Anyone who has played Borderlands 2 knows exactly who I’m talking about, here’s some background info. Borderlands is a first-person looter shooter video game that is set on a chaotic planet called Pandora, Handsome Jack is the insane CEO of a company that technically owns the planet, but he wasn’t always like that. He had a wife and a daughter, who turned out to be a Siren (1 of 6 women gifted with superpowers in the whole universe) who turns out to be very valuable, as a man tries to kidnap her. During the chaos she uses her powers to activate 2 turrets to kill the kidnapper, but accidentally killing her mother, which sends Jack off the deep end, as he makes a personalized prison to keep his daughter in so she doesn’t hurt anyone else, but also uses her powers with technology to help execute his grand plan, to kill all the bandits on Pandora. Which seems like a somewhat reasonable goal, all the bandits on Pandora are crazy people abandoned and left for dead, there’s only one problem with that, he sees every living soul on Pandora as a bandit, meaning he wants to kill a entire planets worth of people, now do see the crazy part?
Getting into the main games, he hires the help of 5 vault hunter to help him find a vault (alien tech gates that lead to ultimate power) and throughout the events of the Pre-Sequel, Jack shows his first signs of insanity. Instance one, after the mayor of a mining town on Pandoras moon tries to attack Jack even after he said he would let the mayor go, Jack proceeds to kill the mayor, following this with the statement “woah, that felt kinda good”. Instance two, after being assisted by 2 legendary vault hunter and a group of scientists, after thinking that all the scientists are trying to betray him, he proceeds to toss them all out a airlock in space, again following this action with the statement “Damn, this feels good”. After many other events that don’t matter to Jacks story, he is betrayed and left for dead inside a vault, where he then escapes and kills the CEO of Hyperion, changing his name to Handsome Jack, names himself the new CEO, and starts his plan to destroy all life on Pandora.
Moving into Borderlands 2 I will summarize some of the events of the start of the game. Jacks daughter, Angel, has been told to help 6 vault hunter that he tried to kill earlier, until he tells her to betray them. After the events of Angels betrayal she then helps the vault hunter, for real this time, find a vault key that opens a vault that will summon a monster for Jack to use to destroy Pandora, as it is revealed that Angel is a siren that is guarding the key, we reach Jacks breaking point. Angel asks the vault hunters to kill her, as she has been trapped in a cage for 15 years of her life, Jack does not like this, because though his actions and the way he treats her says differently, Jack truly did care for his daughter and love her, and in his mind he was just protecting her from the dangers of life on Pandora. After the death of his daughter, we see a change in his mannerisms, before he would talk to the vault hunters and make jokes about them and just say random stuff, now, anytime he talks to them, he is deadpan and serious, they took the only thing that mattered in his life away from him and he wants to make them pay. Later on he gives a speech to the entirety of the planet, slandering the hunters for brutally murdering his daughter and how him, the real hero of the story, will end them, as he puts it, “because that’s what heroes do”. We now reach the end of the game, where the vault hunters defeat Jack, kill the guardian ( the monster Jack was trying to control), and then get a monologue from Jack about how he’s the hero, they’re the villains and that this isn’t how his story ends. Jack then is killed, ending his reign of terror over Pandora, toppling Hyperions massive corporate empire, and ending the story of one of video games greatest villains.
What makes Jack the great video game villain? To me it’s because he truly believes he is the hero, bringing peace to a lawless world, we see his noble goal turn into brutal bloodlust and rage as more in his life is taken away from him. Throughout the 2 games he is in we see the signs and cues of his psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies grow and grow until it’s too late to save him. He was the hero, but by the end of his life, he was most definitely the villain of his own story.
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Handsome Jack is a very well written character for a game that has its key moments of serious exposition mashed with some of the more popular goofy moments Borderlands shares. As a person who’s played both BL2 and The Pre-Sequel, I’ve already understood most of what you shared about him. A man driven crazy with one goal in mind, a goal that drags on far too long, with its effects on all those around him. After Angel’s death, he finally became a man with nothing left to lose, as he explains in his monologue to the Vault Hunter. He’s confused with the concept of liberation and even in his appearance as an AI in Tales From The Borderlands, he still retains that insanity from after Angel’s death.
ReplyDeleteThis is a well-written description of Handsome Jack. I'm not much of a big video game fan, but your description of both Jack and the video game Borderlands gets me interested in playing this game. Jack's life goes very well with the quote "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." In all, Jack is a very interesting character and your description of him is very detailed.
ReplyDeleteI like to look into what the characters are like before starting a game that’s been out for a while, and your description of both the game and Handsome Jack make me interested in the game. He seems like such a well-written villain, and his character design looks amazing as well. His beliefs are actually quite interesting, which is different from many other villains I’ve seen and heard of.
ReplyDeleteIt’s crazy how Jack has still been in the conversation of villains in video games despite the first game he appeared in released in 2012. Like you said, it’s kind of tragic when you play the presequel as while he wasn’t a complete beacon of good, he clearly was trying, only to have his efforts rewarded with a double-cross. Then the whole descent into the events of BL2 just reinforced his role as the villain simply by having him have so much presence, from echo logs to his taunts over the communicator. In terms of villains in this series, he is the obvious winner considering Steele is pretty one dimensional and the twins are just plain unlikable.
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