There were a few stabs at this kind of villainy on screens this year, but they seemed more cartoonish than awe inspiring. Red Skull, the nemesis of Captain America, was a creature of comic book retro-kitsch, so over the top in his fiendishness that even the movie’s Nazis felt he went a bit too far. And the heavy-metal, supermean Decepticons? They’re toys, so lumbering in their belligerence that any 8-year-old knows better than to take their threats seriously.

In the fantasy and superhero realm, the most chilling and compelling villain of the year was surely Magneto, who in “X-Men: First Class” is more of a proto-villain, a victim of human cruelty with a grudge against the nonmutants of the world rooted in bitter and inarguable experience. Magneto is all the more fascinating by virtue of being played by Michael Fassbender, the hawkishly handsome Irish-German actor whose on-screen identity crises dominated no fewer than four movies in 2011. In addition to Magneto, Fassbender was Rochester in Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre” (a romantic hero who for much of the story wears a plausible guise of gothic menace); the psychiatrist Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method”; and the sex-­addicted protagonist of Steve McQueen’s “Shame.” All of these men are studies in ambivalence, divided against themselves and soliciting, at best, a wary sympathy from the audience.

Magneto, more than the others, also evokes a curious kind of self-reproach, because his well-founded vendetta is, after all, directed against us. (And the worst of us is represented by Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw, the nemesis behind the nemesis.) Magneto’s tragic beginnings give him something in common with Caesar, the chimpanzee who transcends his species-based oppression to become a simian Spartacus in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” There is nothing malevolent about Caesar at all: he is the underdog we are expected to root for, even if as a consequence we are rooting against ourselves. The bad guy in “Planet” — the greedy Big Pharma C.E.O. played by the British actor David Oyelowo — is more of a scapegoat than an agent of evil. His indifference to the well-being of his company’s research subjects is not really what dooms humanity to decimation by virus and enslavement by our primate cousins. The true culprit in that regard is Will Rodman, James Franco’s serious, sensitive scientist, an unwitting Prometheus whose experiments give the apes the genetic boost they need to take over the planet.

Will’s motives, throughout, are irreproachable: he wants to cure his father’s dementia and also to nurture Caesar, his pet and protégé. But the consequences of his good intentions are catastrophic, making “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” one of quite a few movies released in 2011 that might have drawn their tag lines from an old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy, and he is us.