The Indiana Jones Franchise (Steven Spielberg/James Mangold, 1981-2023)

[swo17]

Oh my god, what if Indy

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goes back in time and kills Baby Hitler?

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That would be boring. He should kill Baby Putin

[Starman000]

These are some of my favorite movies of all time. Particularly the first and third movies. The acting, directing, storyline, special effects, everything was top notch in these films and I don't know of any action adventure movies in this style that have come close to matching them.
ISpecial thanks to DarkImbecile for setting me up with the digitals for the first 2 films so that I can watch them again!

[ntnon]

Oh my god, what if Indy

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goes back in time and kills Baby Hitler?

Where he inevitably..

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..meets Deadpool and gets shoehorned into the MCU by proxy..

Which could lead to..

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Starlord - not actor Chris Pratt - taking up his whip & hat to better honour his heroic sacrifice and-

[captveg]

Apparently there have been rumours that after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tackled aliens, this one is going to touch on another perhaps divisive pulpy sci-fi (rather than pulpy religious mythology) theme of:

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time travel, with 1960s Indy returning to World War Two - as if it was some kind of inescapable nexus for him - presumably using the titular Dial of Destiny

with some commenters already being upset by the idea that the film may be (major potential spoiler if it turns out to be true)

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potentially resetting the timeline for the younger generation to take on the mantle by doing a Force Awakens-style sacrifice

I've heard a slightly different take on this, wherein:

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the Dial of Destiny allows some Nazi's into the 1960s. Perhaps it's both - Indy goes back to WW2, then inadvertently allows some key Nazi villains (Mikkelsen in particular) to infiltrate his present day late 60s.

[Penti Mento]

I've heard a slightly different take on this, wherein:

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the Dial of Destiny allows some Nazi's into the 1960s. Perhaps it's both - Indy goes back to WW2, then inadvertently allows some key Nazi villains (Mikkelsen in particular) to infiltrate his present day late 60s.

This whole aspect of the story is absurd and convoluted, if true. Why not just have Jones

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somewhere in South America in the 1960s, searching for artifacts, and he encounters Nazis that fled Europe?

If they're gonna emulate the pulps, I'd rather see something more or less plausible than fantastical at this point, maybe have him pulling up bricks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the 500, or maybe he could take a side trip in 1945 to Tinian Island to hitch a ride on the USS Indianapolis and have him fight off sharks, if they must include

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time travel

why not toss him in the slaughterhouse with Kurt Vonnegut and send him on a truly magical journey into the post-war psyche, whatever, who cares, this series is toast

[therewillbeblus]

Indy 5 trailer

The blending of the John Williams theme and "Sympathy for the Devil" had me laughing out loud, especially during the awkward 'hoo's. I don't think that was the intended effect...

[Finch]

Ford is too old for this shit. They already waited too long between Last Crusade and Crystal Skull. But who knows, maybe it'll clear the low bar of being less tedious than the previous two films.

[therewillbeblus]

Ford is a classic example of the “you’re only as old as you feel” saying - he’s still sharp and funny and game for anything. His age is the least problematic thing about this movie. I am imagining him watching this preview and privately roasting whoever cut the trailer music together. Seems like something he would do

[beamish14]

Ford is too old for this shit.

You can tell in Kingdom (still Spielberg’s worst film by a significant margin) that the severe injury he sustained during Temple of Doom makes it hard for him to perform certain physical tasks. Hell, Ford got injured AGAIN while filming this one

[Finch]

I really don't mean to sound ageist but for the same reason I'm glad they haven't done another Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver in it. Weaver is 73 and Ford 80? The older you get, the harder it's going to be to meet the physical demands of roles like these.

[Mr Sausage]

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a masterpiece of action cinema, easily Spielberg's second best film...but I don't love any of the sequels. Temple of Doom has some fun Gunga Din style atmosphere and a few astonishing action scenes, but is otherwise stuffed with cringy bullshit. Last Crusade is bland and forgettable with one good comedic performance from Connery. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I barely remember. So even if the new one were another Spielberg entry, I wouldn't be optimistic; but there would be at least a chance of genius, however remote. But I feel I know what to expect with Mangold. He's made one genuinely excellent movie, Logan, but has spent the rest of his career making watchable films somewhere between decent and forgettable, more often the latter. I'm expecting the same here--something along the lines of The Wolverine in its unremarkable competence and anonymous blockbuster aesthetics.

[Aspect]

Agree on Mangold, but disagree on Temple of Doom, which has some of Spielberg’s most creatively staged action sequences. Once Mangold was announced, I sadly lost all interest in this one. He’s a decent dramatic director, but has shown no flair for clever action and comedy, let alone inventive camerawork and staging. No way this thing has the enthusiastic whiz, bang and zip that Spielberg brings on even a bad day.

Plus, the digital sheen and obvious green screen throughout the two trailers we’ve seen so far look absolutely terrible. The grit and grime of the textures in those early films made the fantastic more real, and the actual physical stunts were breathtaking. These days, Hollywood movies look as unreal as the recycled dreams that inspired them.

[therewillbeblus]

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I barely remember.

I revisited all the films recently. Raiders is still the perfect adventure movie, Temple of Doom is still among the most fun B-movies - a deeply-flawed film I could never defend against its haters, but one that’s ultimately a blast given all the eye-rolling regressive elements compared to what came before. The relentless rollercoaster of setpieces making up its second half (including the most thrilling use of a rollercoaster) is pure uncut entertainment shot into the vein. Last Crusade starts off okay but just becomes boring and sustains that droning state, petering out for like ninety minutes (I hate the abstract, reductive adjective of “boring” in discourse, but it’s true here - and somewhat appropriate as an indicator of surprise since Spielberg’s style is economical and stimulating; not always good but rarely uninvolving).

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a good movie either, but it’s not boring. It’s full of missteps, missed opportunities, poor ideas, attempts that fall flat… but it’s weird and somewhat engaging (even if sometimes you’re aware you’re being engaged around polished trash) and there are at least a few great action setpieces that really work like the jungle car chase fight. I prefer it to Last Crusade, if only because it tries to something that’s not completely safe and has the courage to swing with its efforts.

But I feel I know what to expect with Mangold. He's made one genuinely excellent movie, Logan, but has spent the rest of his career making watchable films somewhere between decent and forgettable, more often the latter.

Hot Take: 3:10 to Yuma is one of the greatest remakes ever (partially due to the spread in quality, the original being a rather lame ‘classic’), and one of the rare great revisionist westerns of the millennium. I think he has the potential to craft strong action scenes and potentially bring some grit to the table.

[feihong]

I thought 3:10 to Yuma and Logan were pretty good pictures. Identity is also a batsh*t bizarre movie in its whole conception, in a way that was very entertaining. I suppose Mangold got the job because he made Logan a gritty action movie about a grizzled old man, and people liked it (unlike the weird Cry Macho movie Eastwood did), but I think Mangold can do this picture as well or as poorly as Spielberg at this point. Can a 5th Indiana Jones movie really ever be good, anyway?

