Indiana Jones 5 and the Inevitable Hopelessness of it All

2 and 4 were just so overwhelmingly racist, harking back to the good ol’ days when brown people had no sense of agency, that I can’t stand them. It makes the weird racial parts of 1 and 3 seem unforgivable in retrospect.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8466065381869534785#

Ahem.

So you haven’t watched The History Channel in the last couple years or what?

Patton Oswalt routines don’t change the fact that Temple is the worst of the original three by a wide margin, and part of my dislike of Crystal Skull comes from how similar it is to Temple.

Oh shit man, I missed all the shows where they display the ark and the grail and pass them around the room to all the people there so they too can partake in–

OH right. Those shows don’t happen. Which is what I was talking about. There are tons of shows about where they might be, just like they have tons of shows about where Atlantis might be and why Hitler was the Atlantian Jesus or whatever. Whereas with the Crystal Skulls, they have closeup shots of them and people have been able to touch/handle them, and they like to put cuts together of Maya scholars with crazy people, which sort of pisses those scholars off later when they realize how they got played.

There’s still mystery to the ark and the grail because they’re legend and no one is holding them up for public display. Not so much the crystal skulls.

I don’t recall any alien skulls on the crystal skull shows, actually. Just like the Ark and the Grail, Crystal Skull takes a piece of archeological legend and actualizes it in the context of an adventure film. The concept is rock solid, the execution was the problem. A great Indy movie about the crystal skull “mythology” is absolutely possible. Just, you know, not from Lucas and Spielberg at this point in their careers.

The difference being that the legends of the Ark and Grail are hundreds of years old. While the mythology of the crystal skulls goes back to the mid 1800s.

And even then they knew it was bullshit.

(Yeah, you can’t read the article. Trust me, crystal skulls are among the spurious Mexican antiquities mentioned.)

Indiana Jones and the Da Vinci Code: a cerebral rollercoaster ride.

Yeah, none of the crystal skulls have any provenance, so I don’t know of any archaeologists that actually take them seriously. You want archaeological mythology, you look at the Phaistos disk (found after lunch, probably forged but if not, the first example of moveable press) or the Ivory Snake Goddess in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (showed up in a cigar box and it’s authenticity is debated what with the lack of provenance, but at least there are examples of things like it that were actually dug up and recorded). The crystal skulls just showed up in shops. The only one that was claimed to have been dug up during an actual dig was a> not recorded anywhere in the dig journals and you’d think something like that would make it in there and b> the woman that claimed to have made the find was not recalled to have ever actually been there.

They might as well have done Indiana Jones and Piltdown Man.

I don’t really think it’s a coincidence that of the four Indy films the two best have two things in common. Nazis and Christian mythology.

Still, Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Golden Plates would have made for quite the actioner.

As opposed to archeologists who take the Holy Grail seriously? Come on. A legend is a legend, and fertile ground for an Indy adventure. It was just a bad script, not a bad concept.

They might as well have done Indiana Jones and Piltdown Man.

Change that to Indiana Jones and the Missing Link and you might have the seed of an interesting story.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. The Grail and the Ark are ancient myths that have inspired weird hunts over the centuries from the Crusades to Hitler. The crystal skulls? Pretty much a known hoax. Hence the Piltdown Man comparison and why it’s a sucky, lazy thing to try to link to Indiana Jones, Adventure Archaeologist!

“Chilled monkey brains.”

Eyeball soup. :] /love that scene

See, personally I don’t think the problem with Indy 4 was the aliens or the crystal skulls or even the fact that Indy has a kid. It’s all about the script and the execution, both of which were mediocre 90% of the time with some occasional reminders of what it was that was great about the franchise and most of those reminders were provided by Ford, who was pitch-perfect as Indy.

The Communists were a bit of a mis-step for the most part as well; occultism doesn’t really leap to mind when you think of the Soviets in the same way as it does when you think of the Nazis.

They could have kept the Nazi angle by having a group of ex-Nazis (possible including Josef Mengele) attempting to resurrect a battalion of German soldiers who are entombed at the bottom of the lake. Or something.

Again, it doesn’t matter. Execution and writing can make anything of the occult nature work in an Indiana Jones context if it’s done correctly. It doesn’t matter how storied the fictional object is, it matters how well the script is written. The crystal skull story/hoax is absolutely fertile ground for an Indy-style story, they just fucked it up. You’re way too wrapped up in the Macguffin here.

Someone didn’t read Declare.

Good heavens, that book was awesome. Why can’t that be made into a movie?

</derail>

I still can’t bring myself to sit down and watch Crystal Skull given commentary by many and shows like Southpark’s send up. Star Wars prequels were bad enough.

Rifftraxis really helpful in these situations.