I think the greatest element of wish-fulfillment in modern cinema, or stories in general, is that of the villain.  There's a reason simple-minded military buffs remain fixated on world war 2, and probably will for a long time: it had a villain.  Modern civilization's layers obscure relationships.  We have made the last corners of the globe part of our society, and so are offered no 'other' to serve as the bogeyman of our stories.  Instead the forces we feel aligned against us result from the bureaucratic banality of business, the well-meaning ineptitudes of government, or the constrictions of a broken system with no shared vision of the future.  Where everyone is tainted by the thin threads holding our social web together- the multinational that kills for oil in Africa? Does my retirement fund, invest in an indexing fund, own shares in that company?  when our government acts the bully, kills civilians, colonizes, are we not complicit in this? Couldn't we have done more? Could it be me? Might I not care? We ask ourselves.  

We are all guilty.  We are all villains.  To have someone worse, someone explicitly evil.  There would be a compass point to which to align our lives.  There would be a story we would share.  Even if it is a fiction.