Myth is the oldest story structure still in working order. This tag collects reviews and craft pieces on mythology in film and fiction: the gods, the cycles, and what modern stories take from them.
Character DevelopmentMatt Damon's Loki ended up floating in the Mediterranean. The original ended up chained in a cave until the end of the world. How the trickster of Norse myth turned into Wagner's fire god, Marvel's adopted brother and Kevin Smith's…
AI WritingThe old story says the river at Sligachan on the Isle of Skye gives wisdom. Google's AI Overview says eternal beauty. Kenny Boyle called it out, and he's right about the folklore, but tourists were hearing the beauty version from…
Fantasy FictionEvery Ray Harryhausen film reviewed on this site, ranked. The skeleton duel, the cyclops, the Medusa and the giant creatures that an entire generation of directors grew up wanting to make.
2010sGods of Egypt (2016) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred and forty million dollars of genuine visual ambition attached to a script nobody appears to have argued with. Gerard Butler is the only person on…
2010sMortal is what a superhero origin story looks like when the director comes from Norwegian horror cinema instead of from American comic book adaptation. Both films treat supernatural material as if it were happening in a country that has actual…
AugustLovecraft sold to pulp magazines for a fraction of a cent per word and died at forty-six in poverty, having invented the only genuinely new horror idea of the twentieth century. He was also a racist by the standards of…
Ancient EgyptRichard reads the foundational ancient-astronaut text that launched a genre, and explains why it works so well despite being built on nothing. The real problem isn't the bad logic, it's the insulting premise underneath it all.
Book ReviewsKarl Glogauer travels back to AD 28 to witness the crucifixion, but finds the historical Jesus cannot be what history needs him to be. Moorcock's bleak novella-turned-novel asks what a myth requires, and answers that it requires somebody to fill…
MayStar Wars opened in 1977 and changed movies forever, and I was there on opening day, in a line that wrapped around the block. On May the Fourth, a look back at the film that taught a generation about myth.
AdaptationIn 1954, Kirk Douglas brought Homer's wandering hero to the big screen, putting the Odyssey in front of a mass audience. A look at one of the oldest stories ever told and why it has survived for millennia.
2010sNeil Jordan returns to vampires with a feminist story of a mother and daughter surviving two centuries. The film's mythology is explicitly gendered.
DystopiaThe Underworld films turned the vampire into a leather-clad action hero across five entries. As a whole it is more than the sum of its uneven parts.
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