So everybody’s all a-twitter about the new Clooney flick Michael Clayton and how realistic and original it is. "Realistic" is a relative term, sure, but we’d like to note humbly that Clayton fits into a long line of movies about characters crusading against Evil Movie Corporations, some real, many fictional. The fact is, the Faceless Corporation is one of cinema’s easiest targets — cooking the books, offing all detractors, bribing officials, and usually killing its consumers. But maybe it’s about time we paid tribute to these parasitic, conglomerated baddies. They may not sneer like Lee Marvin, and they may not cackle like Gert Frobe, but without them, the annals of movie villainy would be a far more impoverished place. So here they are, The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History.
The Soylent Corporation, SOYLENT GREEN (1973)
Charlton Heston went through some shit in the late 1960s and 1970s. He had to deal with earthquakes, runaway airplanes, post-apocalyptic albinos, and a planet full of damned dirty apes. He didn't always make it to the end of the movie in one piece, but give or take a hissy fit in front of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, he usually managed to hang onto his stoic composure. The one time he cracked and had to be carried offstage screaming and frothing at the mouth, it came from a good look at the inner workings of the Soylent Corporation. In 2022, the teeming refuge of an overpopulated and underresourced planet depend on SoyCorp for their meager diet: synthetic crackers and buns that go by the names Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the ever-popular Soylent Green, which is said to be made from plankton and which has a tangy zest with just a hint of Edward G. Robinson. For the benefit of extremely slow viewers, the terrible secret of Soylent Green is spelled out in Chuck's exit line, which has entered the camp lexicon and is beloved even, or maybe especially, by those who've never seen the movie.
The Parallax Corporation, THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)
In Taxi Driver, arguably the greatest of all the seventies assassination movies, Travis Bickle, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer before him, plans to kill one target and then shifts to another when things don't work out. What Travis lacks is a stabilizing figure to help him stay focused and channel his energies — just what the Parallax Corporation offers to the maladjusted social reject searching for the right career path. In this paranoid fantasy, both the "lone gunmen" accused of picking off the potential saviors of our nation, and the real assassins for whose crimes those patsies are framed, are the carefully sculpted products of a company that arranges the hits and shapes the way they're perceived by a gullible public. They're so good at it that reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), the movie's hero, whom we expect to expose the conspiracy, instead winds up as the latest patsy. In the movie's most memorable sequence, Beatty and the audience are subjected to a lengthy film montage that's a regular part of the Parallax training process, a scene apparently based on the not-implausible notion that watching short student films could turn someone homicidal.
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, ALIEN Saga
Most of our readership will surely have two thoughts when reading the above byline, the first being, "wait, Alien AGAIN???" and the second being, "Wait, the Company has a name?" Well, yes, they do, although we’d understand if you hadn’t noticed it. In Ridley Scott’s original film, Weyland-Yutani ran the show, but their presence in the film was almost subliminal — on computer monitors, on a beer bottle, and so forth. But as the series continued, their logo became more visible, especially in Aliens, where it appeared at several points emblazoned on the walls of the mostly-deserted colony where the film is set. But the Company’s ubiquity pales in comparison to its insidious presence in the Alien universe. From the time it tricked the Nostromo into embarking on an alternate, crew-expendable mission resulting in the death of all but one crew member, Weyland-Yutani consistently sent people into the path of the Alien, all in the name of bringing back a specimen for weapons research. Ash’s sentiments about the Alien — "a perfect organism. . . unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" — could just as easily be applied to Weyland-Yutani. But as the saying goes, there’s always a bigger fish. In a scene deleted from Alien: Resurrection, it was announced that Weyland-Yutani had somewhere along the line been bought out by Wal-Mart. Not even a money-grubbing intergalactic juggernaut stood a chance against the Sam Walton empire.
Pacific Gas and Electric, ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)
If you want a generic corporate name, "Pacific Gas and Electric" will do. And if you want a particularly evil-sounding chemical name, what’s better than hexavalent chromium? It’s got HEX in it and it sounds shiny. . . like the Terminator. And then if you really wanna rile people up, have the faceless corporation dump evil chemicals into something harmless and life-sustaining. . . like groundwater. Watch as PG & E (Profits! Greed! Eeeevil!) seems to snicker while the good townspeople get sicker and sicker from an act so innocent — simply drinking the water. If you made it up, they’d slap cliché (or Ibsen) on the script coverage. But if it happened to be a True Story with a 333 million dollar settlement at the end of a class-action lawsuit, then you’d have an Oscar-winning hit movie.
"The Company", SECONDS (1966)
John Frankenheimer's profoundly depressing horror movie deals with the machinations of a deep-pocketed organization that arranges for people unhappy with their lives — from the looks of things here, that would be everybody over the age of fourteen — to be "reborn" via plastic surgery and forged identities. Veteran character actor John Randolph plays the poor schlub who gets roped in and, because the Company uses entrapment and blackmail to make it "easier" for their clients to give up their old lives, is forced to become Rock Hudson. No one will be surprised to learn that this does not prove to be the automatic gateway to an exciting, more rewarding new existence. Unable to cope, Randolph/Rock finally demands that the Company give him a new new life, and soon discovers how they acquire the corpses they need to fake the deaths of new clients. The tough minded will say he brought it all on himself by not ducking out the nearest fire exit when he learned that the head of the Company was Will Geer, TV's Grandpa Walton. As any hardened moviegoer could have told him, anybody that folksy (see also "Brimley, Wilford" in The Firm) in a position of power has got to be up to no good.
— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield