The Heroes Journey in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" Anonymous 9th Grade

With the publication of his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Places, author Joseph Campbell changed the world forever. In the book, Campbell argued that virtually all of the stories told by humans from the beginning of time share something in common – something that he called the heroes journey. Still, Campbell and his work remained mostly unknown, trapped in the confines of academia and read sparsely otherwise. But filmmaker George Lucas changed all of that. After Lucas announced that Campbell’s book helped him craft the phenomenon which later became known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Campbell’s book exploded in popularity.

But Lucas didn’t only use the ideas in Campbell’s book in his Star Wars films. He used the ideas in every film in the Indiana Jones series, which he helped to create along with Steven Spielberg, who would go on to direct all four Indiana Jones films. Among those four is 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was originally meant to be the last film in the Indiana Jones series. In the film, Lucas once again utilizes Campbell’s concept of the Heroes Journey to great effect.

The first step of the Heroes Journey is the “Ordinary World,” which shows Indiana Jones (the hero of the film) in his...