Meeting Point of Ancient and Future: Heroism in Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker Berke Sensekerci College

Serving as the final act of the main Star Wars franchise, the sequel trilogy has so far received mixed reviews and reactions, with the last movie of the trilogy being the most disparaged and criticised one. A majority of the negative reviews (Reklis 2020; Hogan 2020) pointed to the similarity between the sequels and the classic trilogy, accusing the sequel of being relatively unoriginal and unimaginative in terms of its narrative structure and characters. However, these negative reviews, which eagerly assume that George Lucas’s classic trilogy is an original work, miss out the fact that Lucas himself was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (2008) which is a work that attempts to find and formulate a schematic and universal narrative structure that is fundamentally found in various world myths. Campbell called this archetypal narrative template that distinctively echoes in the heroic tales of various cultures “monomyth,” where a hero of a narrative is called to a perilous and challenging duty and reluctantly leaves his/her ordinary world and steps in a supernatural realm where he/she overcomes a variety of challenges and enemies under the guidance of a mentor.

This “monomyth,” or otherwise...