More than a lot of people, I enjoyed many elements of both Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull––but I think the films suffer retrospectively from an inability to find something more for Indiana Jones to do which he didn't do in the first movie, or any way to really push this often cartoonish character into a stranger, crazier role than he's previously occupied. I liked the fridge scene in Crystal Skull, with is mushroom-blast capper. That seemed to me to be a new development for Indy, potentially. What would an Indiana Jones of the atomic age be? I liked the interrogation scene, where they suspect Indy of being a communist. The rest of the movie just did not live up to that intriguing premise for me, past the motorcycle chase. It would have been more interesting if Indy was the double-double agent in the film, compromised by years and years of intrigue in the name of archaeology, perhaps––a potential Kim Philby figure that was brought away from the brink by his ex-girlfriend and son and Mac, or, better yet, a grown-up Short-Round––someone inspired by what they saw in Indy; someone a little too blind to his obvious flaws.

Perversely, I feel I want both a more cartoonish exaggeration of the character, and an accompanying attempt to mine the more serious undertone of Indiana Jones' adventures in Raiders––which seem more serious, and which offer more possibility of real people getting hurt than the sequels in general provide (Temple of Doom actually makes fairly good on this, amidst Kate Capshaw's insufferable screams––dwelling more than the other sequels on pain, deprivation, and suffering surrounding these vainglorious quests for archeological objects). There is a generalized softening of the character in the sequels, so that Jones is more and more of a fumbling fuddy-duddy, less a user of people––which is a kind of disturbing undertone of the first film that I think is very clear in the script, but which Spielberg is constantly trying to downplay and ignore. There's also that really nice, harsh line from the fourth film, where Jim Broadbent says "we've reached the age where life stops giving you things, and starts taking them away." But again here, that film doesn't own up to the seriousness this suggests. There's nothing Indy can't do as the film goes on; he gets another chance with Marion. He gets a theoretically cool son, who comes to think he's pretty cool, in return. Nothing is really "taken away" from him, as Broadbent suggests might happen––it's a way of gracefully excusing the absence of Denholm Elliot, but it's also, perhaps unbeknownst to the filmmakers, a line that implies serious consideration for later––consideration which never comes. By comparison, Indy's experience in sequel 3 and 4 is more shallow than in the previous movies, and there's no attempt to deepen the experience of the first films––which have both transporting elements of fun, and serious stuff around the edges you sort of wish you knew more about (It seems like Indy really ruined Marion's life prior to Raiders? Is he really going to kill Willie Scott in the Shanghai nightclub in Temple of Doom? What happens to Short Round between Temple and Raiders?). The later movies just weren't able to get deeper––the way Empire Strikes Back deepened the story of Star Wars, for instance––though there were plenty of opportunities.

I kind of put this down to Lucas and Spielberg not really being up to the task. Spielberg wants above almost everything for his movies to be of the broadest possible appeal, damn the artistic merits denied in the process, and Lucas frequently seems uncertain what he'd want of a sequel to one of his movie-mad childhood visions––or just what he'd want a story to be about. I guess I want to see an Indiana Jones movie written by Alan Moore, or something. Unrealistic, I suppose, but I just wonder...at what point in their careers are these allegedly "arty" makers of popular pictures supposed to actually get arty? When do they have the clout to stretch the remit even just a little? But I think the truth is, they just aren't up to the job. Is Mangold? I don't know; maybe. Probably not. I think it's fun that Harrison Ford is still interested in this, but I wonder what it is that still interests him in the character? Ford himself is a pretty odd and hidden personality, and Indy has some of that quality, and has it frequently dragged out of him for all to see in the various movies. I can't say I see much that interests me in this trailer, though. Something about a granddaughter, some weird thing with Indy's son? Hard to care too much about the family drama of the Joneses. I mean, if any group of filmmakers was maybe less qualified to develop Indiana Jones in a more interesting direction than the uneasy alliance of Lucas and Spielberg, it would have to be Disney.

[Mr Sausage]

Marion: I was a child; I was in love! It was wrong, and you knew it!
Indy: You knew what you were doing.

There's a lot in those lines, and they tend not to register because they're sandwiched between Marion drinking a Sherpa under the table and a room full of goons being blown apart. But the oft-described genius of Raider's screenplay is that it doesn't explain those lines. You come in on what feels like entry 8 or 9 of a series and you just have to catch up. There's a whole history between many of these characters you're never going to know, but you'll get tantalizing bits and pieces that make you wish you'd seen all the previous entries. Wonderful.

But like feihong points out, Indiana Jones seems more flawed and compromised, more gritty I guess, than the Hollywood hero he'd later become. He's basically a treasure hunter, one good only by virtue of the fact he tries to commit his thefts before objectively worse factions can do it first. And his personal relationships seem fraught and unsettling (of the 'seducing your mentor's teenage daughter' variety). Those suggested previous adventures do not seem squeaky clean, wholesome stories.

RE: Mangold. The one thing Logan and 3:10 to Yuma share is that they are intimate stories focused on character relationships. That's where Mangold's strengths lie, I think: his ability to show these small character moments and the effect the action has on them. When he tries larger contexts with bigger stakes, you get bland, unaffecting movies like The Wolverine and Ford vs Ferrari. Indeed, the former is instructive, in that you have two entries in the same series, made by the same director, involving the same character, and they feel utterly different. One's a forgettable comic book adventure where bland action mostly replaces character and emotion; the other's a gritty, melancholy story about death and loss as everything winds down, where the characters and emotions are front and centre all through. I see this new Indy bringing The Wolverine-side of Mangold.

[feihong]

And his personal relationships seem fraught and unsettling (of the 'seducing your mentor's teenage daughter' variety). Those suggested previous adventures do not seem squeaky clean, wholesome stories.

As a kid I loved the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for its globe-hopping views of 20th-century history. But I think in retrospect what was also disappointing was how little the events of the series seemed to be creating the figure who was to come in the film narrative. Indy's idealism in those teenaged episodes didn't really go to explaining the more compromised figure we see in Raiders––not that this transition needed to be more psychologically believable, per se, but that, for the viewer, the introduction of those themes needed to have already been there. The flashback in the beginning of Last Crusade does more to justify the figure we see later, with the idea of a sort of teen righteousness frustrated by his inability to triumph over less noble men––and maybe River Phoenix just presents a more credible "angry young man" than Sean Patrick Flannery––outraged at not being able to keep his hands on an object out of history.

In retrospect, Young Indiana Jones seems so clearly modeled upon Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese comics––especially in the casual-seeming insertion of history into the hero's adventures. And like Corto, Indy is often searching for grand, hidden historical artifacts––which he brushes against or catches sight of without ultimately possessing them. Now that many of the popular European comics of the 60s and 70s have been translated into English, it's becoming clear just how much these influenced Lucas, specifically (so many of the most striking images out of Star Wars come from a few Valerian and Laureline comics of the early 70s: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/valerian- ... star-wars/). And I think Corto the treasure-hunter, though he is a little more humane than Jones in Raiders, has a sense of moral compromise which is always followed and mediated by an heroic act of remorse (blowing up Semonov's canon after failing to stop Semenov from killing Duchess Seminova in Corto Maltese in SIberia, adopting Louise Brooksowic's child after failing to prevent her murder in Tango), which endears us to him, and which endears us to Jones in much the same way (the idea that he wants to be bad, or worse, to achieve his goal, but that he can't quite stomach it). But Pratt is able to his hero through multiple stories without defanging him in quite the way that Indy gets defanged. Honestly, saddling Indiana Jones with a family does a lot to dull the cruelty and sourness Ford and Kasdan are able to suggest in the first movie––and maybe to a similar point, Corto Maltese never gets as old as Indy has by Crystal Skull, with Pratt choosing instead to end his career in middle-age, having him disappear during the Spanish Civil War (with Pratt Danakil warrior, Cush, telling us in no uncertain terms that Corto's thematic era was over, and that's why, in narrative terms, he is gone).

