Braveheart-mythical

The movie starts out with men wearing rags, looking on one hand like Native Americans and on the other hand like George of the Jungle. The men fight on horses that seem very much like an olden day war. Almost right away there’s a love plot to catch the attention of the audience. Once the woman of his dreams dies, William Wallace {Mel Gibson} takes charge of the men who did this to his lover, the English. When the war between Wallace’s side, the Scottish, and The English commence, one will notice a myth straight away as Wallace is constantly fighting for the entire Scottish side. It seems almost as if he’s a one-man team beating the English all on his own. This is of course quite mythical. In the movie, First Blood Part 2, Davidson and Lytle bring up a similar case where Rambo locates an MIA prison camp trying to rescue American prisoners. Everyone thinks he will fail because he’s all alone but “Needless to say Rambo manages to fight off entire detachments of Vietnamese and their Russian allies, rescuing the American prisoners and piloting them safely home. {423}” From these two examples one can see how mythical a scene like this could really be.
On the other side we see Gibson in an authentic light when we hangs on to the handkerchief of his lover, which helps him get through the war. It gives him strength to give a pep talk to his fellow soldiers and keep them going. However on the other hand one might look at the actual battle scenes and notice that the Scottish have no armor, all they have is rakes and sticks to fight while the English have Armor, and real weaponry. Davidson and Lytle point out that just as Gibson and soldiers in Braveheart lack everything essential for war, making this an evidential myth, “Cimino went to extreme lengths shooting these sequences, not so much to re-create historical reality as to obtain the proper “look” for this myth. And because myth deals with expectation rather then reality, Cimino obliged. {417} Myths keep an audience more entertained because they are films where the audience expects something to happen and it usually does. This gives satisfaction to the audience and at the same time, a successful movie.