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To: Antoninus
There's a treasure trove of historical incidents that could be made into epic movies that haven't even been touched yet.

I agree with that. We are on somewhat different tangents here. Yes, there are many worthy individuals and events that have not yet been filmed. When I said that all the great themes have been revisited, I meant by "themes" the great moral arcs involving friends, family, fractured relationships, faith (or lack thereof), commitment, betrayal, courage, honor, sin and redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, etc. Our behavior is highly patterned. We see the same stories repeated over and over among people of different times and places. One of the reasons we endlessly retell such stories, and hunt for new examples, is because they speak to universal truths.

I've been reading a lot of reviews in recent years. One of the recurring criticisms of conventional dramas is, "yes, it's a good story, but it's nothing we haven't seen before." That doesn't mean that the particular individual or event has been filmed before; it usually means that the character arc is familiar territory, as it should be if we are dealing with reasonably normal people under stress. Filmmakers who try to find a new twist are sometimes tempted into bizarrely convoluted plots or to ever more grotesque extremes of (often dysfunctional) behavior in the search for novelty for its own sake.

81 posted on 12/14/2021 1:56:53 PM PST by sphinx
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To: sphinx
When I said that all the great themes have been revisited, I meant by "themes" the great moral arcs involving friends, family, fractured relationships, faith (or lack thereof), commitment, betrayal, courage, honor, sin and redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, etc.

No, I understood exactly what you meant. The way you make those themes fresh is by putting them in different historical contexts. That was my point.
84 posted on 12/14/2021 7:08:19 PM PST by Antoninus (Republicans are all honorable men.)
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