Lyle Tiberius Rourke

Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke is the main antagonist of Disney's 2001 animated feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Prior to the main events of the film, he was the Commander of a previous mission to Iceland where he assisted Milo Thatch's grandfather, Thaddeus, in locating the Shepherd's Journal.

Background
Lyle T. Rourke was born in 1860 and learned the ways of military life at an early age while with father, a cavalry officer named Lt. Col. Jackson. In 1864 his father was killed in battle in during the Civil War. After repeated expulsions from boarding school for fighting, Rourke resolved to follow in his father's footsteps and joined the military at age fifteen. There, he exhibited a remarkable talent for leadership, owing to his analytical mind, charisma, and refusal to acknowledge the white flag surrender. He married in June 1887, but his wife left him after only four months.

He held numerous expeditions during his career, most notably leading the Whitmore Expedition to Atlantis.

Development
As has been the case in their previous films, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise wanted the film's villain not to be the usual mustache-twirling bad guy. They wanted the character to have complexity by not making him inherently evil, but rather greedy. The idea being that they wanted a three-dimensional character as opposed to a two-dimensional villain.

The supervising animator of Rourke was Michael Surrey. At first, Mike was excited at animating the character because villains are generally the most desired characters for animators as they are generally allowed to do whatever they pleased. Mike then realized that it was not going to be like that early on as Rourke was not the typical type of villain. It was not until the climatic battle in the volcano that Mike was able to really animate the villainous scenes he had been hoping to do.

James Garner provided the voice of Rourke. While Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Davenport, and Kurt Russell were among those also considered for the role, Garner was chosen for his extensive acting background in action films, westerns, and war movies, making his voicing a character like Rourke fit him like a glove. Garner was noted for having fun doing the role and was impressed with Trousdale and Wise's ability to direct what he describes as an ensemble piece.

Personality
Rourke is seemingly composed, pragmatic, and a reasonable figure of authority. In truth, he was scheming and violent, having no qualms against harming or threatening others to get what he wanted.

According to Rourke, he also has quite a bit of control over his temper, as he tells Milo and congratulates Milo for setting it off.

Physical appearance
He bears resemblance to Bill Sykes, only with a more muscular built, and more of the Military Experience muscle as seen later in the film.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire
"I love it when I win."

- Lyle Tiberius Rourke

Rourke leads the expedition to find the Shepherd's Journal in Iceland with Milo's grandfather Thaddeus Thatch. When Thatch is not looking, Rourke rips out a page concerning a giant crystal which he later uses to convince virtually everyone else on the forthcoming expedition to Atlantis to retrieve it and sell it on the black market for a hefty sum.

As commanding officer of the expedition, he is primarily responsible for making the decisions that will ensure the mission's success as well as the survival of his crew. This includes the belief of there being acceptable losses in his attempt to defend the Ulysses from an attacking Leviathan before ordering all hands to abandon ship.

He has little contact with others outside of his directing orders, preferring to stand apart. When the expedition is dropped into a cavern while escaping the attack of fireflies, he recognizes a possible exit route through the top of the volcano they are in. With the discovery of Atlantis being alive and thriving, Rourke maintains to a hesitant Helga Sinclair that their primary objective remains as planned.

After attempting to learn from the Atlanteans where the crystal might be, he turns to Milo Thatch to decipher the stolen page, but not before Milo discovers Rourke's treachery when the young cryptographer sees his former allies armed with guns. As a result, Milo refuses to play along with him, and Rourke, in turn, becomes more forceful and has a gun pointed at Princess Kida He then has the doors to the king's chambers blown open and demands King Kashekim Nedakh explain the riddle that reveals the location of the crystal, going so far as to strike the already dying king in front of a horrified crew. Sitting on the throne and threatening to execute the king, Rourke manages to figure out the riddle on his own and proceeds to descend into the chamber with Helga dragging Milo and Kida along.

While Milo and Rourke argue over how the crystal is to be retrieved, Kida is called upon by the Heart of Atlantis and is bonded with it. Rourke then has Kida sealed up in a container and prepares to leave. Milo pleads that their actions will kill the Atlanteans, but Rourke does not care and decks him. Rourke punches Milo in the face and then breaks his picture with his foot. However, he ends up losing all of the key members of the expedition, but Helga, of when they develop a conscience. Rourke has the bridge destroyed to prevent them from following in an attempt to stop him.

Rourke has the top of the volcano blown open and has a hot air balloon ascending with the container when Milo and the others arrive in flying stone fish vehicles. During the chaos, Milo crashes his stone fish into one of the balloons, causing it to descend. With all of the extra weight having already been thrown off, Rourke tosses Helga off in an act of self-preservation. However, a dying Helga gets back by destroying the main balloon with a flare gun.

Enraged, Rourke begins to take his aggression out on Milo and uses an axe. He hits a glass cover of the container, with glass shards becoming embedded with the Heart of Atlantis. As Rourke holds Milo up for a killing blow, Milo cuts him with one of the shards and he begins to transform into crystal form. Rourke still attacks, but a chance situation causes him to be hoisted into the still moving propellers, destroying him for good.

