Every movie needs a villain, and one of the most despicable and loathsome bad guys of all is a traitor. This is the nefarious character that pretends to be on the hero's side but has their own selfish plan hidden underneath their friendly guise.Sometimes the traitor hides so well they even fool the viewer, but other times the person working for the other side is painfully obvious. How did the main characters not see it coming? The simple and most obvious answer is because the movie needs to happen.
8 Carter Burke - Aliens (1996)
We'll kill all the aliens, he totally promises, even though the company we work for has already made it clear they would really like to have a specimen. This is the same company that sent Ripley and her friends into space in the first movie, right? How can anyone think that this is legit?
Carter Burke is a simpering little weasel right from the first second he's introduced, a hateful stereotype of an overstuffed pencil pusher in love with the sound of his own voice. That makes it all the more satisfying when the aliens rip him apart.
7 Dr. Yue - Dune (2021)
The security forces of the Atreides Family overlook Dr. Yue as a possible mole because of something they refer to as "imperial conditioning." That means something important to them, but nothing to the viewer, who knows immediately who the spy is just from his cagey behavior.
Everything Yue does screams guilt, and even the way his character moves, keeping to himself and speaking covertly to Paul, seems to betray a craven and weak character. The David Lynch movie or the original book could go on this list as references since the character is pretty much the same in every version.
6 Edmund - The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe (2005)
All it took was a few pieces of cheap candy to turn Edmund, and nobody was surprised when he slunk away in secret from the Beaver's damn in order to betray them to the White Witch. Edmund is set up as a start as the brat of the family, and even C.S. Lewis deemed it so in the literature.
This isn't one of those times when the writers try to hide the traitor and fail, or simply skip over an explanation out of laziness. Edmund is portrayed as a turncoat on purpose to introduce themes like forgiveness and redemption into the story.
5 Cypher - The Matrix (1999)
The women in the crowd might have noticed Cypher before the men, but he's obvious to pretty much everyone eventually, even before he appears with Agent Smith in the Matrix eating steak. Why didn't Morpheus notice that one of his Operators, a person who has one of the most sensitive jobs on the ship, was starting to crack?
Cypher has the advantage of being one of the more sympathetic traitors in the movie world. The sensual experiences that humanity had lost in this dystopia seemed to leave some kind of permanent, emotional scar on humanity as a whole, something this character sadly embodies.
4 Jim Phelps - Mission Impossible (1996)
One of the first scenes with Ethan shows him flirting with fellow agent Claire as he teases her about the bad coffee, and boss agent Jim cuts in to remind Ethan that's his wife he's talking about. Once Ethan is sitting next to an aquarium in a fancy restaurant with Kittrich, and the mole-hunt plan is revealed, Ethan might be in the dark about who the traitor is but the viewer isn't.
The movie drops a few strong hints to the viewer as the film progresses in case they happen to miss this obvious and even funny bit of dialogue. It proves that all decisions are personal in the end.
3 Dennis Nedry - Jurassic Park (1993)
How did someone as smart as Dr. John Hammond trust Dennis Nedry with anything, let alone high-value industrial and commercial secrets? Granted, this was the 1990s, a time when anyone with even a smidge of programming knowledge was held in higher regard than their true skills deserved, but it makes his status as a traitor painfully obvious.
This character is open about his money problems and his intention to solve them using any means necessary in earlier scenes while he was arguing with Hammond. There's a lot of money in selling patents, inventions, and formulas, so it doesn't surprise anyone when Ned decides to sell dinosaur embryos to a competing genetic-engineering company.
2 Lettice Howard - Elizabeth (1998)
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The way this story is written, the viewer is intended to understand who the traitor is but her ultimate target misses her completely. It's strongly hinted that Walsingham, the chief of Queen Elizabeth's espionage network, has some kind of connection with her from the very beginning.
It's unclear exactly what or how many secrets Lettice was able to betray during her time acting as a double agent, sending information to Walsingham while pretending to be the loyal consort of the Duke of Norfolk. He's the only one at all shocked when he realizes the signed document he trusted his lover with is going to cost him his head because everyone else saw it coming.
1 Walter Donovan – Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989)
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Elsa could go on this list as well, but she played the innocent fairly well and wasn't as obvious as the clean-cut but slimy and sneering Donovan. It's possible that Indiana's judgment was skewed by Walter's financial support of the museum, but the viewer knows all that stuff is tax-deductible and isn't fooled by his tux or his charm.
Walter Donovan has another layer of evil on him because he's an American who betrayed his own country to work for the Nazis. Henry Jones Sr. declares that he never suspected that Donovan would have gone so far as to "sell your country and your soul to the slime of humanity" but the viewer has known ever since a bunch of thugs grabbed Indy outside of his office.