When you boil it down to its component parts, every single film follows the same plot. Not just the Snyder story beats, the McKee essential elements, or the basic three-act structure. Nope, absolutely every Hollywood movie you watch will follow a story that's existed since the dawn of time: the monomyth or, for the less Joycean in the audience, the Hero's Journey. Described best by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which compared the way stories have been told in mythology and folk tales throughout history, all over the world. It's a "journey" which appears in every single story ever told, from The Bible to Noah (the film with Russell Crowe in, remember that?). Campbell gives the basic set up as "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." That might seem a little different from what happened in Gravity, but the basic bits are all there: everything's normal at the start, they want something, they go after it, they face conflict, they return to the starting point, having changed. The narratives of Gautama Buddha, Moses, and Christ all follow that structure; so do most of the Greek myths; so does Star Wars (Lucas is an avowed Campbell fan). The plot points have even been adapted for screenwriters particularly, in Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Campbell argues that this structure is inherent in humanity's brains from birth, that we're hard-wired to tell stories that way, so we guess it's natural that all these things would appear in movies. It's what we've been doing for millennia so why stop now? Because it's boring. That's why. Whatevs, Campbell, we want something different from Transformers 5!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
