By Chelsea Callahan
Clash of the Titans, Wrath of the Titans, 300, Immortals, King Arthur, Troy, Alexander
Over the past few years a string of movies has been produced about heroes, not just super heroes like the Avengers but legendary heroes. The movies above are only a select few of those films. With each of them though there is the legend.
Stories have always had power. Every name meant something. Your name and your history was your greatest currency. Having your name remembered made you immortal.
Brad Pitt’s character Achilles, in Troy, said “Myrmidons! My brothers of the sword! I would rather fight beside you than any army of thousands! Let no man forget how menacing we are, we are lions! Do you know what’s waiting beyond that beach? Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”
His words in the movie are what we hope that our hero’s of the past actually felt. We want to believe that they too wished to be remembered. As much as we want them to have done their great deeds out of the desire to save the world, these words remind us they were human too. Theseus from Immortals, played by Henry Cavill said “Deeds are eternal not the flesh.”
“Each time a story is retold it changes. This is due to certain natural but curious tendencies of the mind – the tendency, for instance, to remember things that make a strong impression and to forget things that don’t impress us very strongly. There is also a tendency to exaggerate or minimize, to glorify or ennoble, to idealize or vilify. Beyond that, there’s a natural, unconscious tendency to analyze things, to take them apart and put them back together in different combinations and a natural tendency to simplify or edit. The tendency to conserve energy in nature is very strong in everything we do, including how we organize and store our thoughts and memories. These are all things we’re very aware of.” Said James Bonnet.
Bonnet is reminding us that we tell these stories because they have a moral, and a lesson buried inside them. After all legends are the tales of deeds we wish we had the courage to do, and are the pieces of history that inspire us to fight for glory. Readers and viewers alike, all wish to be remembered. In the Immortals movie Theseus said“My death will make me a legend, my deeds will go down in history.” If in fact that thought crossed the real Theseus’ mind then he was right.
No one wants to be forgotten; perhaps that’s why the population is so enthralled by these stories even today. They remind of us that our lives our fleeting and we only have so much time to make ourselves memorable. Achilles from Troy said “I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
Our life is fleeting, so we must use these stories to find the courage to live it to the fullest.
Sources
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332452/quotes
http://www.writersstore.com/how-the-great-myths-and-legends-were-created
Immortals (movie)
Google Images…I do not own the rights to these photos
“The Legendary Flick” by Chelsea Callahan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
