Film Analysis: Joe Versus The Volcano

Imagine standing in front of two paintings. The first: a picture of what most would consider a normal life. It illustrates a man with a job, a home, everything a person would need. The second picture had a very different depiction. It shows a man standing on a cliff with the whole world in front of him. With no belongings or baggage holding him back; he had everything in front of him to explore. Now what if you were able to choose one of these pictures and that would become your life? Many would choose the first painting. They would choose the safer route where everything they needed would be promised to them. But in the movie Joe Versus the Volcano the focal character Joe Banks lived a normal and very dull lifestyle, but he craved so much
His life was ordinary and he wasn’t exceptional, and he wanted so much more than his mundane routine. The movie begins with a scene of Joe walking into the factory where he works. You can tell very obviously that he hates his job from the tone in the first four minutes. As soon as he gets out of his car Joe finds his foot landed in a puddle of mud, but this didn’t even seem to faze him. His face read, “Of course this happened, this happens every day”, as he proceeded down the muddy path with everyone else. As he walks down the crooked road that leads to the gates the sole of his shoe rips, and after recognizing this he continues to traipse along. He gets pushed into the courtyard and throws his hands in the air and looks to the sky as the song in the background plays: “Another day older and deeper in debt - Saint Peter, don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go - I owe my soul to the company store”. Joe is a classic victim of an “everything bad happens to me” scenario. He hates his job and he always complains that the office was making him sick. Every day was the same monotonousness. He had completely lost his passion for life. He was constantly distracted at work and didn’t really care. Once Joe found out he was sick, quitting his job was the first thing he did. He didn’t want to waste his last bit of life working at the same place he had been at for four and a half years; doing work he claimed he could’ve done in six months. “That’s four years wasted. If i had them now, it would be like gold in my