But more than anything, the breadth of different types and genres of adventures Pratt put Corto through is so varied, compared to Indy's. Corto hunts treasure on the constantly changing borders of the collapsing Ottoman empire in one story, is a pirate trying to save children from other pirates in the South Seas during WWI, serves as a defacto detective, investigating murder in Argentina in the 20s, digs into occult mysteries in Venice, gets wrapped up in the struggle between the reds and the whites in Siberia in 1919, and falls into a hallucination of one of Herman Hesse's more obscure novels in Switzerland in 1924. Corto is subtly re-cast in all these adventures, serving in a nominally different role––but he's never a truly different person, and the persistence of him as an axiomatic figure offers access to a wide variety of different narrative experiences in the different books. Indiana Jones could have been similar, but the character is not quite so essential and solid as Corto, to my mind. Indy changes from film to film, from episode to episode––and not in ways that chart a clear evolution of the character. Like Corto Maltese, he doesn't seem entirely real, but the filmmakers keep treating Indy as a more realistic character, saddling him with a family, with formative experiences, with a character trajectory––one that keeps getting tweaked, amended, and softened in the various films. The result, I think, is that the later films, more committed to seeing this aging figure through to the simplest of validations (Indy gets married! Indy reconciles with...with his son, through his granddaughter?...Something like that?). Whereas Corto's closure is in things like reconciling with Charles Soong, the father who forbade the great love of Corto's early life (entirely off-page), and who has come to find the lost continent of Mu on his deathbed––a continent that has just sunk from under Corto, who found it first...or did he merely dream he had? ...Not exactly the tidy, emotional catharsis worldwide movie viewers expect. But for a somewhat abstract character, worthy complexity. I think ultimately, Indy falls a bit outside of the model of the realistic hero, and at his best he's a lot closer to the kind of abstruse, stylized character Corto Maltese embodies. So I'm not sure what kind of adventure, or what kind of closure, I'd want for the character at this point. Crystal Skull felt like it came too late, and tried to do too many of the same things as the previous movies––when they already looked less than credible for an older man. I guess I keep going back and forth in my head, thinking one approach is too far-fetched, another to literal and realistic. But I suppose that points to what a hard needle an Indiana Jones adventure is to really thread. Hard to get it right.

[ntnon]

As a kid I loved the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for its globe-hopping views of 20th-century history...
...more than anything, the variety of adventures Pratt put Corto through is so varied, compared to Indy's. Corto hunts treasure on the constantly changing borders of the collapsing Ottoman empire in one story, is a pirate trying to save children from other pirates in the South Seas during WWI, serves as a defacto detective, investigating murder in Argentina in the 20s, digs into occult mysteries in Venice, gets wrapped up in the struggle between the reds and the whites in Siberia in 1919, and falls into a hallucination of one of Herman Hesse's more obscure novels in Switzerland in 1924. Corto is subtly re-cast in all these adventures, serving in a nominally different role––but he's never a truly different person...

I loved YIndy, too. But - and maybe it's my rose-tinted memories - your description there of the "variety of adventures" EXACTLY describes the Chronicles - Egypt with Carter, inspired by Lawrence, fighting with Villa, cycling around Hollywood, battling Richthofen, etc., etc. - as a worldwide, anything-and-everything series of adventures as diverse (more?) than Maltese.

The accompanying documentaries for the DVDs were also fascinating and genuinely both exciting and educational, (just like the films weren't) in a rare way that seems to only apply to Spielber-associated TV projects (i.e. Animaniacs).

I'm also befuddled - but, again, relying on dimming memories - that you didn't see the hardened and cynical Jones formed in the forges of Ireland, Mexico and the trenches of WWI (et al.).

But then the prevailing trend here seems to be generally anti-Crusade, which has never been my experience, so maybe it's a difference of outlook!

[feihong]

I loved YIndy, too. But - and maybe it's my rose-tinted memories - your description there of the "variety of adventures" EXACTLY describes the Chronicles - Egypt with Carter, inspired by Lawrence, fighting with Villa, cycling around Hollywood, battling Richthofen, etc., etc. - as a worldwide, anything-and-everything series of adventures as diverse (more?) than Maltese.

I'm also befuddled - but, again, relying on dimming memories - that you didn't see the hardened and cynical Jones formed in the forges of Ireland, Mexico and the trenches of WWI (et al.).

The reason I didn't see a more cynical Indy formed in those adventures is because there wasn't any consistent character development in the show, and Indy's response to the space he was in wasn't a focal point in the adventures. The show relies upon your dimming memories to supply the juice, but we do not see Indy having flashbacks to the Somme, for instance, when he's playing jazz with Sidney Bechet later on. And there is no attempt to plot out formative experiences in a way that the audience could follow, leading up to a sense of the character Indy would develop into. In other words, you have to do all the work to make that transformation happen––the transformation is not an element of the story as it's actually being told. To make the contrast pretty clear, nothing I ever saw in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles––and I watched most of it––would identify for me the Indiana Jones who later has an affair with a self-described "child" of his archaeology professor, who would go on to become the kind of dissolute grave robber he appears to be in the beginning of Raiders (what makes Indy the more worthy thief of the Hovitos idol in the beginning of the film than Belloq––because instead of fooling them, he just goes up and takes it? The Hovitos clearly don't want the idol stolen, either way). Nothing in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles invites me to track that development in my head, because there are no narrative signposts which actually mark the journey.

As for the variety of adventures, yes, the child Indy and the teen Indy of the Chronicles show do get into a broad spectrum of adventures––but the movie Indy, who was the object of that thesis, does not. The movie adventures are rather similar to one another––and my point is that, as Harrison Ford gets older, Indy is less convincing knocking a guy out without breaking his hand, landing on speeding trucks without breaking his hip or his ankle...sure, the fights are implausible in the first place, but just like Roger Moore in James Bond, when the guy doing the fighting looks less and less credible doing the stunts, when he looks slower and softer and more fragile (all understandable parts of aging), the unreality of the stunts becomes the focus, and not the outrageous excitement of the stunts themselves. Another form of story could arise, which didn't put so much pressure on the aging Ford to deliver the same kind of thrills he did in his 30s and 40s––but the films instead aim to repeat the things that made the previous films special, and my point in referencing Corto Maltese is that the adventures there offer precisely the kind of variance that could keep an actor viable as the character as they got older. The adventures of The Secret Rose don't require the same physicality as those of Corto Maltese in Siberia. An Indiana Jones who could do more thinking and less fighting could still be intriguing and entertaining––but the makers of the films never developed Indy into a character who could do more than what we saw in the first couple of feature films. But then Crystal Skull suggests Indy was a spy for OSS in WWII. Here's a direction things could have gone in. This is my point in bringing up Corto Maltese. The stories are entirely different genres, placing Corto in different roles. But because the filmmakers behind Indy left him pretty much as-is for the later movies, with no attempt to grow his catalog of heroics (as they surely did in the TV show, but that hardly relates to the movies at all besides that one reference in Crystal Skull), Indy now still has to crack his whip and punch nazis––even though Harrison Ford no longer looks entirely plausible doing it.

