General Indiana Jones Thread

Great, getting into "I said you said" nonsense.

I never said that's what you guys were saying (invalidating your strawman claim), I was saying these types of conversations end up going that direction because someone somewhere will balk at giving a non-white person a negative trait.

Hence hoping we all agree that non-white actors can be villains, I was asking how to tell the story of Temple of Doom without being perceived as racist.

People balk at non-white characters having negative traits when said traits are racist. That's another strawman.

It'd be difficult to actually be able to fix Temple of Doom and make it racism free when the racism in it is built so deep into the story's fabric. Personally I'd suggest moving the location entirely or, failing that, toning down Mola Ram's crazy practices. No heart ripping, no Aztec looking sacrifices, make him more like a charismatic cult leader who seems reasonable but is really just a murderous, well, thug. Maybe have some Indians explain how his beliefs deviate from Hinduism to further the distinction between the actual beliefs and Ram's nonsense. Maybe even make the titular temple some kind of lodge similar to Branch Davidians or something.

Additionally, I'd add a character who is firmly on the good side and who is Indian, gets some kind of focus and development, and who is the deutaragonist or something. The biggest difficulty in this case would he how to deal with the British Raj, and frankly I have no idea how to fix that. The setting can't happen without them unless it were in an entire other region.

Nobody has done this which makes this claim yet another strawman.

Not really a strawman when I'm talking about first hand experience of what people have complained about. This includes such things as doing very little in the plot or making tactical mistakes.

I do agree that the biggest problem is ultimately not allowing the local village to have control over their own fate. Give Indy a local ally to travel to the temple or find one inside to help undermine the entire infrastructure. If the British do come to the rescue it is to provide back up. As a kid I always thought them arriving was a Deus ex Machina, and even today knowing more about the Indian/British history it still feels that way.

Literally no one has done that in this conversation.

Personally I'd just replace Willie with an Indian character out to fight the Thuggee. Willie is ultimately a really useless character built on sexist stereotypes who does nothing but scream, complain, get rescued, and get generally abused by Spielberg and Lucas's writing.

^^ Mighty Whitey was discussed several times, and it is a subtextually racist trope where the problem is that the non-white people are passive and ineffectual. It doesn't take much to go straight for "passive, ineffectual" as racist traits while forgetting the context. The whole conversation about German Nazis, Russian Soviets and Indian Thuggee was heading down a weird path trying to prove the Thuggee were not as bad as the others, it's why I was saying these discussions tend to go sideways and nowhere productive.

I rarely feel the same animosity towards disliked characters as others, but I get how Willie was disliked for constantly being a Hysterical Woman. I do see some value in that Willie does toughen up over the course of the film (specifically the spiked wall scene), but the joke was overplayed and she doesn't quite toughen up enough to be worth it.

So you were strawmanning. Because nobody was arguing "passive and ineffectual" were racist traits void of context. The film's a very blatant case of the Mighty Whitey trope.

Weird path? Trying to prove? Between the Final Solution proper and various other acts of genocide the Nazi regime killed eleven million people or so (and that's not counting the dead from the war itself). The Soviet regime under Stalin was responsible for at least six or seven million dead, once you factor in the Holodomor, the Kazakh famine, the Great Terror, the Kulak operations, etc. Both regimes piled up those dead in a decade or less. The Thuggee—who in real life were extinct by 1870, meaning the film resurrected them to justify their Orientalist caricature—don't come close to that. According to the most reputable, modern scholarly estimates they killed about 50 000 people over the course of over 150 years.

Nazism and Stalinism have a bodycount orders of magnitude worse than the Thuggee. They also actually existed in the time period the film was set in, and didn't require Orientalist caricature to present.

[[mod-removed per above post]]

Sorry; made my post before you made yours. In any case, if this puts a stop to this BS, I'm all for it.

edited 25th Jan '18 6:48:28 PM by nombretomado

...So anyway, what is everyone's personal favorite movie in the series? Mine's Last Crusade. It's got comedy, it's got heart, it's got Sean Connery when he was still great...it's just an overall good movie to me. It's clear that whatever issues Spielberg had when making Temple of Doom were more or less resolved when he made Last Crusade.

Last Crusade will always be my favorite of the franchise. Connery is a welcome inclusion but what I love the most are the jokes in there. Compared to Raiders and Temple, it's lighter than the both of them (minus Donovan drinking the wrong grail and Doc Brown-ing himself to death) and it actually kinda works. Makes for a fun romp with how all of the characters bounce off of each other.

Donovan's death scared the hell out of me as a child. I do like Last Crusade, but I think Ark has a more stripped-down-to-basics quality that keeps me coming back for more.

Some time ago a local theater did a showing of the films, and I went so I could see them on the big screen and critique them from being older with a more refined understanding of films and stories. Raiders remained my favorite, the use of light and shadow, the stunt work (especially the truck chase) and the production design really stands out. The other films aren't bad, but Raiders makes pretty much every scene a classic while something about Temple of Doom and Last Crusade feels less refined. Last Crusade comes in second mostly because Sean Connery was hysterical in the role and the interactions between him and Ford basically saves the film, but the cinematography and production design was really subpar compared to the previous films, less interesting locations and overall a more tv-movie feel to it. Temple of Doom has the better cinematography and action scenes compared to Last Crusade, the bridge fight is still amazing.

