It would be interesting to see children struggle with the moral dilemma, is there any movie like this already that I'm not realising?
For incredible kids TV shows that emphasize empathy for "the bad guys", demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses of the "the good guys", and does so in a way that encourages personal growth, integrity, and compassion over moral nihilism as a response, then you can't do better than
* Steven universe
* Avatar: the last Airbender
Your parent isn't making the "for kids" a requirement, which explains many of the suggestions here, including "The Wire".
> *"I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids)"
Kids is also relative: you need to take the kids themselves into account to know what may be appropriate for them.
I appreciate you including that. When media does trend towards "reality is complicated" very often it feels like to me its ending with the lesson 'everybody hurts everyone so just get used to it and stop classifying anything as wrong or right.'
I remember hearing shouting matches as I left Civil War about who was right, who was on the side of good.
And Infinity War leaves a lot of people with a sense that maybe Thanos wasn't so bad.
I still like the idea of wiping half of life in the entire universe though, it works well from the narrative perspective.
Same goes for the much maligned Marvel's Inhumans, where it's not clear exactly why the Royal Family is deserving of any sympathy.
Has society gotten so corrupt that we can't see that almost all the "good guys" are total villains compared to the moral and ethical norms from even as recent as 30 years ago?
Go back further, and the good guy "sacrificed" himself or his own interests for the benefit of others.
Edit: Rocky isn't a great example, but leaving it in because at least it was inspiring to try and rise above his place in life honestly.
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
You call Iron Man a selfish, rich asshole. But this is the character who shut down his defense contracts worth billions because he found out that his weapons weren’t being used the way he thought. He also sided with the UN (or whatever equivalent) against his team, in deference to traditional hierarchical authority. If anything, his morals are simpler than many other modern characters. He’s just not as flat as the Superman written for Reeves.
Started with a black and white view of good vs bad, but started pulling that apart as by mid way through there was no appropriate label for any side. You began to question what was good and what was bad and why.
If you restrict the scope to just human interaction on ships then you retrieve the good-bad spectrum. A caste system, a military dictatorship, black markets, etc.
Ironically I'm not sure it makes a difference. I think in a kind of perverse voyeuristic way people like to live through them, but stay safe in the knowledge that they "could never do that". Like the kind of excitement you got from being around the naughty kid at school, without actually risking getting in trouble.
Grendel, Grendel, Grendel[0] Superb children's animation from the 80s. Though you might be very hard pressed to find it. A retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view whilst paying homage to Monty Python. He's big, bad, misunderstood and ultimately dies when our human hero Beowulf ambushes him. Never full of Disney shmaltz and cute, deep enough to give you plenty of talking points.
Lots of movies with bad guys and good guys do that, but mostly just without...
> leaving the viewer undecided on whether they support the good or the bad guy.
(Or, if they do that for a while, they resolve it, for most viewers, by the end.) In fact, any movie with a well defined “good guy” and “bad guy” does so specifically because it either doesn't do that or resolved it before the end. Otherwise you have at best a winner and a loser.
OTOH, lots of movies that aren't action movies are driven by character conflict where there isn't a well-defined bad guy and good guy, and where the protagonist is differentiated from other characters by focus and arc, not by superior virtue, and where it's quite possible to disagree on whether the protagonist or someone with which they had a conflict was more right, because “good guy defeats threat of bad guy” isn't the story model.
Avatar: The Last Airbender the cartoon tv show is a perfect example of this. For kids and adults alike.
Also Star Trek DS9 did an excellent job of getting into the villains heads, spending time with them and showing their perspectives and motives.
And even the "good guys" did some questionable stuff, e.g. in In the Pale Moonlight. But that's my favorite Trek episode ever out of all the shows, so I'm not complaining
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Ozymandias did unify the world, after all.
It's great because it divides the present heroes as well, with Rorschach the absolutist morality on one side, Dr Manhattan as the complete pragmatist on the other, and everyone else somewhere in between.
This is also one of the few shows where they try not to kill the bad guy every time.
That's actually fairly common in TV shows. Police procedurals, for one example, where they try to kill the bad guy every time are kind of exceptional.
Most comic book villains lack any redeeming quality (largely on purpose, to remove any chance for empathy and justify the heroes' wanton destruction), but DOOM is refreshingly multi-dimensional for a villain.
The big scary Ogre comes to the rescue instead of Prince Charming. Something about government plans for land and evil fairy God mothers.
--- And then there is Frozen,
A Girl is taught to conceal, not feel, and turns the whole place into an icicle and is in many ways considered the wicked person.
This is one of the reasons why I actually like the X-Men movies a lot (at least the 1st ones), while I hate most superhero movies. I find the character of Magneto, with his backstory and his relationship with Xavier really interesting.
It's called Magica Madoca. It completely flips the roles by the end.