Crossover Queen recently posted a review of 2014’s Hercules, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the title role. It sounded so good and I was already under the weather (allergies or head cold, I can’t tell which, but argh) that I followed the link that she offered and watched the film. The movie more than delivered on her promises and I enjoyed it very much.
From a writing perspective that might be interesting to future authors, most of what I enjoyed was the skill with which the film’s characters were executed, as well as the set up for the plot and the worldbuilding. This is what I wish to talk about today, as it has been quite some time since I saw characters done this well. Many a filmmaker would have been tempted to go off the rails or shorthand things, maybe even wink at the audience a time or two in the bargain.
None of that happens in 2014’s Hercules. It plays everything – characters, setting, worldbuilding, and plot – absolutely straight. The trailers did not do it justice, as Crossover said; I remember seeing them the year this film came out. All the trailers did was make the film look like some kind of edgy gods vs. monsters film. Yawn, thank you, pass. Far too much of modern Hollywood thinks spectacle sells but that is not why we care about films.
We care about films (and stories in general) because of the characters, and Hercules gets all the characters right. Not “right” in the sense of being letter-perfect translations of the myths (which are varied and don’t always agree on much), but it gets them right based on the types of characters that they are for this film. As an apparently obvious example, take Hercules himself; most adaptations make him a big guy unconscious of his strength but extremely conscious of how his good looks gain him attention….
Okay, that is mostly the Marvel version (give me Thor any day, ugh). But in many an adaptation, Hercules is little more than a musclebound meathead with the finesse of a drunk elephant in a China shop. Very rarely is he a competent war leader with, as is said in the film, “no ambition” beyond his duties and own personal happiness. Said personal happiness was apparently stolen from him by his own hands one night. That infamous murder of his family while he was mad haunts him and leaves him a sober individual.
That’s right, Herc in this film is no meathead. He isn’t even a demi-god but a street orphan who joined the army and whose strength won him attention. But even he knows strength isn’t everything and his skill at managing crowds, encouraging people, and leading are all things he learned through hard work and experience.
Refreshingly, he also doesn’t try to drown his sorrows in his cups or go searching for a place to die. Nor does he try to satiate his dejection with gold. He might be a mercenary but he is a moral mercenary, something the Truly Horrific Bad Guys in the film do not get, because as Crossover says, they are sociopaths. Morality means nothing to them and they think that because Hercules and his crew of mercenaries won’t fight for anything less than the “right price,” that is ALL they look for in a job.
It isn’t – and Herc is the reason why it isn’t.
Now, a big reason why I wanted to see this film was due to Crossover’s description of Tydeus. The horrific story isn’t dwelt on in detail, but it is explained that Tydeus was only a child when disaster fell upon Thebes. The entire city was left dead and Tydeus has been in a feral state ever since due to what he witnessed and what he had to do to survive.
Even today this would be cause for Tydeus to be locked up somewhere so he couldn’t hurt anyone. In the ancient world, where insane asylums didn’t exist and prisons weren’t meant for someone feral, at best Tydeus would have been killed out of hand. (At worst, some sociopath might have made him a “pet.”) Hercules and subsequently the rest of his crew instead took Tydeus in. They feed him, care for him, and give him an outlet for his violence by letting him attack only bad guys.
Tydeus doesn’t talk. He can but he chooses not to do so and – this is the key item the film does not say but which it still makes plain as a pikestaff – he is broken beyond repair. And Tydeus himself knows that.
There is a scene in the film where it is revealed that when he sleeps, Tydeus sleeps chained down like a wild animal or a dog. He has night terrors due to what happened to him in Thebes and he will come out of those nightmares ready to fight. When this happens in the film, he inadvertently terrifies a young child. As Hercules leads the child away, the camera pans back to Tydeus’ face as he whimpers like an animal.
His expression isn’t enraged, full or hatred, or anger. Instead, it is a painful semi-silent lament of the recognition that he can never be normal and never be fully SAFE for anyone to be around. The only reason Hercules and the other mercenaries ARE safe around Tydeus is that they take precautions and are prepared for his night terrors to wake him up like this. They have their own demons and nightmares that make them capable of understanding him even though they cannot fix what was broken within him. This makes a later scene with Tydeus all the more poignant, but I won’t spoil that. I only bring this up as an addendum to Crossover’s point here:
This is a good movie for showing how people who are good at violence, who have dealt with it large parts of their lives, are also responsible and careful with that violence. The people who aren’t, are Bad Guys.
Tydeus knows he is broken. He knows, too, that there is no fixing it and that without Hercules he wouldn’t have had any affection or love from anyone. Although feral in many respects he maintains enough rationality, damaged though it is, to direct his violence at proper targets when he can and to take precautions for when he can’t (it’s never shown who chained him up to sleep, after all, and you can’t exactly unlock your own chain when you’re straining at it lunging at night terrors). Furthermore, Tydeus recognizes that there are people who should not be harmed and he will fight for those people even without Hercules’ express orders.
