This review comes from two questions I had after watching the movie.
The first is that I think Arthur's "hero's journey" is relatively thin. His ability was bestowed by destiny, communicating with marine creatures, and being selected by the trident were all destined. He only needed to go there and pick up this thing that belonged to him. I couldn't beat my brother before, it seemed that it was just because the weapon was not powerful enough. After getting the Sea King's Trident, Arthur became like a god and easily defeated his brother in front of everyone.
He chooses his own destiny, and he doesn't have much psychological pressure. He doesn't have to make painful choices like Anakin in Star Wars, so he conforms to his "Skywalker" nature and leaves his mother who is still a slave to become a slave. Jedi Knight. She was not driven by her own psychological motivation to sail the seven seas like Moana in Oceania, and finally realized her dream and found a long-forgotten adventure life for her own ethnic group.
Second, on the premise of rationally understanding the existence of the first problem, I still felt a deep emotional involvement in the movie. I like Arthur very much, and I think his mentality and emotional changes in the film are coherent and coherent, very convincing, and in harmony with the main story of the film.
In this way, my rationality and my sensibility are contradicted - since the "story" is not finished, why doesn't my subconscious feel that there is a problem? Am I misunderstanding this "Hero's Journey"?
I started to think, which scene in the movie reminded me, lit up an important link in the emotional logic chain, and let it take shape in my mind?
It's the conversation between Arthur and Mera on the boat.
Arthur said he learned a long time ago not to show his fears and insecurities, but to fight it with violence. But he still does so, but he has been failing.
Later in the movie, we see this sentence fulfilled in his younger brother, a pure-blooded Atlantean, a true child of the previous Aquaman, with the demeanor of a king, skilled in expeditions, and Aum, who has always used force to subdue others, failed. .
Before that, Orm also proved his strength and glory by defeating Arthur, who held his mother's trident, in the arena with his father's trident. However, in the battle and the chase in the arena, I saw the shadow of another person in him - the predecessor of the sea king, his father.
The ancient Greek tragedy writer Aeschylus wrote the Orestes trilogy "Avenger". After Orestes killed his mother to avenge his father Agamemnon, he was killed by the three goddesses of revenge because of his blood. chase. His patron Apollo asked him to go to Athena for judgment, and Athena, as the "child of the father" born directly from Zeus' brain, issued a judgment in favor of Orestes.
Like Athena, Orm is also a "child of the father".
He hated his mother who betrayed him, and he hated his brother, who was of savage terrestrial blood, whom his mother loved.
He duel with his brother, the people of Atlantis watching, just like the ancient Romans in the auditorium in the Colosseum, to his brother, the loser, made a thumbs down gesture representing the death sentence .
He did not agree with the king of the Fisherman's Kingdom's Greek-style "education" in the Alexander era, and he opposed it by persuading him to stab him directly.
He gave Mera bracelets, but put locators in them.
After Mera's true betrayal, his frustrated kingly masculinity drives him furious and makes him realize that he may be in the dark cloud of his father's reincarnation.
Such was his fate as a "father's child", with almost all the qualities his father had left behind, commanding his martial city-state. They "will never forgive".
Arthur, on the other hand, was completely different. He had the happiest time with his loving father and mother. His father loved his mother, but his mother was persecuted and killed by his own kin. Arthur, who was in the rebellious period of his youth, learned from the old counselor that he lost his mother, and he no longer planned to have anything to do with his hometown. If it wasn't for the war that Orm was about to start threatening his only remaining family, and he had to become king to stop it, Arthur might never have gone back.
Perhaps compared to his white-faced and beardless younger brother, Arthur looks much more arrogant, uninhibited, and has become a legend among human beings. But the loneliness under the mighty appearance of "Sea King" (it can be seen that he does not like close contact with others, even if these people are admirers who want to take pictures with him), and the hesitation about his identity in the cracks makes him have to continue to think go down. Even if he is in the romantic and exciting adventures of the prince in distress in the eyes of the audience.
For Arthur, what is the ocean?
It is my mother's hometown, a place where my imagination secretly calls out.
After learning about the "death" of her mother, it is a dark and harsh hometown that makes people do not want to go deeper into it.
Reluctantly to become a king and fight to stop Aum, he was a cold-eyed spectator who rejected and covered himself.
And when he rediscovered his mother after failure and doubt, the ocean was the source of his innate strength. This power was named by an ancient prophecy, passed on to him through his mother.
Therefore, the identity in the gap is no longer a curse, but a blessing to be chosen. Because of "killing" his mother, the suspicion, vigilance and subconscious disgust of the power on this side of the ocean have disappeared, and he has not only become complete, but also full of infinite courage. At this moment, he was born as the new Sea King.
Since he is already the "Sea King", he can naturally get the trident. Therefore, according to this conjecture, "Hero's Journey" itself is not true, and obtaining the trident is not important. It is just a ceremony of recognition, an anchor for the audience to understand the framework and development stage of the story, and to place the intense action scenes. .
Now to sum up, due to commercial needs and structural needs, the big structure of Aquaman's film is the trident of the half-blooded prince of the earth and the sea to find the ancient Aquaman. The story of a hero's journey to defeat his younger brother and become king to prevent his younger brother from launching a war of aggression. But character development and emotional logic aren't traditional "heroes' journeys" at all. It's a story of a father's child vs a mother's child. While the latter story is subtle and unified, cramming it into a particularly commercialized "three-paragraph" structure would obscure the original point, but it wouldn't quite fit the point of the real "Hero's Journey" requirement. So those who could get the latter accepted the story and logic, and had no choice but to ignore its sloppiness in the "Hero's Journey" structure. But I especially take the big structure seriously, and I care about the unity of the story inside and outside (that's right, the Gao Zan brother. I also compare MOS with Neptune, which really makes me sad. Although MOS has a slightly disconnected atmosphere before and after, but The story on the outside and inside is very unified, and the degree of completion is quite high), you will find this disconnect, and then feel that the whole story is a child's play.
But for me, I really liked the story of "Father's Child VS Mother's Child" and was satisfied with the moral premise set by the writers. Aquaman, a character who originally looked very labelled and had a particularly stereotyped stalk, had a place in my heart because of this movie. So I don't think it's worth watching this movie.
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