The Hero's Journey is a Red Herring

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, AKA Moseph Monkbell's Monkey's Journey

May 22, 2024

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes | The Movie Database

The snappily titled Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes1 doesn’t so much dip its toes in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as soak its naked ape torso in its warm, salty embrace.2

Featuring a ‘peaceful equilibrium shattered by a shocking event’ setup, a ‘wide-eyed protagonist embarks on an arduous journey of physical and spiritual discovery’ narrative, and a ‘Gandalbledor-Kenobi’ mentor (this time an orangutan!), the film clings unyieldingly to Campbellian archetypes.

The previous Apes trilogy, ending in 2017, was a remarkable feat of blockbuster filmmaking. The “mOnKeYs WiTh GuNs!” veneer operated as a Trojan Horse for a jarringly dour tone, aspirations of thematic depth, a genuinely great character arc for Andy Serkis’ Caesar, and astonishing VFX.

Kingdom jumps forward hundreds of years to reboot the series in Force Awakens style with new locations and characters while retaining the mythology and iconography of its predecessors. Most dangerously, it has to justify its own existence, given the satisfying finality of 2017’s trilogy closer.

Confronted with this tricky to-do list, director Wes Ball deploys a journeyman competence that delivers a bluntly functional, box-ticking picture. Its use of an explicitly Campbellian structure to achieve this is a revealing entry point to broader storytelling trends in modern mainstream filmmaking.

In its unblinking adherence to the Hero’s Journey, Kingdom follows the playbook of some of the most successful films of the past 50 years. There’s a reason that this style of storytelling is so common in franchise openers (think The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hunger Games, Avatar, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, and The Matrix): it’s an unrivalled way of introducing audiences to new fantastical worlds.

These stories typically feature a naive protagonist travelling through an unfamiliar world, guided by a wise mentor figure armed with deep historical understanding. Like us, the protagonist is experiencing this world for the first time, allowing exposition to be delivered organically while the “journey” element ensures both narrative and physical momentum.

For these reasons, a conventional Hero’s Journey structure was a reliable approach for Kingdom, which needed to introduce a radically transformed Earth. This choice also explains the film’s lack of staying power. Movies that successfully execute an explicitly Cambellian structure present richly drawn worlds packed with vivid details (you have likely already thought of the Mos Eisley Cantina in A New Hope). Kingdom’s attempts to allude to a thriving world outside the frame largely fall flat, consisting primarily of some nebulous stuff around apes speaking to eagles by whistling (?!)

It’s no coincidence that Kingdom was penned by Josh Friedman, who also wrote Avatar: The Way of Water. Avatar’s James Cameron and The Matrix’s Wachowskis are among the post-Lucas directors most committed to the classical Hero’s Journey structure. This mode of storytelling leans towards earnestness, even self-seriousness, aiming to connect with audiences on a primordial moral level. It taps into a mythological tradition that, when executed well, evokes a familiar sense of awe and wide-eyed wonder (it’s called the “monomyth” for a reason - it provides root access to universal human experiences and emotions). As George Lucas once said, Star Wars was “a conscious attempt at creating new myths,” aimed at instilling basic morality in kids. “Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’”3

Although Kingdom fails on this front, its attempt to tap into an earnestly mythological approach can be seen in recent blockbusters like Top Gun Maverick, Godzilla Minus One, the first Dune, and The Woman King. These films resist the winking, quipping, postmodern storytelling found in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MonsterVerse, the films of Matthew Vaughan, and any production containing the words “Ryan Reynolds,” a style of film The Ringer podcaster Sean Fennessey collectively labels “wink-action.”

The Hero’s Journey structure deployed in wink-action feels calculated and cynical in a way that classically minded films, even unsuccessful ones like Kingdom, don’t. It’s Campbellian storytelling by default, not design, a templated approach stripped of weight or depth.

This is the version of the Hero’s Journey that hustlebros shill online with titles like “This Simple Yet Timeless Structure Will GUARANTEE Your Screenplay To Be a Success!” This is the type of film that feels focus-grouped and factory-designed to functionally hit your emotional buttons with all the majesty of a scientist injecting ecstasy into a lab rat.

The MCU, at its worst, is guilty of this. While its best films effectively use a Campbellian structure to elevate the material (Tony Stark’s arc in Iron Man) or to surprise the audience (Thanos’ arc in Infinity War), it’s often just another ingredient in McDonald’s filmmaking: a tidy way of templating a recipe that can be prepackaged and sold en masse. When the films do threaten to adopt some emotional or mythological weight, it’s often quickly punctuated by a knowing wink or self-aware quip.

Using the Hero’s Journey as a shortcut isn’t always an exercise in cynicism. In genre pictures, particularly action films, our primal familiarity with this narrative pattern allows us to focus on what we have really come to the cinema to see without getting bogged down in the meat and potatoes storytelling.

Just as the success of the Hero’s Journey in worldbuilding depends on the richness of the world created, its effectiveness in action films hinges on the strength of the set pieces. Take Mad Max: Fury Road, in which Imperator Furiosa’s arc closely follows the Hero’s Journey. The plot is notoriously threadbare, but its brute functionalism is the point, providing a skeleton for director George Miller to flesh out with his future-punk orgy of crow men and guitar flamethrowers. In contrast, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man makes the mistake of leaning heavily on the Campbellian structure while withholding the madcap action for large swathes of the movie, leaving these sections as lukewarm versions of something we’ve seen better done elsewhere.

All the examples discussed have been instances of the Hero’s Journey as an explicit structure - a deliberate choice by filmmakers for specific storytelling purposes. This only covers a tiny fraction of films. Zoom out, squint a little, and the Hero’s Journey can be seen as a ghostlike metastructure emerging organically in stories that appear to be aiming for something else entirely. This implicit form tends to be what people are pointing to when they claim that the Hero’s Journey is the “pattern for all stories.”

Take Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, whose neo-noir form is sprinkled with a healthy dose of erotic thriller elements and a dash of Cronenburgian body horror and then baked at a medium-high temperature in A24’s neon-cool aesthetic. Noirs, with their meandering protagonists and built-in nihilism, often rub against the expectations of the Hero’s Journey, yet Kristen Stewart’s protagonist can be seen as following a Campbellian arc, starting in stasis, embarking on an adventure, facing a moral crisis, and returning transformed.

Although this is technically true, it feels analytically shallow. Far more interesting is the shapeshifting nature of the film’s central romance and its coy flirtation with the American noir tradition. Unlike Kingdom, whose use of the structure reveals plenty about its storytelling style and modern blockbuster identity, applying a Campbellian analysis to Love Lies Bleeding feels like a dead end.

Here, the concept’s nebulosity becomes apparent: any film featuring a catalysing event and character development can be viewed through a Hero’s Journey lens, but unless intentionally baked into the movie’s structure, it feels, to me at least, like one of the most uninteresting angles from which to analyse it.

So, where does all this lead?

Although Kingdom was unsuccessful in storytelling terms, I hope it signals a trend towards more earnest, unapologetic, classically minded blockbusters that don’t offer you a certain type of story with one hand while actively mocking everyone involved for enjoying it with the other.

It’s also a reminder that the "Is everything a hero’s journey?” debate is a red herring. What it ultimately comes down to is intention. The simple fact of whether a film does or doesn’t adopt the Hero’s Journey is uninteresting. What’s far more interesting is why the filmmaker chose to structure their movie as they did.

Happily, that’s a question that no handy online storytelling template will ever be able to answer.

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