I will go further into Tydeus’ characterization on my site at some point, but for now let’s move on to the other characters. Atalanta, the Scythian Amazon, was a refreshing take on the trope. She is not a man-hater and doesn’t get a speech in the film about the superiority of women. The princess who comes to hire them early in the film is intercepted by Atalanta who steps between the woman and Hercules, demanding to know what she wants. Hercules must tell her to let the princess pass otherwise Atalanta will defend her leader from the other woman.
This shows that Atalanta is a professional warrior. A disdain for men would get in the way of her job, and why should she talk, when she can simply prove her doubters incorrect with a show of her archery skill? It is, importantly, archery which is her greatest skill. Atalanta doesn’t engage in a fight like a man and try to beat him brawl-style. She’s a woman and she uses those weaknesses as well as her personal strengths to her advantage.
Most neatly of all she sidesteps the “I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR!!!” trope. She doesn’t browbeat the men that she trains, there is no snide sniping about her being better than a man, and she is as fiercely loyal to Hercules as she would be to her own brother. The moment she thinks his honor has been insulted is the moment she is at her most terrifying, as she looks ready to morph into a lioness to tear out the throat of the person that she thinks is slandering Hercules. A very rare find, Atalanta is a character to watch if you want a female warrior proud to be so but confident enough in her own skin that she’s not going to give wild speeches about the Amazons being better than everyone else.
For Iolus, Hercules’ “nephew,” the Athenian storyteller is a good-hearted fellow with a natural talent for creativity. He is good at improvising and can spin a nice yarn – one moment when it looks like their scam might unravel, someone asks him how Hercules could skin an animal with an unbreakable hide. “With unbreakable weapons!” Iolus retorts after a moment’s quick thought, making sure to keep his expression that of someone internally wondering how dumb his questioner is. The following scoff implying the unspoken “Duh!” tacked on to his performance is the icing on the cake.
Iolus’s ability for dreaming and storytelling, however, means his situational awareness is poor. Most of the movie sees Hercules ordering him behind the lines for his own safety, and the comments about his “talking nice” are jabs at this trait of his. As he proves later, it’s not that Iolus cannot fight or kill. It’s that he is – in most circumstances and particularly in the madness of melee combat amid clashing armies – not cut out for it in general. He is a creator, someone who makes things with his words, and leaving him at risk of being killed or losing that ability is why Hercules and the rest of his crew put forth such effort to protect him.
Now Autolycus has a moment in the movie when he makes a decision that feels forced, at least on an initial viewing. A second viewing when you know how amoral he is makes it clear the writers are not forcing this scene and that it makes sense, but you need that second viewing and maybe even a third to really get a handle on him and his thinking for it to make sense. His loyalty to Hercules is pretty strong – at least as strong as the rest of the group’s – even if he is rather amoral. A scene or two that helped to set up for that moment in the movie makes it feel less forced, but I was processing so much in the first viewing that I wasn’t sure if this moment wasn’t a case of “plot armor,” “idiot ball,” an attempt at natural character progression, or if there was a cutscene beforehand which would have set it up better. So that moment felt unnatural the first time, but on a second viewing, it felt perfectly normal for the character.
As I mentioned above, Hercules and his crew are moral mercenaries. Autolycus is the only one presented as amoral, which is why he is irreverent and snarky, making dry and sarcastic comments while throwing knives to take out people sneaking up on his friends. These traits don’t obscure his loyalty to Hercules, who has taken him everywhere, which is why his decision two-thirds of the way into the movie feels forced the first time I watched the film.
(Note, this is a case of where “plot armor” can be annoying but still acceptable. I was annoyed with this apparently forced decision but nonetheless I still thoroughly enjoyed the film that first time I watched it. A second viewing let me catch all the little indicators that set up Autolycus’ moment later on. You do not need to obsess over getting everything right or making something perfectly clear the first time, because someone will always find something wrong, and like me they might come back later and go, “Ah! I missed that before. That’s on me, then.” Just get as much right as you can and do it honestly, and most people will not mind at all.)
When it comes to Amphiarus, the seer in the group, I can’t help but think Ian McShane had a huge amount of fun playing this man. Calm and unruffled, Amphiarus is said to have foreseen his own death, which is why he has no fear in combat. He really doesn’t seem worried when he is in a fight, being almost a cross between Zen and high on weed while still being sane. The sane part is the surprising twist on his character and while it seems to vary from scene to scene, a man who was actually insane wouldn’t make a particularly good grief counselor, which Amphiarus does in the film.
Yet even with that, the film leaves his sanity a bit iffy. Is he a madman, or a sane man pretending to be mad? Does he really have visions or not? The movie leaves those questions unanswered – and that leads me to the next thing this film does without making it seem the least bit hard. It takes for granted that most of the people in the movie actually believe the gods exist, or exist enough that they ought to be honored and not ticked off.
