people don't appreciate now how from 2005-2013 EVERY movie villain was Jigsaw

basically Jigsaw feels like the pop movie sphere's cultural birth of the "smarter than you" bad guy, before him bad guys in movies are actually very rarely AHEAD of the hero, it's more understood they can just do things the hero can't like Vader or Jason

even Sauron or Sauroman, they aren't cleverly maneuvering around the heroes playing 3 dimensional chess they just have better magic or bigger armies and thus are the bad guys, Saw changed that dynamic because Jigsaw was smarter than EVERYONE- including the audience

closest comparison to this is Hans Gruber from Die Hard only its being played on the audience, like Hans' "who said we were terrorists?" is an "oh shit!" moment that YOU, the audience, are in on well before ANYONE else in the movie, it's an empowering revelation

Saw (and most of its follow-ups) keep you in the dark on the big shocking reveal so Jigsaw maintains power over you, he's not a teleporting slasher, he doesn't have a secret OTHER Jigsaw like Ghostface, he's just that fucking good and people ate it up with a spoon

so basically EVERY movie where the twist is "he wanted to be caught!" is a Jigsaw descendant like all these ones

and this is also why V in V for Vendetta becomes this hyper-planner dude who has these elaborate stunt tricks like dressing up his hostages like him and appearing in costume for Finch to meet when there's no way he could've known he'd be there

and by the time you reach the 2010s it's just a trend you have to accept of the villain going into a cell so they can monologue about how actually this was my plan all along

the kind of interesting lingering thread of this idea, however, is that I think it also helped promote the "villain is actually right" ideology we've grown fat upon, because it's A LOT easier to root for the guy who's smarter than everyone than it is the guy who's just better

like cards on the table nobody is rooting for Ras Al Ghul because his victory is presumed, he has a ninja army and a deadly microwave and super fear toxin, rooting for him is like rooting for the New England Patriots or John Cena, victory is assured before match play starts

but people absolutely were on board rooting for Joker in Dark Knight because all he had (as we perceived it) was his wits, no billion dollar company or Wayne fortune or high tech gadgets, just his grim genius foresight and hey, you're a pretty smart guy too right?

the same way Jigsaw slowly migrated from fucked up crazy man to almost a kind of folk hero, in Saw 2 he kills a kid, in Saw 5 & 6 he's going after the people who did Grenfell Tower and Health insurance executives who deny coverage

people want to root for the villain because he seems so smart and that evolves into wanting to root for the villain because it makes you feel smarter than the movie

you aren't one of those dullards who just blindly accepts Professor X's "don't murder people" ideology like sheep, you're a bold iconoclast who watches X-Men and roots...for Magneto! and this eventually became a sought after prize

sigh, it's not just about the villain being "right" or even having a kernel of a good point because a bunch of bad guys have that and no one actually LIKES them, Thanos was hailed as having a point and nobody really LIKED him like they did Joker or Kilmonger

the rightness has to go hand-in-hand with being the underdog, victory through ingenuity and cleverness like Vulture & Kilmonger have this because they're both PERCEIVED as men stepped on by corporations & countries reasoning their way into revenge

Magneto without the origin as a holocaust survivor and position of opposition to Charles isn't as interesting because then he's just a living God preaching about how much better he is than everyone else