The Hero’s journey – A story of the story
The Hero’s Journey is the narrative equivalent of gravity; invisible, inevitable, and always pulling the story forward. Joseph Campbell mapped it out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: an ordinary person is yanked from their comfortable, familiar world and dropped into a crisis that forces them to grow, guided (and occasionally scolded) by a mentor figure. They return changed, a little battered, a little wiser, and now capable of saving the very world they once fled.
It’s a structure that has shaped some of the most enduring stories in cinema. And, curiously, three of the greatest, Alien, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, all use this mythic skeleton, each twisting it to its own genre and temperament.
Alien – The Reluctant Warrior
Ridley Scott’s Alien might be set in the i...