Our epic unit is coming to a close and it has reminded me why I enjoy epics so much. We have viewed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and PowerPoint presentations paralleling other epics. All of the PowerPoints where arranges and presented nicely; however, my favorites where Justine’s Harry Potter parallel, Reece’s Iron Man parallel, and Chris’s Avatar parallel.
I’ll start with Harry Potter. The hero of the series, Harry Potter himself, closely relates to Frodo, hero of Lord of the Rings Justine points out that in both movies the heroes where the only possibilities for the quest they must complete, destroy Voldemort and the ring respectively. The heroes of these two films are both very selfless. They put themselves in danger to protect another on more then one occasion. I like the way Justine paralleled guides from the two movies. Gandolf and Dumbledore are both old and powerful wizards and guide the hero with their great wisdom. I think putting a picture of a mermaid and ent as the background of her supernatural forces slides was an excellent idea and really added to the presentation. I like how she paralleled the Order of the Phoenix with the Fellowship of the Ring. Both organizations where created with the purpose of eradicating evil from their respective worlds. Justine was also one of the few who has a language parallelism. She showed us Harry Potter’s parseltongue, language of the snakes, as well as magical terms and the elves’ and dwarves’ language from Lord of the Rings.
Reece’s presentation of Iron Man grabbed my attention right away with the picture of Tony Stark’s face next to the Iron Man face. I liked Reece’s parallels between Stane and Gollum. Both characters betrayed the hero of the film they where in; for example, Stane had Stark kidnapped, and Gollum tried to steal the ring from Frodo. Both also died horribly in the film; an arc reactor explosion and plummeting into the depths of a volcano. This shows how a characters in a science fiction film can be similar to those in high fantasy film. Although Iron Man didn’t have any true supernatural forces, Reece used the Iron Man suit. It enhances the abilities of Tony Stark, the hero of the film, by alowing him to fly and fire a pulse cannon. Reece also talked about Jarvis, Stark's sarcastic computer AI.
Finally, Chris’s Avatar presentation had amazing pictures to help focus our attention on the parallelism. He did a great parallel of Jake Sully and Frodo Baggins, the heroes of the two films. Chris focused on the bravery and compassion of the two characters. I like how he did a comparison of creatures and races found in each world like the Na’vi and elves. It's amazing how two difrend races from two very difrent worlds can be so simmilar. This can also be aplied to life to show that although people have difrences, we are also very simmiler. Like Justine, Chris did a parallelism of language in his PowerPoint using the Na’vi and elves’ language.
