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Comments
I can’t believe they had the woman do all the work just to make Indy look dumb and befuddled. Woke gone too far!
Even if this movie is really good ( which is really doubtful ) the idea of selling an octogenarian action hero to a modern day cinema audience ( which like it or not skews young ) is a tough sell.Given that the out of control budget raised to over a 300 million ( not counting marketing costs ), Indy 5 has to make in the region of 900 million to a billion just to break EVEN.
The last film in the series ( despite being bad ) had the nostalgia and benefit of the goodwill of the classic trilogy giving it must see status.It’s looking more and more likely that Indy 5 is going to be a financial flop.
“Hey, SKYFALL is the highest grossing Bond film! Good for them!”
“Oh yeah?! But it doesn’t beat DR. NO’s ROI, does it?! What a failure!”
Personally I'm more worried about whether I have a fun time watching it than whether some rich shareholders get a good cut. And if they spent too much money on it and it shows up on screen... well then good.
That's a lovely clip. I like the water displacement idea.
The clip looks good.
I never hated it. It’s not as good as the first three, but I never thought it was the travesty so many claim it to be. Also thought Ford and LaBeouf had very good chemistry.
I always felt Mutt was overhated because so many people were upset at the idea of him taking over from Indy that they couldn’t just take him as just another sidekick character like Short Round or Professor Jones Sr. But rather thinking Lucas and Spielberg were trying to prop him up for something bigger for the franchise, and now that seems to be an issue Phoebe Waller Bridge has to deal with (she’ll probably get a spin-off TV series at best, but I doubt she’ll take the mantle when it comes to theatrical films, even if DoD does great at the box office).
I always thought LeBoeuf is absolutely fine in it; he’s no Connery-style charisma matcher to Ford, but he’s not annoying in a role which really could be. The problem is that the story doesn’t really have a good idea for him to fill.
Very cool moment from the premiere last night:
(Also, it’s full of precisely the kind of ‘arcaneology’ that was very popular in the Cold War period — which is spot on for Indy’s origins and concept.)
I do agree about the arcaneology (great word!) - I think the ancient aliens thing is spot on for Indy and works well. But the script just needed more passes. Why does Spalko break into Area 51 in the beginning for example? What use is the alien she steals?
I always thought it was the catalyst of the overall story. To let the audience know that Indy would be dealing with UFO's and Aliens along the way.
I get what you're saying though, there's no real reason for the Ruskies to obtain the alien corpse.
Bit vague though, and she already seems pretty certain. Really in a plot like this, it needed to have been something which then lead her to find the macguffin itself, like the medallion in Raiders. As it is it's just a body she does nothing with.
Maybe if it had somehow granted her some of the mindreading properties she claims to have, and that had told her the location of the skull... maybe that would have added together a bit more.
But the film has so many saggy bits like that. I think the worst thing it does is fail to give anyone particularly big motivations to do any of it (there's pretty much no reason for any of them to keep going after the waterfall bit)- not least Indy has no massively movie-worthy motivation to go on the adventure in the first place. A strange kid turns up saying he's the son of a woman he doesn't remember, telling him a guy he knew years ago but found quite boring has gone missing, whilst in search of a skull that Indy thinks is worthless. I mean, it's not massively compelling stuff, is it? Luckily Indy has just lost his job, so he literally has nothing better to do.
Compare to 'your father has vanished, and you have to stop Hitler's armies of darkness walking across the Earth'.
That makes sense for the ark with the talk of levelling mountains etc but not so much for the Grail.
Immortality in the hands of evil would lead to just as much destruction.
It just so happens that they were wrong anyway - in the sense that in order to maintain immortality you seemingly would have to stay within the grail site.
Well the grail has to stay there, but there's nothing to say that its effects don't remain if you leave the site. Both Henry and Indy have their injuries healed by it after all, and their wounds don't reappear when they leave.
Admittedly how useful this is to an army in Europe is up for question, but I guess it seems certain that the top Nazis would have lived effectively forever.
The Ark is shown to be an effective weapon in the book Indy has; if the Nazis had learned how to control it (and if it had gone to Berlin it's hard to imagine they wouldn't have continued to experiment on it, no matter how many German soldiers it killed) then it may well have been a major threat in their hands.
Yes, this. It's not as good as RAIDERS or LAST CRUSADE, but if I had to watch either of the other two, i'd rather rewatch CRYSTAL SKULLS.
Oh it def needed more passes… Ray Winstones character is unbelievably badly written. Clumsy insert, that goes back and forth in a way that stops being funny pretty quick. She wants the alien skull because she reckons it will (a) lead her to the others and (b) is sold on the idea of it increasing her telepathic powers. They basically say that on screen.
Doom has not aged well, and there’s a sort of… nastiness to it, hanging around the edges. Crusade does a better job all around, and even the ‘Indy Girl’ (since Jones was at least in part inspired by Bond…) is significantly better and treated better by the script, despite being an actual Nazi Villain.
The worst parts in Skull are not as annoying and ultimately easier to gloss over than the worst parts in Temple. (Crusade as well has a couple of silly moments that are easy to gloss over mentally.)
At the end of the day, the movie where the hero beats the child sidekick and featuring some unironic questionable stereotypes, is gonna be hard to beat at the bottom of the pack. There’s a lot of eighties Schlock in there, and it is of its time — unlike the others which have a timeless quality. It’s why ‘The Mummy’ with Brendan Fraser later used the template so well, getting that style just right.
Skull actually improves with rewatches, whereas Doom actually goes in the other direction.
I am kinda looking forward to this new one.
She says the New Mexico one 'gave them hope' because it had a crystal skeleton, unlike the previous ones they'd found in Russia; and she thinks it may have been looking for the Akator ones too, but I'm not sure she says much else about it..?
I would love to see a Hollywood script doctor give their take on the KOTCS script. Because I love all of that theory about how good stories work, and you can tell that KOTCS's just doesn't add up to be a satisfying story. Indy and Mutt don't really have a relationship which grows or goes anywhere really, for example, and so many characters just lack motivation.
I saw someone suggest that Spalko shouldn't have died at the end for example, but that she should have got her wish of the Skull giving her all the knowledge, but it proves too much and pushes her into insanity. So the film ends with her in a Peruvian asylum, babbling on about string theory and the secret to nuclear fission etc. but where no-one will ever hear her. I thought that's lovely, and a nice parallel to the famous ending of Raiders.