And while Crystal Skull had its moments, it just isn't in the same category. Excessive humor, too much cg, not enough genuine stunt work and bland set design.

I remembered being creeped out by it as a kid but not as badly as I've heard other people were. I guess it didn't exactly help that he looked like Doc Brown partway through and it went from terrifying to hilarious instantly.

Raiders I feel has the better visuals but Crusade had the better humor and character bits for me. I actually liked Marcus Brody a lot in this one because of them playing him up into being such a silly airhead. True, it makes me wonder how this is the same guy who was backing up Indy in Raiders and who didn't show any bit of that silliness, but I mean, I can't really complain much. I still wonder how Indy keeps his job anyways, but then that's just part of the charm for me.

Crystal Skull I still feel gets a bad rap, but the one thing I do hold against it is the CGI. It's so damn shoddy, I hate it. I'm not one of those "practical effects are king" types but the CG in there is so overdone and distracting, I hate it. Especially with the damn spider monkeys. It's a shame though, LaBeouf really got too much hate for this film. He's not outwardly bad or anything, I think the issue is partially because he's playing the son of an 80's pop culture icon, so people got really mad about that role being given to the guy from Transformers. Was there ever any serious reason people disliked LaBeouf?

Crusade definitely came with the heart, something that got lost in Temple of Doom with all the satanic imagery, gross out gags and general mean-spirited feel.

Labeouf is really a fine actor, which has been shown in a number of other works (both leading up to Transformers and after), but for him the Hollywood Hype Machine was more about being piggybacked on to existing franchises, which had diminishing returns. He does an alright job as Mutt, the problem is really that Mutt was a rather poorly defined character beyond the greaser stereotype and the reveal that he is Indy's son. A decent, energetic performance does not always translate to an engaging character. What should have been done with Mutt was make him more invested with learning the mythology of the crystal skull, as instead it felt like Mutt was just there to marvel that Indy was still active in his old age.

The overall franchise was defined by the incredible stunts they pulled off, the previous films used plenty of visual effects but it never diminished or overshadowed the physical stunts. I'm thinking about outrunning the water in the mine shaft, obviously they weren't really 200 feet above a ravine but the actual water coming out of the cave set and the actors scrambling as dirt pathways turn to collapsing mud feels genuine and exciting. In Crystal Skull things like the rocket sled, the monkey/Tarzan swing and the sword duel between the jeeps relied in the visual effects to make it exciting.

This occurred to me during another discussion but...has anyone ever noticed that the first Got G is basically the first Indiana Jones in Space? I mean, you have the opening scene with the treasure which has to be retrieved under great personal danger. You have different groups fighting over a McGuffin for different reason, with the hero team occasionally fighting each other. You have the villains getting the McGuffin and then bringing it elsewhere to wreck destruction and the heroes following them. Well, the Got G actually does something to rescue the world in the movie while Indiana Jones doesn't, but I have the feeling that James Gun took a lot of inspiration from Indiana Jones.

Not saying those things aren't there, but they're hardly something that Indiana Jones invented, or used for the first or last time before GOTG came out. They're both riffing on some fairly standard tropes of adventure/quest stories.

That being said, I don't doubt that James Gunn is one of the many influences on James Gunn's pop sensibilities.

edited 27th Jan '18 4:01:09 PM by Unsung

I mean, there's a reason why Chris Pratt has been suggested by many people as a potential replacement for Harrison Ford. There's definitely some traces of Indiana Jones in Guardians of the Galaxy, I wouldn't doubt Gunn took it as a significant influence.

Well, naturally not, because Indiana Jones itself was a riff on the serials of the old. But there are a few aspects which are soooooo Indiana Jones. Especially the opening sequence.

The problem with Lebouf in both Transformers and Crystal Skull is that the characters he was given had very little going for them. Sam from Transformers was a bland This Loser Is You Vanilla Protagonist that has no real pull, charisma or anything all that interesting going on. Mutt's a bit better I think, but he suffers from not being that interesting as well.

Anyway...

Filming for Indiana Jones 5 starts in 2019!

Side note: Spielberg is apparently doing a movie on West Side Story immediately afterwards.

Everyone knock on wood so that Harrison Ford doesn't die before they're done filming.

I've said this before, but I really hope they do a Lost World thing with living dinosaurs, maybe set in the Congo, where according to legend, dinosaurs still live. Indiana Jones is perfect for that, and there's no rule about having dinosaurs in two major Spielberg-adjacent film franchises. Maybe these dinos can be scientifically accurate to differentiate them from Jurassic Park's theme park monsters.

Edited for clarity.

edited 30th Jan '18 10:27:10 PM by ThriceCharming

Depends on if Spielberg feels like he'll be repeating himself too much on that. If what I've heard of him making Mutt a guy instead of a girl because he'd already done a father-daughter thing in the second Jurassic Park is true, than he might not.