Some movie villains like to keep it simple, opting for efficiency and effectiveness in their plots to ensure their victory. Others play the game a little differently. Many antagonists from science fiction movies opt to display their next-level intelligence through the complexity and inscrutability of their schemes.
Sci-fi villains are often guilty of some sort of hubris, whether through the overextension of their resources, misunderstanding of the protagonist, or even just a plain old detachment from reality. Even though they are illogical, the plans are often portrayed as the products of either next-level intelligence or folly, up to viewers' interpretations.
10 Loki Could Never Have Ended Up On Top
Though he may be the MCU's most popular villain, Loki would have had a tough time controlling Earth after his attempted conquest in The Avengers, even if he had pulled off his invasion. His army may have been able to defeat Earth's heroes, but Loki would still have an even greater fight ahead of him.
Loki is only able to get as far as he did in The Avengers because of his backing by Thanos, both in the form of his staff, secretly the mind infinity stone, and the Chitauri army. If Loki had won, Thanos would demand both the space and mind stone, robbing Loki of the power he is using to control Earth, inviting fresh conflicts.
9 Mr. Glass's Hit/Miss Ratio Is Abysmal
The plan revealed at the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable by its villain Mr. Glass, is pretty easily glossed over, but it really shouldn't be. It only ends up making sense because, in the case of the movie, he is proven correct.
Mr. Glass is a comic book fanatic with a frail body who becomes convinced that great abilities can only be revealed through great trauma, which becomes the throughline of the film trilogy. In the case of Unbreakable, Glass is revealed to have caused a train crash with 131 casualties, one of many attacks. Glass seeks to prove that his own physical difficulties are evidence of his own greatness, which is a clear misunderstanding of the scientific method.
8 Snoke Is A Waste Of Time
When Supreme Leader Snoke was introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the mystery surrounding his character was his most compelling attribute. He is clearly a riff on the original Galactic Emperor, Darth Sidious, but it was the mystery of his past that excited viewers.
In Rise of Skywalker, Snoke, who had been killed in the previous movie, is revealed to be one of many clones of the Emperor, in a reveal so obvious that it becomes surprising. There is no real reason for Palpatine to use Snoke as a figurehead, especially because the Supreme Leader occupies the exact same function as him. He doesn't even seem concerned with maintaining the illusion once Snoke dies.
7 Norman Osborn Looses Direction As Green Goblin
Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, is defined by his extreme intelligence and mania in his villainous identity. In Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, he proves himself to be an excellent villain, though he loses much of his focus in the second half of the movie.
Osborn spends the first chunk of Spider-Man killing off those who have wronged him personally and professionally, but after he finishes, he doesn't really have too much to do other than fight Spider-Man. He explains this by saying his hope is for the two of them to team up and conquer the world, but even Osborn is incapable of explaining why that would ever happen.
6 Zod Shouldn't Terraform Earth
General Zod's plan at the end of Man of Steel makes little sense, especially considering he knows of Superman's abilities. The final action set piece of the movie has Superman destroying Kryptonian terraforming machines to change Earth's composition and eradicate the planet's inhabitants.
At this point, Zod knows that Kryptonians can thrive on Earth after they take time to get used to the planet's atmosphere, so it makes no sense to do either of those things. Earth is not only more beautiful than Krypton; it's full of billions who would be forced into slavery under Zod. There is no reason to kill them off.
5 Lex Luthor's Plan Relies On Huge Logic Leaps
There are many disappointments in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor may be the greatest. Luthor is usually a calm, wily and vindictive businessman/scientist. This portrayal tries to make him unpredictable, to the point of actually being incomprehensible.
Even with added information revealed in deleted scenes, Luthor's plan is predicated on none of the people he is fooling ever having a conversation. He plans on using Batman to weaken or kill Superman, which is misguided even though he is successful after destroying the alien superhero's good name. He leaves himself no backups, even though his plan revolves around the public having specific reactions to huge events and blaming Superman for everything.
4 Thanos Didn't Need To Antagonize The Universe
In an attempt to ground Thanos' "kill half the universe" plan, originally a tribute to his beloved, the MCU may have made the villain less understandable. In his comic portrayal, Thanos is driven to genocide through his deep romantic love for the personification of the force of Death, an admittedly high-concept reasoning.
The MCU's Thanos is far more practical. He kills innumerable lifeforms to stave off universal overpopulation, allegedly an understandable motivation. It falls apart, however, because of two glaring holes in his plan. First, the Infinity Stones are more than capable of creating more space and resources, and even if he killed half the population, it wouldn't take long for it to rebound. Perhaps Thanos should stay a romantic.
3 Poison Ivy And Mr. Freeze Can Never Coexist
Batman and Robin is many things, but well-thought-out isn't one of them. Like previous Batman films, its villains, Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze decide to combine their plans to fill the world with plant life and freeze the planet, respectively, due to their shared hatred of the caped crusader.
The villains are clear with their endgames, and they cannot coexist. While there are plants that thrive in frozen environments, there is no way that Poison Ivy, in all her glory, would ever compromise on which plants she can grow. Even if they were to succeed, their reigns would never last past their mutual betrayals.
2 The Signs Aliens Should Never Come To Earth
There are few alien invasions in movies more doomed to fail than that of the aliens from Signs. It's hard to believe that an alien race, with technology advanced enough for interstellar travel, could not predict that there's water on Earth.
Many films, like Battleship and War of the Worlds, feature aliens defeated by Earth's environment. These forces usually come with protection but are doomed once those plans fail. In Signs, the aliens cannot touch water and come with no plan for shielding. They land on a planet mostly covered in water, where water regularly falls from the sky, and expect not to get wet. They deserve to lose.
1 Hugo Drax Doesn't Understand Basic Genetics
Hugo Drax, the chief antagonist of the movie, James Bond and Moonraker, seeks to destroy the entire population of Earth with deadly poison to then repopulate it with a master race. He uses his connections to populate a space station with six shuttles worth of models who will later return to Earth after it is no longer dangerous.
There is simply not enough genetic diversity to support sustained population growth after Drax returns to Earth. He may succeed in killing off the Earth's humans, but the genetic deformities that would result from such a shallow pool would lead to serious issues within a few generations.