[ntnon]

I loved YIndy, too... I'm also befuddled - but, again, relying on dimming memories - that you didn't see the hardened and cynical Jones formed in the forges of Ireland, Mexico and the trenches of WWI (et al.).

The reason I didn't see a more cynical Indy formed in those adventures is because there wasn't any consistent character development in the show, and Indy's response to the space he was in wasn't a focal point in the adventures. The show relies upon your dimming memories to supply the juice, but we do not see Indy having flashbacks to the Somme, for instance, when he's playing jazz with Sidney Bechet later on.

I think I recall (limited) flashbacks and briefly-referenced memories, but you're obviously right - the focus was on the novel happening, the current intrigue and the touchstones of history. Because YIndy was a comic strip, jetting from storyline to storyline all over the world with limited changes to anything but the setting - however (again, relying on memory) he DID grow as a person, and there were seeds of the character he grew into sown and nurtured throughout the series.

I need to watch it again. I'd hoped Disney would re-release the discs, this time including an episodic option with the Old Indy bookends, but so far.. nothing.

And there is no attempt to plot out formative experiences in a way that the audience could follow, leading up to a sense of the character Indy would develop into. In other words, you have to do all the work to make that transformation happen––the transformation is not an element of the story as it's actually being told.

Forgive me, but a) that was definitely not the point of the series. The series was "adventures of Young Indy" and history lesson, not pointedly laying out gis character developing, and b) ..wasn't that an element being praised above? The whole 'starting in the middle of the story' and not spelling everything out? Teasing, not leading; hints not hitting you over the head. As much as the River Phoenix YIndy was enjoyable, it was a very rote 'here's the hat, here's the whip, fear of snakes, doesn't like his given name and... driven by putting things in a museum' one-two-three of How He Became Indiana in ten minutes-odd. That's not how people develop.

To make the contrast pretty clear, nothing I ever saw in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles––and I watched most of it––would identify for me the Indiana Jones who later has an affair with a self-described "child" of his archaeology professor, who would go on to become the kind of dissolute grave robber he appears to be in the beginning of Raiders (what makes Indy the more worthy thief of the Hovitos idol in the beginning of the film than Belloq––because instead of fooling them, he just goes up and takes it? The Hovitos clearly don't want the idol stolen, either way). Nothing in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles invites me to track that development in my head, because there are no narrative signposts which actually mark the journey.

Clearly I need to rewatch the films too, because that's really not how I recall viewing any part of that1. Maybe I'm forever-coloured by the Phoenix flashback, but he's no grave robber: he's a respected academic and an archaelogist driven by (sharing) history. He's recovering the idol so that it may be seen by the world, and while the idol is clearly sacred or important, my reading was never that they were there to stop it being stolen, but that Belocq had promised them something (maybe the idol, maybe not) to help him - they were there as backup, not to independantly guard the temple.

As for the variety of adventures, yes, the child Indy and the teen Indy of the Chronicles show do get into a broad spectrum of adventures––but the movie Indy, who was the object of that thesis, does not. The movie adventures are rather similar to one another––and my point is that, as Harrison Ford gets older, Indy is less convincing knocking a guy out without breaking his hand, landing on speeding trucks without breaking his hip or his ankle...sure, the fights are implausible in the first place, but just like Roger Moore in James Bond, when the guy doing the fighting looks less and less credible doing the stunts, when he looks slower and softer and more fragile (all understandable parts of aging), the unreality of the stunts becomes the focus, and not the outrageous excitement of the stunts themselves.

That's one of the plus points of Crusade - Sir Sean is more prone to sitting down than being active and thus contrasts well with gis younger, fitter, son who can do more heroics. But even then, there's more machine gun than fisticuffs and fewer(?) stunts than before.

An Indiana Jones who could do more thinking and less fighting could still be intriguing and entertaining––but the makers of the films never developed Indy into a character who could do more than what we saw in the first couple of feature films. But then Crystal Skull suggests Indy was a spy for OSS in WWII. Here's a direction things could have gone in.

Skull clearly tried to move away from Action Indy by bringing in the younger model, but.. someone (correctly) realised that that was an even worse idea, and the compromise (married to the terrible plot, poor casting and abominable script) made the film - to me, and to many - basically unwatchable. I don't understand why the trend (above) seems to be rehabilitation and promotion over Crusade.. perhaps I missed something the previous two times I watched it.

[feihong]

And there is no attempt to plot out formative experiences in a way that the audience could follow, leading up to a sense of the character Indy would develop into. In other words, you have to do all the work to make that transformation happen––the transformation is not an element of the story as it's actually being told.

Forgive me, but a) that was definitely not the point of the series. The series was "adventures of Young Indy" and history lesson, not pointedly laying out gis character developing, and b) ..wasn't that an element being praised above? The whole 'starting in the middle of the story' and not spelling everything out? Teasing, not leading; hints not hitting you over the head. As much as the River Phoenix YIndy was enjoyable, it was a very rote 'here's the hat, here's the whip, fear of snakes, doesn't like his given name and... driven by putting things in a museum' one-two-three of How He Became Indiana in ten minutes-odd. That's not how people develop.

I agree that the filmmakers behind Young Indy Chronicles made a creative choice to emphasize the historical adventure elements and a commercial choice to downplay the serial nature of the series (witness how in its initial broadcast the episodes were shown brutally out-of-sequence), but––and this is threading a needle pretty finely, I know, so I'll try my best to articulate it––part and parcel of that was a decision made––consciously or unconsciously––to decouple the Indiana Jones character from whatever ongoing evolution was left of him. That consistency had already been diluted considerably by the films coming after Raiders, I feel, but all I'm arguing is that there was a way to do this that would have maintained the consistency of the character from Raiders, and I'm saying that the character from Raiders is more intriguing than the later incarnations. Ultimately, I'm claiming that the Indy in Raiders would have sustained a long-scale development more than the
Indy in Last Crusade or either one on the TV show, and that developing that significantly darker and more ambiguous character (not only often not a very nice guy, but one whose moral decisions we're frequently meant to question {in the screenplay, at least––the tone of the film demands looking past a lot of the subtle elements of the script as quickly as possible}, and who isn't the ultimate hero of his own story––as is frequently noted, Jones could have not shown up to Raiders, and the outcome would have been none the worse for it) could have led to a richer palette of differing kinds of Indiana Jones movies which could have been made as Harrison Ford got older––including, perhaps, pictures where Harrison Ford didn't need to get injured doing his own stunts. I know that television of the time wasn't geared to present an Indiana Jones growing towards the person he would become as a narrative element, but I feel Lucas made a very similar mistake here to the one he made with the Star Wars prequels––in other words, giving us a wide-eyed young innocent as a lead, in place of a young man already on the way to becoming the compromised, darker figure he would ultimately become. Start with Annakin Skywalker halfway to the dark side, and you've got a much easier lift (in other words, a young man who is already impetuous, reckless, and ready to take the quick and easy way out––the qualities we see Luke wrestle with in the original films––then show us how those elements of his personality grow and lead him down the path to becoming Darth Vader). Start with an Indiana Jones already at least encountering the compromises he will face as an adult archaeologist––at least seeing these compromises playing out, and processing them––and you have a character more plausibly geared to slip into the figure Harrison Ford embodies in the first movie.

This is the way in which the River Phoenix character in Last Crusade more aptly mimics the Indy of the earlier movies––the film sets him up as an angry, idealistic young man witnessing what he believes is a crime. The crime he witnesses––committed, not coincidentally, by a guy who is essentially the double of the older man Indy will become in Raiders––not coincidentally mirrors Indy's quest for the Hovitos' idol in Raiders––and the young Indy is outraged by it. Then all the fanservice happens, blah blah blah, snakes, bullwhip, etc.––in an era before widespread, Disney-fied fanservice, this sequence actually seemed quite funny––and, key to the end of the sequence, the older man--the dissolute grave-robber who foils Indy's attempt to put the cross in a museum, rather than capitalize on it for personal gain––puts his hat on Indy's head, making a key literary identification. Indy is, essentially, that man with the fedora (and not a copy of his more doctrinaire father, who, in a sense, helps to ruin Indy's liberation of the cross). Some years later, the man in the fedora will be Indy himself, driving a very similar set of unreliable goons into the jungle to "liberate" a precious artifact for personal gain.

I think something key here to what I'm saying is that I'm not primarily talking about the psychological plausibility of a character evolving into a particular kind of person; I'm talking about signposting a character from a work of fiction's literary destiny––much the same thing as paying off the setup of a particular element of a scene or character. If a figure in a fiction turns traitor on the heroes, even by surprise, the turn works a much more gratifying transition if there is something in the writing that seeds that transition before it happens––and if the traitor turns with literally no explanation, then the author usually looks as if they are hastily backfilling a decision they made late in the game. This is a very mechanistic example in some ways, to be sure, but the Keyser Soze reveal in The Usual Suspects only works because the filmmakers have constantly been dropping hints who he could be, all through the film. If Indy grows up to be a conflicted character––driven on the one hand by his boyhood dream of discovering important artifacts (a mirror of his father's adult dream of finding the grail), and on the other by the lure of compromise in making it happen (represented by the man who gives Indy his fedora), well, then it would be nice to see that seeded in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles––if we are meant to think of those adventures as part of Indy's own grand narrative. Similarly, it would be nice to track those elements of Indy's personality––which so dominate and drive the action of Raiders––through the subsequent movies. But it grows harder in the later ones, where Indy's dad distracts mightily from Indy's own personal motivations and growth, and in the fourth one, where...well, who knows what happens to these threads of Indy's character in the fourth movie? It's very jumbled in this regard, specifically. To give you a sense of why I think it's important to be able to track these elements of Indy the fictional character––these are the main points of who he is in the first movie––the things that most directly affect his character motivations. The Indy of Raiders is compellingly torn between being a decent guy and getting the job done, between being an outlaw––which he is frequently expected to be––and being the one guy after this object with anything resembling a conscience, between sacrificing the people he maybe cares about in the name of archeological discovery, and giving up the knowledge of history for people he only sort of cares about (how much Indy cares about Marion is a frequent, open question throughout Raiders). Those choices Indy makes are at the center of the film's themes. These later pictures make a confusing hash of these ideas. The Indy of Temple of Doom isn't confronted with these questions so directly (more of that film is a rollercoaster ride than collection of moral conundrums), and the Indy of Last Crusade is cast as largely a nice guy, perhaps less tempted than his former self, simply because he has his dad to scold him constantly––effectively keeping him far shy of moral compromise throughout (you could make the claim that Indys dad dominating Last Crusade deprives Indy of more personal character evolution). The guy in Crystal Skull has made no progress on these questions. Indy of the 4th movie's greatest character challenge is how to work with other *ssholes, like Mac, and his son. He doesn't weigh personal conflicts very heavily in that 4th film––and I think the 4th film would have been much better if he had been challenged to do so. Again, Corto Maltese is instructive here, because Corto faces moral choices at every stage of his character evolution––from whether to defend someone or abandon them, to whether or not to value one of Herman Hesse's characters over another in the dream he has about Hesse's book. Whether Corto is younger or older (the series spans almost 30 years in Corto's life, just as Indy's series spans decades), as the main character, he is always tasked with making morally-complex choices, centered around the driving literary themes of Corto's character (i.e., how to treat individuals, how to treat them within their differing societies). Thus, there is tremendous consistency to the literary persona Corto Maltese seems to inhabit––moreso than the literary persona Indiana Jones presents from movie, to movie, to series, to movie.

To make the contrast pretty clear, nothing I ever saw in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles––and I watched most of it––would identify for me the Indiana Jones who later has an affair with a self-described "child" of his archaeology professor, who would go on to become the kind of dissolute grave robber he appears to be in the beginning of Raiders (what makes Indy the more worthy thief of the Hovitos idol in the beginning of the film than Belloq––because instead of fooling them, he just goes up and takes it? The Hovitos clearly don't want the idol stolen, either way). Nothing in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles invites me to track that development in my head, because there are no narrative signposts which actually mark the journey.

Clearly I need to rewatch the films too, because that's really not how I recall viewing any part of that1. Maybe I'm forever-coloured by the Phoenix flashback, but he's no grave robber: he's a respected academic and an archaelogist driven by (sharing) history. He's recovering the idol so that it may be seen by the world, and while the idol is clearly sacred or important, my reading was never that they were there to stop it being stolen, but that Belocq had promised them something (maybe the idol, maybe not) to help him - they were there as backup, not to independantly guard the temple.

It's very possible to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and to read Indiana Jones not as a hero, per se, but just as an at least occasionally nasty guy who shepherds us from one adventure to the next, all of whose efforts lead to very little. He is visually and aurally coded as threatening––maybe even the bad guy––from the first minute he appears. What softens that image at first is that everyone else we meet in the first scene––aside from the Hovitos themselves––are pretty bad guys, too. What separates them from Indy is almost only their trickery. Alfred Molina ditches Indy without his whip, the other guy just tries to shoot him in the back, and Belloq simply outsmarts him, turning the Hovitos on him. But the way I read the situation, it's very clear that Indy has rolled up to take the idol of the indigenous people––not taking it from the remains of an extinct society, but appropriating it from one that is––whether fooled by Belloq or not––still intent on protecting this idol against theft (at least theft by the unworthy––Belloq presents himself as having earned the right to command its' fate before the tribe). He is literally stealing this tribe's golden relic, intending to abscond with it to another country, and then he means to personally profit by selling it to a museum. That's not for the benefit of the world, that's theft of an indigenous tribe's cultural history, and the tribe has every right to determine the fate of the relic for themselves. It's pretty clear from that opening scene Indy has not asked the Hovitos for the idol. And throughout the movie Indy is challenged to value the girl, Marion, over the ark––and he repeatedly fails to make good when pressed to choose the girl. But in the end, all he ends up with is the girl––and he seems disappointed. But more than that, there's the sense that Indy need never have gone on his adventure in the first place; had Jones stayed home, the nazis would have bought or stolen the headpiece to the staff from Marion, found the ark, opened it, and the ark would have melted their faces just the same. The way I read it, the ultimate ineffectiveness of Indy is, in a way, payment for his really out-of-whack priorities. He leaves Marion prisoner so he can get the ark. He can't bring himself to complete his ransom of the ark for Marion. In the end, the ark takes matters out of the confused Dr. Jones' hands and settles accounts, the government takes things out of Dr. Jones' hands twice over, and he is left with Marion––who he repeatedly valued less than the ark––almost as a form of punishment for his own hubris.

An Indiana Jones who could do more thinking and less fighting could still be intriguing and entertaining––but the makers of the films never developed Indy into a character who could do more than what we saw in the first couple of feature films. But then Crystal Skull suggests Indy was a spy for OSS in WWII. Here's a direction things could have gone in.

Skull clearly tried to move away from Action Indy by bringing in the younger model, but.. someone (correctly) realised that that was an even worse idea, and the compromise (married to the terrible plot, poor casting and abominable script) made the film - to me, and to many - basically unwatchable. I don't understand why the trend (above) seems to be rehabilitation and promotion over Crusade.. perhaps I missed something the previous two times I watched it.

I don't think I necessarily agree that Skull marginalized Indy's action role by bringing in his son. I admit this feels like some film executive's desperate hope for further franchising, but the film, as I saw it, continues to demand action as the defining value of Indys presence. Maybe LaBeouf was meant to shoulder a few scenes more than Harrison Ford, but the film still turns on how Indy fights his way out of desperate situations and bad odds. He's guiding his son to do the same thing he's doing, which makes the film feel very redundant––and the casting of Shia LaBeouf wasn't a wonderful choice here, to my mind (in fact, bringing in Indy's sort-of "family" wasn't a good idea as it was presented in the movie). But movies live or die not on some empirical quality of their ideas, but on the accompanying tone or valence the idea is given as it integrates into the existing drama of the piece. To me, the mistake the later movies have made is to treat the character of Indiana Jones as a series of visceral moviegoing experiences rather than as a thematic idea of a character––so Indiana Jones is a cracking loud punch, the snap of a whip, Ford's reluctant grumble, the quest for the fabled artifact, the characters we've seen before, the insane action, uncommon vehicles, the sourpuss wisecracks. Later addendums seem to include some member of Indy's family tree, a betrayal by a trusted ally, nazis (or, in Crystal Skull, Soviets that essentially stand in for nazis mostly interchangeably), necessary costume pieces, etc. By comparison, Corto Maltese has far more literary and thematic consistency. Regardless of his age or his role in the story, Corto is a solid literary idea, with philosophical beliefs and formative experiences that drive him, with characters which motivate him in specific ways, with both an undergirding philosophy and with a thematic purpose which remains undiluted as the series continues. Indiana Jones does not have this consistency, and I think this is in large part why people respond so differently to the different movies. He is a series of commercial tropes, periodically reanimated to lurching life in order to generate another big profit; Corto is a way of giving us different, playful experiments arranged around the same core kernel of an idea. Because of that different construction, Corto is a vital, relevant character in each volume (even in The Early Years, where he appears about 8 pages from the end of the story). But I think the makers of Indiana Jones struggle to have that same sense of center––which I think is an apt comparison, because it seems so self-evident that Corto's adventures are a huge inspiration for at least Lucas' thinking about the character of Indiana Jones. I think a lot could have been made out of many of the ideas in Crystal Skull, had they been able to be presented with the gritty, sardonic feel of Raiders––but the goofiness of Crystal Skull constantly sabotages its best concepts. It never seems over-the-top, as its best set pieces could certainly have seemed, with a different tone undergirding them. Instead, the overwhelming goofiness keeps coloring the content of each worthwhile creative concept––as does the anti-romantic calculation of commercial profit that creeps into the later Indy movies, frequently souring the creative angles. The making of Crystal Skull was the ideal time for the Philip Kaufman of the late 70s or early 80s to step through a door, via the Dial of Destiny, and ultimately take over directing an Indy picture (one feels like Steven Spielberg might have been ready to cede control––from interviews he seemed not to believe that the ideas George was putting out were going to work)––I feel like Kaufman's ability to mix goofy humor and serious pathos in films like The Wanderers and even The Right Stuff would have been a better fit for Crystal Skull––and his take on the aliens might have been more interesting and original. At the end of the day, I just don't quite buy Harrison Ford as the action star when he's 80, regardless of what he can do. I would have liked a movie that positioned the character of Indiana Jones to take advantage of the more plausible and potentially compelling material Harrison Ford can create as an late septuagenarian/octogenarian––while taking the literary character of Indiana Jones in a direction worth developing. I really doubt that's what's going on in the new movie; but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

[John Cope]

A friend of mine identified his problem with Crystal Skull by isolating the scene in which Indy unearths the treasures (including the skull I think). He pointed out that the big difference was that Indy no longer treated the relics with reverence, as precious objects, but rather just quickly rifled through them with little such consideration. That may seem minor but it points to a significant change not just in tone and temperament but in the way these films are conceived and composed, understood even. Without that sense retained it really does become just another not-taking-itself-too-serious pop trifle floating away in the breeze and leaving little lingering impression.

I didn't look into it as deeply but I was just as disappointed. All it really took for me was the treatment of Marion who is reduced to a broad and shrill caricature of herself without any of the glimpses of depth that we received before. And again without that it's all just too pop fatuous to care. I still think that if the film had been what I thought it was going to be initially it would have likely been far better. What I thought we were going to get was an Indiana Jones film that took the filmic model of the 50's sci-fi B-movie as its form. But instead we simply get a lazy updated retread of the same stale formula, the 30's cliffhanger serial mode carried over to the point of dominance, made even worse here for a multitude of reasons (the excessive reliance on CGI for one and the too light and frivolous tone being another). The CGI actually could have worked I suppose as an analogue for the change in era but that's reaching when it shouldn't have been necessary. A genuine update, putting an out of place Indy in that whole other stylized form, would have been genuinely inspired. But really that Marion stuff was enough; it's unforgivable and frankly depressing.

[beamish14]

But really that Marion stuff was enough; it's unforgivable and frankly depressing.

