to save Marty Jr. from making a dumb decision though,
05:59the group ultimately opened the door for an older version of Biff Tannen to run riot in the past.
06:05See, old man Biff steals the DeLorean and travels back in time to talk to his younger self.
06:10There, he gives him an almanac containing the results of every major sporting event up until the year 2000.
06:17Past Biff then uses the book to make a series of bets, earning himself an outrageous fortune.
06:21He uses the money to then take over Hill Valley and rule over it with an iron fist.
06:27It's actually a genius plan, but we've got to give credit to the right person,
06:31as old Biff wasn't the one to come up with it in the first place.
06:35In fact, it was all Marty's idea.
06:38Number 4, The Good Investment, Lex Luthor, Superman.
06:41In the first Superman film from 1978, Christopher Reeves' Man of Steel goes up against his arch-nemesis
06:47to stop him from blowing up the west coast of the United States with nuclear missiles.
06:53Now, any old villain could probably just blow up a chunk of America.
06:56That's not the smart bit here.
06:59What's smart is what Lex Luthor planned to do after the missiles hit.
07:03See, Luthor used his considerable wealth to buy up large chunks of land in the desert.
07:08That way, when the original west coast sank into the sea, his land would take its place.
07:13So if we're keeping track, that means missiles plus land equals big bucks in land rights money.
07:20So many of the supervillain's plots boil down to just blow this thing up
07:24and then maybe blow something else up because we've got no endgame.
07:28But Luthor did have foresight.
07:31And so, in the end, Lex was just a greedy landlord.
07:34By far, the most evil thing in the world.
07:38Number 3, Burying the Tripods, The Aliens, War of the Worlds.
07:42Steven Spielberg's Tom Cruise fronted adaptation of H.G. Wells' seminal novel is far from a classic.
07:49But it does get one thing right in how it portrays its villains as far more advanced than the human race.
07:55See, one day, the Earth gets some visitors in the form of giant weaponized tripods.
08:00These three-legged titans emerge from the ground up and begin laying waste to the Earth and its inhabitants.
08:06And it's up to old Tom to keep his kids safe as the destruction continues.
08:11Now, the aliens, who are Martians in Wells' original book, have been plotting this attack for a long time.
08:17Long enough that they were able to bury huge machines underground without anyone noticing.
08:22They took the world by complete surprise and would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling microbes.
08:29Number 2, Watching, Waiting, Thanos Avengers Infinity War.
08:34Look, how hard can it be to find six rocks, put them in a special glove, and then snap your fingers?
08:40Well, Thanos had ages to do this, sitting in his big chair whilst everyone else did the work for him.
08:47So, why is he so revered amongst MCU fans then?
08:51What did he actually do?
08:53Well, the answer to that is, he waited.
08:56The Mad Titan perfectly calculated the exact moment to strike, giving himself the best chance to secure all six Infinity Stones in quick fashion so he could then use them to wipe out half of all life in the universe.
09:09And that moment was the destruction of Asgard in Thor Ragnarok, following hot on the heels of the Avengers themselves starting to fight against themselves.
09:18See, this is genius because with the planet decimated, Thanos knew that the Space Stone was now unguarded.
09:25After taking the Power Stone from Xandar, he then used it to retrieve the Tesseract from Loki, and now that he could travel freely throughout the universe, the rest of the stones would be pretty easy to find.
09:36Number 1, Infiltrating the Republic, Palpatine, the Star Wars Prequels.
09:41Sheev Palpatine might be more of a meme than a Sith these days, but he was a very clever bloke.
09:47Beginning as a lowly galactic senator on Naboo, Palpatine slowly rises up the ranks and eventually takes power by becoming Chancellor.
09:55And he does this not through force, but through clever political strategy.
09:59Okay, maybe some force as well if you count all the stuff he did as Darth Sidious, but you know what I mean, there's Palpatine.
10:05As both Palpatine and Darth Sidious, the future Emperor could manipulate the events on both sides of the galaxy-wide conflict to suit his personal interests.
10:14And this comes to a head when his crispy fried version dissolves the Republic and forms the Galactic Empire.
10:20It took decades of deception to reach this point, but Palpatine exercised immense restraint while waiting for his plan to come together.
10:28And you know, hey, hats off.
10:30Patience is a virtue, and this Sith Lord had it by the bucketful.
10:34So, that's our list.
10:36I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
10:38What did you think of these sci-fi movie villain plots, and are there any smarter ones I missed off here?
10:43Let me know, and while you're down there, if you could, please give us a like, share, subscribe, and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
10:51Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.