Do I Still Love Movies? – Part II: The Hero’s Journey

As soon as I decided to begin the long journey of once again appreciating film as an art, I immediately knew where to begin. The Monomyth, or Hero’s Journey, is the basis for all stories. While some argue its validity, it cannot be denied that many stories follow this basic pattern. Characters from Hercules to Moses to Luke Skywalker have all followed this structure with great success.

There are 17 stages to this structure, but not all of them need to be used in every story. Most stories will have the basic three-part structure of the Separation (which is the birth or rise of the hero and the call to action), the Initiation (this is the meat of the story where the hero faces his trials), and the Return (the hero is now seen in a new light after overcoming his trials).

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What made me most intrigued about reviewing this story structure was the idea of reading The Epic of Gilgamesh, not to be confused with The Epic of Gargamel which would tell the back story of the Smurfs’ sworn enemy. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest story ever recorded. While stories of the gods and heroes had been told for generations, this was the first work of fiction that we have record of being chiseled onto a tablet.

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Even if you are not familiar with the story or haven’t read it yourself, I’m sure that you can guess how the story goes. Gilgamesh is the tyrannical half-god ruler of Uruk. His subjects pray to the gods on a regular basis for relief from their king, and eventually the gods respond by creating Enkidu, who is Gilgamesh’s equal in strength, in the hopes of destroying him. However, after just one fight they become the best of friends and Gilgamesh’s Earthly mother even adopts Enkidu and they become brothers. The two go on many adventures together until the gods strike Enkidu with an illness and he dies. Gilgamesh is heartbroken and fears for his own mortality, so he journeys to find the secret to eternal life. He meets many people along the way including an immortal that tells him how he survived the Great Flood. Eventually he makes it all the way to the Underworld where he learns that he cannot obtain eternal life. “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.” Gilgamesh returns as the king of Uruk after this journey and shares his stories. He is all the better for his experiences and though he does not attain eternal life, he does live on in the stories that are still told about him to this day. The Epic of Gilgamesh has influenced many stories from the tales of The Garden of Eden and Noah’s Flood in the Bible to The Odyssey and even many comic books. Wolverine has had many arcs that follow similar stories to that of Gilgamesh.

Studying the Hero’s Journey also provided me the opportunity to watch Pathfinder again. People really didn’t like this movie when it came out. I saw it in the theatre the same week that I first studied the Hero’s Journey and actually enjoyed it. It only has an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.4 on IMDb, and I will admit it isn’t the greatest movie ever made. However, it does follow the Monomyth almost perfectly. I’m pretty sure that while they were writing the screenplay they just had a copy of the Monomyth next to them to make sure that they hit everything. I was able to pick out 14 of the 17 stages while watching the movie, which is well above average.

The movie opens with a Native American tribe taking to an abandoned young Viking who refused to murder a defenseless woman and child. The tribe raises him as one of their own and 15 years later a new group of Vikings come to destroy all of the local tribes and take over the land as their own home. After the tribe is completely slaughtered (except for the hero who was hunting at the time), he goes to the neighboring tribe to warn them and proceeds to kill the Vikings one by one with a series of Home Alone type traps. The Vikings are interchangeable and rarely speak, basically reminiscent of Orcs from The Lord of the Rings.

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The only standout amongst the Vikings is their ruler played by Clancy Brown, who almost steals the show from the hero played by Karl Urban. I’m really glad that Urban was able to break away from roles like this one and The Lord of the Rings with great turns in Star Trek and Dredd. I really liked the short-lived television series Almost Human that he did, too. I also have to give some credit to director Marcus Nispel. This was only his second feature, the first being the better than expected Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. There was a lot of gore in the action sequences and you can tell that he used a lot of what he’d learned on Chainsaw in this film. Almost all of the effects were practical and it really helped the film a lot.

I would definitely recommend looking over the Monomyth if you are at all interested in story structure. It is kind of fascinating to break down movies into their plot points and see just how similar some of them are. If you’re further intrigued, check out The Epic of Gilgamesh and Pathfinder. Having this in mind might make the movie more enjoyable for you.

Next time I’m going to watch Adaptation, which is the movie that originally changed the way that I saw films from entertainment to art.

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