There is no actual magic in this film and the gods do not show up. That being said, however, ambiguity remains in the narrative as to their existence even though they are not seen. Do the gods really interact with men? Is Hercules actually a demi-god? Later in the film, he gets pretty beat up and pulls off truly Herculean feats of strength. He is already an abnormally strong man and adrenaline can allow someone to perform actions which he normally wouldn’t be able accomplish. At that point in the story, the adrenaline had definitely kicked in along with some very understandable righteous rage.
Yet the film still leaves the question open-ended. Perhaps the tales of Hercules’ Labors are exaggerated. Maybe the monsters are “only” human. Does that truly negate the reality of the gods’ existence? For people who regularly blow Hercules’ exploits out of proportion, only Autolycus doesn’t seem to be that religious or to believe in the gods. The rest of the crew, including Hercules, accept Amphiarus’s visions as real since he accurately predict several events in the film. So what gives? Where does the religious piety end and the reality begin?
What I love about this ambiguity and wish for other writers to learn from it is that you really don’t need to have your gods or God show up onscreen for the characters to believe in them or Him. There’s (almost) always a natural explanation for the seemingly divine or godlike things that happen in 2014’s Hercules; someone got hyped up on adrenaline, someone’s on drugs, someone’s really good at making stuff up and oh, look, reality decided to play along. That’s weird, though, since reality tends not to do that type of thing, but it’s hardly impossible, is it?
This is why the Catholic Church turns the sciences upside down and inside out to confirm reports of miracles, incorrupt bodies, days the sun danced, et cetera and so forth. There are many miracles reported in the lives of saints that could be anecdotal and never actually happened, like a miracle I read attributed to St. Frances Cabrini where one of her sisters told her there was no money to buy bread. Mother Cabrini told her to turn her pocket inside out three times, and the third time, there was money in it. Did it really happen? Maybe the younger nun had just missed it. Maybe she was flustered and Mother Cabrini had her turn out her pocket until the coins fell out – anyone who has misplaced their glasses only to find them on top of their head knows this is entirely possible and may even be likely.
Incorrupt bodies? Those are harder to explain, but maybe there is a natural explanation, so the Church investigates until all the science says, “We have no idea how but yes, this person’s body actually is incorrupt.” Same for Eucharistic miracles, and as for the Day the Sun Danced…. Well, when people in Spain, a long distance from Fatima in Portugal, who had no idea there was supposed to be a miracle do actually see it... You can say it was a mass hallucination but you’re going to have to work really hard to make that theory make sense.
Some of the stuff the heroes pull off in this movie? It might not be that hard to explain, but for faith, explanations aren’t necessary. For those who truly doubt or won’t believe, no explanation will convince. Hercules 2014 doesn’t try to explain anything or convince anyone, and the silence leaves open a realm of possibilities.
Finally, and this is also important for writers, the people whom Hercules judges to be good people actually do prove to be good people. I loved the scene where two of the farmers trained to fight by Hercules and his people – whom I was sure would die at some point in the movie – were revealed to be alive and to be good men stuck in a horrible situation not of their own making. It is not just Hercules and his crew who are duped by the Bad Guys but others as well, and that scene seals the deal.
I have left some details out to avoid spoilers, even though – oh, wow, the movie is a decade old. Tempus fugit. The fact is that the movie offers some very good lessons in writing and I wanted to touch on as many as I could from a writer’s perspective in a sort of review format. With this post and Crossover’s review as a base you can watch the movie and learn a lot about good storycraft from it.
I will leave you on that note, readers, and with a link to the DVD here*. I want to watch the movie again but I already know that this film is going on my Christmas list. After letting it slip by me once, I would be foolish to let it go again!
*These are Amazon affiliate links. When you purchase something through them, this author receives a commission from Amazon at no extra charge to you, the buyer.
If you liked this article, friend Caroline Furlong on Facebook or follow her here at www.carolinefurlong.wordpress.com. Her stories have been published in Cirsova’s Summer Special and Unbound III: Goodbye, Earth. She has also had stories published in the Planetary Anthology Series. Another story was released in Cirsova Magazine’s Summer Issue in 2020, and she had a story published in Storyhack Magazine's 7th Issue, Cirsova Magazine’s 2021 Summer Issue, and another may be read over at Ember Journal. Vol. 1* and Vol. 2* of her series – The Guardian Cycle – is available in paperback and ebook as well. So is her first YA novel, Debris, which can be purchased in ebook and paperback here* and here*. Order them today!
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Wow I remember the film hitting theaters but never watched it, figuring it was fairly forgettable. I'll need to change that.
Though from some of your talk, it also sounds like this film could be a gilgamesh movie with minimum adjustments.