When Milo's friends eventually return to the surface, they reenact a false story with Preston regarding the fates of the other crew members after explaining the truth of the situation to him earlier. When Preston "asked" about Rourke, Dr. Sweet responded that the crooked captain suffered a nervous breakdown and that he "shattered to pieces", while Cookie added that he was "transmogrified" before immediately restating his answer to simply "missing".

House of Mouse
Rourke appears briefly in "Donald Wants to Fly", watching Kida fly above his head in quiet awe.

Trivia

 * Rourke's fight with Milo was similar to the fight between Gaston and the Beast, even having Rourke trying to smash an axe against him. Coincidentally, both Beauty and the Beast and Atlantis: The Lost Empire were created by the same writers.
 * Rourke's treachery and eventual betrayal was actually foreshadowed early in the film during Milo's conversation with Whitmore: When Whitmore shows Milo the photographs of all of the explorers he will be traveling to Atlantis with, Rourke's photograph shows only half his face. Also, along with their photos are small sheets of paper showing the explorer's profiles and biographies. Since we do not see the other half of Rourke's face, we do not see his biography at all. Also, shortly before Ulysses was submerging, Whitmore is seen crossing his fingers on his back, implying that he did not take full trust on the expedition led by Rourke.
 * Also, when the remaining crew members are forced to evacuate the submarine, Rourke is the first to enter the escape pods. In real life, the captain is always the last crew member to evacuate a sinking ship (hence the phrase "go down with the ship"), so this is often considered disrespectful to maritime culture.
 * Yet another clue to Rourke's betrayal includes some of his early lines in the film, especially those containing either the words "rich" and/or "money", with the most obvious example of this being his line, "This will be an enriching for all of us."
 * After Rourke abandons all of his teammates except for Helga along with Milo and the other Atlanteans in Atlantis, as he and Helga are leaving Atlantis with the crystallized Kida, he tells himself, "P.T. Barnum was right." P.T. Barnum was a famous American showman who coined the phrase, "there's a sucker born every minute." But historically, he never did as Barnum was not the kind to disparage his customers.
 * Rourke's middle name, Tiberius, could be a possible reference to Captain James Tiberius Kirk from the show Star Trek, of which Kashekim Nedakh's voice actor Leonard Nimoy played Spock.
 * Rourke has at least 90 henchmen (including himself and Helga), given the fact that the Ulysses was supposed to have 200 crew members at the start of the expedition, and that half (100) of said crew were all killed in the Leviathan attack, and that only seven crew members (Milo, Vinny, Molière, Audrey, Dr. Sweet, Mrs. Packard, and Cookie) actually survive at the end.
 * For a while, Rourke (and to a much lesser extent, Helga), was the most marketed character from the film following  Atlantis'  release, and was therefore officially the most popular character from that film. However, Rourke's popularity may only be due to the fact that he is the villain.
 * At one point, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Davenport, and Kurt Russell were originally going off for the voice role of Rourke, but the role was already given to James Garner. However, Tim Curry, who was originally going to voice King Nedakh before he was voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy instead, may arguably be the current voice of Rourke.
 * On one of the earlier versions of the script, during the final battle, when Rourke uses the fire axe in order to kill Milo and accidentally breaks the glass window from the steel container where Kida is, instead of trying to swing the axe once more against him, Rourke would have pulled out a revolver and try to shoot Milo on the head, upon which Milo would have shoved the piece of the crystallized glass in the revolver's barrel, making the firearm explode and backfire. The shards created by the explosion would have hit Rourke in the eyes, rendering him blind and prompting him to fall from the balloon to his death. The writers decided to rewrite the scene, as they thought it was too similar to Helga's death.
 * Rourke is the sixth male Disney Princess villain, after Gaston, Jafar, Governor Ratcliffe, Shan Yu, and Clayton, but before Doctor Facilier, Mor'du, and Hans.
 * Rourke is the second Disney Villain to have one part of a book that the hero has, and the part the villain have has something important and use it for their own nefarious plans, Rourke has a page of the Shepherd's Journal from Milo Thatch which contains information about the Heart of Atlantis, the first is The Bookman from Bedknobs and Broomsticks has the part of The Spells of Astoroth from Miss Eglantine Price for the Substitutiary Locomotion spell and the third is Mittington Random in the Phineas and Ferb episode, Klimpaloon having the second journal of the Klimpaloon from Phineas and Ferb which contains the map to Klimpaloon.
 * Like Wilhelmina Packard, Milo Thatch, and Kida, Rourke has his only appearance in House of Mouse. Strangely enough, he, for some reason, does not appear in the show's tie-in film Mickey's House of Villains, not even as a cameo, and is therefore the only Disney villain featured in that show that doesn't appear in that film at all.

Gallery
Lyle Tiberius Rourke