Hacker News Reader

Comment by kilgnad | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone name a movie that was really good and really popular that diverged from this model heavily.

By really popular I mean pretty much universally popular. Not niche popular.

One of the reasons models like this feel universal is because they have a lot of wiggle room in how you interpret what they mean.

So some movies fit them very plainly and other movies fit them only after somebody pulls a “well, actually” and makes an unobvious interpretation of who the story was really about, or what they wanted, or where they started, or where they ended.

The easiest starting points to look for the “hard fits” are in any tragedy (which aren’t very popular in the US recently), any movie that’s in the middle of a trilogy, and some absurdist/surrealist comedies that happened to win success on humor or novelty rather than structure.

But someone committed to the universality of this model can always make a case that those movies fit too. It’s just a more strained argument than in some others.

It's kind of funny because we already have a great storytelling model that does fit almost all of these (including lots of the more absurdist stuff), that is in 8-ish points: the 3-act structure!

Act 1 is usually Point 1 - 3; Act 3 is 5 -

You can Map the 3 Act structure to the 8 Points. Act 1: 1-3; Act 2: 4-6; Act 3: 7 - 8.

I think that that's saying that these 8 points are an instance of the 3 act structure but loads of stories match the 3 act structure without matching this.

I think as a whole the mystery genre doesn’t use this model. So, say, Glass Onion right now. There’s a different but similar model for the whodunnit.

There are other movies that play with the model, like The Big Lebowski, in that it skips a lot of the character development on purpose. Things may try to move his world, but The Dude abides.

I agree; was going to provide Glass Onion as an example.

I think also the Horror genre often ignores or subverts the Hero's Journey.

Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).

Harry Potter is not this.

Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.

Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.

Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.

Avatar _is_ this I think! Kind of.

Harry Potter overall starts with a character who has a mortal enemy and he has to overcome obstacles to finally defeat him in the end

It's basically hero's journey

Plenty of movies start out not so much with the protagonist in a zone of comfort wanting something, but being forced into something. E.g. Iron Man 1: that cave was not a zone of comfort. You might argue that this structure applies e.g. to Avengers: Endgame, if you'd call "dealing with half of sentient life obliterated due to your failure to prevent it" a place of comfort. But frankly, I think for most of the MCU, the stories are not due to a comfortable character wanting something more.

So, to answer your question: basically all movies in the most successful franchise ever diverge significantly from this formula. As does any other movie where the antagonist drives the plot significantly.

Pretty much any movie with a larger cast will typically only follow some version of this pattern for one character. For example, in Lord of the Rings, only Frodo fits this trope decently (and even for him, I would argue it fits quite poorly, especially since the "loses something important" step happens at the very end of the story). But Aragorn, Sam, Legolas, Merry and Pippin - their own journeys diverge quite a bit.

Or, look at The Avengers - how does this apply to The Hulk,for example?

Memento

While the end of the movie is the protagonist ends up in the same situation, having changed nothing and it's basically a bad end

Memento [1] is a pretty famous example of a movie which defies basically all structural prescriptions except for the basic flow of tension and resolution innate to all narratives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film)

Fight Club

There Will Be Blood

Great call. I love this film for the ways in which it avoids a lot of the common structures and conventions.

All of Tarantino films?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com