It was incredibly disheartening but perhaps not surprising to learn that Lawrence Kasdan had been brought in to punch up her scenes. I mentioned this in the Spielberg thread, but I just cannot stand Janusz Kamiński‘s photography in this. It’s so overblown and looks even muddier in tandem with the CG, which is incredibly poor in spots. I’d read that he and Spielberg rewatched the original 3 on multiple occasions to nail Douglas Slocombe’s aesthetic, but they completely failed

[ntnon]

Crystal Skull is forever tied in my mind with Superman Returns - sequels to good films, both with children of the main character that shouldn't be there (or exist), rehashing old plot points to diminishing returns featuring decent central perfances in deeply misguided finished films.

Forgive me, but a) that was definitely not the point of the series. The series was "adventures of Young Indy" and history lesson...

I agree that the filmmakers behind Young Indy Chronicles made a creative choice to emphasize the historical adventure elements and a commercial choice to downplay the serial nature of the series (witness how in its initial broadcast the episodes were shown brutally out-of-sequence)...

I've only ever seen it as the later stitched-together film-length endeavour, but my understanding of the in-universe(ish) logic of the shuffling - as opposed to the realities of shooting with children and perhaps needing to alternate YIndies for time reasons - was to juxtapose (perhaps exactly!) the kind of character building that seems absent.. mayhap a reshuffle might reveal it more? I have read (and dimmer-than-usual recall) that setting alternate adventures together throws light on both the inevitability of his past-and-future interactions with people, places and especially Things as well as how he internalises and uses his experiences to form his character.

[Indy's character's] consistency had already been diluted considerably by the films coming after Raiders, I feel, but all I'm arguing is that there was a way to do this that would have maintained the consistency of the character from Raiders, and I'm saying that the character from Raiders is more intriguing than the later incarnations. Ultimately, I'm claiming that the Indy in Raiders would have sustained a long-scale development more than the
Indy in Last Crusade or either one on the TV show, and that developing that significantly darker and more ambiguous character (not only often not a very nice guy, but one whose moral decisions we're frequently meant to question {in the screenplay, at least––the tone of the film demands looking past a lot of the subtle elements of the script as quickly as possible}, and who isn't the ultimate hero of his own story––as is frequently noted, Jones could have not shown up to Raiders, and the outcome would have been none the worse for it) could have led to a richer palette of differing kinds of Indiana Jones movies which could have been made as Harrison Ford got older––including, perhaps, pictures where Harrison Ford didn't need to get injured doing his own stunts. I know that television of the time wasn't geared to present an Indiana Jones growing towards the person he would become as a narrative element, but... [if they had begun with] an Indiana Jones already at least encountering the compromises he will face as an adult archaeologist––at least seeing these compromises playing out, and processing them––and you have a character more plausibly geared to slip into the figure Harrison Ford embodies in the first movie.

First, I need to know if the screenplay is purchasable. I know I have the novel(isation) somewhere, but again.. I don't see quite as ambiguous or morally conflicted character as you do. And I (think that I) do recall young Henry Jr. encountering the shades of grey of a complex world and having to process how he fits within it, should react to it and must strive to change and fix it. I'm thinking especially of the Chronicle where he winds up infiltrating and commenting on a slave market sale, and the one where he encounters the Russian royalty and wrestles with the concept of 'us and them' in both different scenarios.

This is the way in which the River Phoenix character in Last Crusade more aptly mimics the Indy of the earlier movies––the film sets him up as an angry, idealistic young man witnessing what he believes is a crime. The crime he witnesses––committed, not coincidentally, by a guy who is essentially the double of the older man Indy will become in Raiders––not coincidentally mirrors Indy's quest for the Hovitos' idol in Raiders––and the young Indy is outraged by it. Then all the fanservice happens, blah blah blah, snakes, bullwhip, etc.––in an era before widespread, Disney-fied fanservice, this sequence actually seemed quite funny––and, key to the end of the sequence, the older man--the dissolute grave-robber who foils Indy's attempt to put the cross in a museum, rather than capitalize on it for personal gain...

Right. And in a facile way, THAT is the core of the character on display repeatedly: "it belongs in a museum!"

While there are certainly other choices and compromises that might - when I rewatch - inspire me to better see your reading, at the moment I'm focused on that line: and it is not morally gray, it's (white savior-like) Idealist and Noble. He's driven - like his father - by the pursuit of knowledge and the sharing of same. He wants the hidden and forgotten and important treasures of the world to be available for everyone - not stolen and sold like Belloq or hoarded for power like Hitler and Donovan. Shared and accessible.

Some years later, the man in the fedora will be Indy himself, driving a very similar set of unreliable goons into the jungle to "liberate" a precious artifact for personal gain.

Well, directly after the flashback, of course, the man in the fedora is Indy deliberately undoing the 'wrong' of the theft of the Cross so that it can finally be available to the world - not (just) a parallel and comparison, but an inversion and correction. As well.

I'm talking about signposting a character from a work of fiction's literary destiny––much the same thing as paying off the setup of a particular element of a scene or character. If a figure in a fiction turns traitor on the heroes, even by surprise, the turn works a much more gratifying transition if there is something in the writing that seeds that transition before it happens––and if the traitor turns with literally no explanation, then the author usually looks as if they are hastily backfilling a decision they made late in the game... If Indy grows up to be a conflicted character––driven on the one hand by his boyhood dream of discovering important artifacts (a mirror of his father's adult dream of finding the grail), and on the other by the lure of compromise in making it happen (represented by the man who gives Indy his fedora), well, then it would be nice to see that seeded in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles––if we are meant to think of those adventures as part of Indy's own grand narrative.

Running on fumes, and repeating the same barely-founded counter, but... I think we DO.

The Indy of Raiders is compellingly torn between being a decent guy and getting the job done, between being an outlaw––which he is frequently expected to be––and being the one guy after this object with anything resembling a conscience, between sacrificing the people he maybe cares about in the name of archeological discovery, and giving up the knowledge of history for people he only sort of cares about (how much Indy cares about Marion is a frequent, open question throughout Raiders). Those choices Indy makes are at the center of the film's themes.

I can see that, but I still tend to disagree. He may be a flawed hero and clearly operating on the fringes of the law, but he's Pulp Hero and Superhero through-and-through - i.e. He Is Right. He is Batman. He is Doc Savage. He's doing The Right Thing for the Right Reasons, and while there are (very) brief moments where he vaccilates between doing something that could compromise that integrity, he always makes The Right Choice and always saves Marion.

These later pictures make a confusing hash of these ideas. The Indy of Temple of Doom isn't confronted with these questions so directly (more of that film is a rollercoaster ride than collection of moral conundrums), and the Indy of Last Crusade is cast as largely a nice guy, perhaps less tempted than his former self, simply because he has his dad to scold him constantly––effectively keeping him far shy of moral compromise throughout (you could make the claim that Indys dad dominating Last Crusade deprives Indy of more personal character evolution).

(I've warmed up to Temple, but my recollection for years was that it was the definite low point between the excellent Raiders and even better Crusade. Temple is very simplistic in its Good (Indy) vs Evil (Mola Ram) where Raiders and Crusade managed to allow for shades of grey.. well, slightly lighter black even when the villains were literal Nazis and their agents.)

Crusade is so enjoyable because of the dynamic - Indy is used to being the hero and the smartest man in the room, but here he is constantly reminded that many of his best traits came from imitating (or, slightly paradxoically, rebelling against) his father. They even share a taste in women. He also rankles the whole film at the comparison, which to me could even be seen to demonstrate greater depth of character than seen anywhere else.

