The plotlines (Score 1)

You might want to read Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it Campbell explains how myths and legends from all around the world have certain themes and events recurring.

These themes include for example a phase of the myth/story/whatever when the Hero goes to the Abyss (eg. the bad guys beat him up), but via a divine transformation (eg. dead partner saying Get up! Get UP!) the Hero emerges and goes on to slaughter the enemies and inflict various kinds of revenge upon them. You know, the standard Steven Seagal / Die Hard / whatever action-movie plot.

So... it's classical stuff, real classical. All the great myths, legends, hero epics, world creation stories and such have common elements. Since they're great stories, it's obvious that there becomes a "pattern" of a story which is then followed. Naturally the script writers, authors and so on would like to recreate the great mythical epics so they take influence from there. If they don't, they should. Rewriting something like Gilgamesh or just about any of the great stories to a space-epic cyberpunk screenplay would kick Matrix's ass.

Hell, you could even think of Campbell's book as equivalent of Gamma's Design Patterns for storytellers (script writers, book authors, etc.) all around the world!