Dear Cinemythologists,
On Tuesday, October 6, our unit on Heracles/Hercules comes to its penultimate film. Please do the following.
VIEWING
- Hercules (Brett Ratner, 2014)
Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit. This is the second of two Hercules films from 2014, and the difference is stark in just about every respect. Even as we consider the persistence of 20th-century peplum traditions, let us also think about how this film defines heroism.
ANALYSIS
Rosenblum and Whatley will continue our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.
READING
- Curley, Dan. 2018. “The Hero in a Thousand Pieces: Antiheros in Recent Classical Cinema.” In Augoustakis, Antony and Stacie Raucci, ed. Epic Heroes on Screen, 173–190. University of Edinburgh Press.
- Chiu, Angeline. 2018. “Heroes and Companions in Hercules (2014).” In Augoustakis and Raucci, ed., 60–73.
I know, another reading by me. But see if it can’t help you think through the dynamics of heroism in some of the screen texts we’ve paired together — not only in this unit, but in our Perseus unit, too. Chiu, meanwhile, addresses the Very Millennial Notion of teamwork in today’s viewing.
SEQUENCES
- Davis, Eiger.
Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.
Recommendations should contain the following:
- A brief description of the sequence.
- Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
- A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.
DC
45:21-48:18
This is the scene right after Hercules’ hallucination/dream of his wife and children being eaten by Cerberus. Ergenia walks over to the rest of Hercules’ crew and asks Iolaus for the truth about Hercules and his family in Athens. Autolycus answers recalling each team member’s origin story and tells Ergenia that they are a family, and Hercules has always been there for each one of them. When Ergenia first approached the group, she asked Iolaus to tell her a story about the murder of a wife and her three children. But, when Iolaus began, she interrupted saying, “No myths. I want the truth.” To which Autolycus replied, “No one knows the truth.” This scene is important because it clearly separates myth from the truth. I just thought it was interesting that the film made the decision to have Hercules’ background be ‘fuzzy’ with the details (though we do find out Hercules did not kill his family) because in the other films we have watched so far, those details are the only ones we can rely on knowing.
8:31-11:44, specifically 8:31-9:12 and 10:00-11:44.
I found this scene particularly intriguing because it frames Hercules as a mercenary and not a heroic figure who fights for righteousness. This sets him up as an antihero, because he wants to be paid for his endeavors- not simply do them to save people or to display his worthiness as a demigod. However, he is also shown to be humble, much unlike his fellow mercenaries. His goals do not seem to include a lavish lifestyle filled with riches, women, and opulence. This seems counterintuitive to him being a mercenary, as his goals are now more murky; he seeks money but not for hedonistic reasons. Given that this scene takes place so early in the movie, I think this establishes him as a moral man- one the audience can sympathize with more than the traditional mercenary archetype.