Dec 07 2008
100 Best Movie Characters? Really?
The British film magazine “Empire” recently compiled a list of the 100 Best Movie Characters of all time.
And Empire also seriously undermined their credibility by declaring that the number one best movie character of all time is… get this… 
“Tyler Durden from Fight Club”.
Really.
That one guy from Fight Club.
Tyler Durden.
Better than Darth Vader, Indiana Jones, or James Bond. Better than Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockinbird. Better than Rick from Casablanca. (Neither of whom even made the top 25, by the way).
I think this speaks for itself. No need to go into pages and pages of rants about how ridiculous and wrong it is. An article on Yahoo Movies talks about some other problems with the list - not the least of which is that Boba Fett got a slot (Boba Fett??!! You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me!! He had like three 
minutes of screen time, like two lines, and died screaming like a little girl when a blind man humorously knocked him over!! HE WA NOT A PROPER CHARACTER IN THOSE MOVIES!! HIS ENTIRE FAN FOLLOWING WAS GENERATED BY NOVELS AND COMIC BOOKS!!! HE SHOULD NOT BE ON THIS LIST!!! ARRHGHGH!!) and that characters from Anchorman snagged not one but two slots. (Don’t get me wrong. I love Anchorman: Will Ferrel’s funniest film without a doubt. But, seriously: two characters from it are Greatest Characters of All Time? I kind of think not.)
But this also brings to the forefront one of the main problems with these lists which are generated by online voting: namely, the fact that it is mostly teens-and-twentysomethings who are voting on these lists, and therefore movies that came out in the last five or ten years are heavily favored. If a proper film historian (or, even, a random person with any experience of watching films made before 1995) made this list, I expect that “The Joker” from The Dark Knight and Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean would not have made the top 25, as fun as they are.
AFI’s list of “100 Greatest Heroes and Villians” is much more reliable, even though they put Jodie Foster’s character from Silence of the Lambs (honestly - and nothing against Jodie Foster - we all know she was just a delivery system for Hannibal Lector) and Sigourney Weaver’s character from Aliens in the top ten because somebody would complain if there weren’t any girls up there.
Tyler Durden indeed. (Grumbles.)
