Advanced Myth Final

Each trimester, I have my students in Advanced Mythology apply what they've learned about archetypes to a movie. They need to explain the hero cycle in the movie--which event correlate to the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, the trials, etc. They also need to choose four male or female archetypes and explain how characters in the movie fit and deviate from the aspects of the archetype.

For a while I use Shrek. Easy. Enjoyable. But now, everyone seems to have seen it too many times. And more importantly,I have grown bored with it. So I switched to Guy Pearce's version of The Time Machine, and I have been showing that for the past year and a half. Now I am sick of that, too. I was surfing amazon and looking for another action/adventure/sci-fi/fantasy movie that I could show, but none of them seem quite right.

I'm considering Minority Report. Though it's rated PG-13, I still think the content is questionable. The same is true for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I'm also thinking about. For a few insane moments, I thought about Van Helsing, but that is so close to an R rating in my opinion, I don't think I would be willing to show it. I think the best contender right now is Pirates of the Caribbean, but I don't know that I want to use something so popular.

I had my mind made up in August that I was going to use The Italian Job, but my wife pointed out to me that it does not contain all of the parts of the hero cycle. And while I don't expect students to find all the parts, I do want the movie to contain the majority of them.

Who knows what I'll use.