The guy in Crystal Skull has made no progress on these questions.

Least said the better.

Corto Maltese is instructive here, because Corto faces moral choices at every stage of his character evolution...

So I also went looking for my Hugo Pratt books, discovered them missing and now feel compelled to track down out-of-print and escalating-in-price books to read, re-read and cross-compare with Henry Jones. Thank you for that!

...he's no grave robber: he's a respected academic and an archaelogist driven by (sharing) history. He's recovering the idol so that it may be seen by the world, and while the idol is clearly sacred or important, my reading was never that they were there to stop it being stolen, but that Belocq had promised them something (maybe the idol, maybe not) to help him - they were there as backup, not to independantly guard the temple.

It's very possible to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and to read Indiana Jones not as a hero, per se, but just as an at least occasionally nasty guy who shepherds us from one adventure to the next, all of whose efforts lead to very little. He is visually and aurally coded as threatening––maybe even the bad guy––from the first minute he appears. What softens that image at first is that everyone else we meet in the first scene––aside from the Hovitos themselves––are pretty bad guys, too. What separates them from Indy is almost only their trickery. Alfred Molina ditches Indy without his whip, the other guy just tries to shoot him in the back, and Belloq simply outsmarts him, turning the Hovitos on him. But the way I read the situation, it's very clear that Indy has rolled up to take the idol of the indigenous people––not taking it from the remains of an extinct society, but appropriating it from one that is––whether fooled by Belloq or not––still intent on protecting this idol against theft (at least theft by the unworthy––Belloq presents himself as having earned the right to command its' fate before the tribe). He is literally stealing this tribe's golden relic, intending to abscond with it to another country, and then he means to personally profit by selling it to a museum. That's not for the benefit of the world, that's theft of an indigenous tribe's cultural history, and the tribe has every right to determine the fate of the relic for themselves. It's pretty clear from that opening scene Indy has not asked the Hovitos for the idol.

I can't agree with the thesis there - but again, will consider all this next time I watch them - the temple is overgrown and abandoned. It may yet be a sacred site, and certainly he's walking the archaeologist tightrope of desecration vs. education, but I don't think it's for "personal profit" (reimbursement of travel costs, sure, but you imply a finder's fee or ransom that bothers me) and the idol has clearly been unseen and untouched within living memory. Quite what Belloq has said (read: lied) to the Hovitos may be debatable, and perhaps some of Indy's hero-ness is due to the comparison between on-screen characters, but just as much as his Han Solo/leading man charm. He's disheveled after days in a jungle, not coded as a threat to me.

And throughout the movie Indy is challenged to value the girl, Marion, over the ark––and he repeatedly fails to make good when pressed to choose the girl. But in the end, all he ends up with is the girl––and he seems disappointed... [punished?] for his really out-of-whack priorities. He leaves Marion prisoner so he can get the ark. He can't bring himself to complete his ransom of the ark for Marion. In the end, the ark takes matters out of the confused Dr. Jones' hands and settles accounts, the government takes things out of Dr. Jones' hands twice over, and he is left with Marion––who he repeatedly valued less than the ark––almost as a form of punishment for his own hubris.

Vehement disagreement. He's after the Ark a) for it's historical/religious significance, b) because of it's importance to his mentor, Abner Ravenwood and c) to stop Hitler harnessing the Wrath of God and winning the war. And I don't think those three elements can be separated - or even ranked - in his mind. So the Ark's recovery is CRITICAL. And yet, he can't help but be torn because of Marion - there may be ambiguity and history, but it's blindingly obvious in my mind that if it must be a straight choice, she is more important. But, that's the bigger picture quandary all fictional heroes face - what matters more - THE WHOLE WORLD or Your Person? We all know the answer. We all know that the personal element creates tension. And we all know that the real answer to "A or B?" is the Batman Conpromise - "C: Both." And that's what he does. Marion must remain prisoner for the plan to work (and she knows it, too), and at the finale, his being deprived of the glory and reality of putting the Ark on display undercuts that "C" victory. The 'right' answer (The Girl) has a pall thrown over it because it isn't The Girl AND-.

I don't think I necessarily agree that Skull marginalized Indy's action role by bringing in his son. I admit this feels like some film executive's desperate hope for further franchising, but the film, as I saw it, continues to demand action as the defining value of Indys presence. Maybe LaBeouf was meant to shoulder a few scenes more than Harrison Ford, but the film still turns on how Indy fights his way out of desperate situations and bad odds. He's guiding his son to do the same thing he's doing, which makes the film feel very redundant––and the casting of Shia LaBeouf wasn't a wonderful choice here, to my mind (in fact, bringing in Indy's sort-of "family" wasn't a good idea as it was presented in the movie). But movies live or die not on some empirical quality of their ideas, but on the accompanying tone or valence the idea is given as it integrates into the existing drama of the piece. To me, the mistake the later movies have made is to treat the character of Indiana Jones as a series of visceral moviegoing experiences rather than as a thematic idea of a character––so Indiana Jones is a cracking loud punch, the snap of a whip, Ford's reluctant grumble, the quest for the fabled artifact, the characters we've seen before, the insane action, uncommon vehicles, the sourpuss wisecracks. Later addendums seem to include some member of Indy's family tree, a betrayal by a trusted ally, nazis (or, in Crystal Skull, Soviets that essentially stand in for nazis mostly interchangeably), necessary costume pieces, etc.

Again, the least said the better.. but, as mentioned briefly, I found it hamstrung by the (wrongheaded) decision to Further The Franchise, as per Superman Returns. It reeks of studio insert and meddling - and also of retroactive cold feet over same. I didn't intend to say it DID marginalise the Indy action, I meant to say (I believe) it was INTENDED that way - bring in a surrogate and place the continuing franchise on his shoulders! Son of Indy! And then they say what they had wrought and backpeddled, but it was too late. Maybe.

At the end of the day, I just don't quite buy Harrison Ford as the action star when he's 80, regardless of what he can do. I would have liked a movie that positioned the character of Indiana Jones to take advantage of the more plausible and potentially compelling material Harrison Ford can create as an late septuagenarian/octogenarian––while taking the literary character of Indiana Jones in a direction worth developing. I really doubt that's what's going on in the new movie; but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

This is really at the heart of the wider issue of Belated Sequels - the Rockys and Terminators and Star Treks and Star Warses et al. - where the audience expectations (and Studio Suits' Opinions of Expected Expectations) are that we want more of the same. And that's just not feasible without changing something - so some bring in surrogates and are disappointing, while others don't and are unbelievable. Or, occasionally, both.

[aox]

Despite the weird headline, Spielberg apparently liked it

Though, I don’t think he would say anything differently.

[Finch]

Reviews out of Cannes are mixed. David Ehrlich gave it a C and Owen Gleiberman's Variety review sounds similarly unexcited about the film. David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter didn't like it either, calling it an exhausting slog. But not to worry, Bob Iger says he's seen the movie five times already (while allegedly disliking The Last Jedi), so it's all good!