General Indiana Jones Thread

Any info on the upcoming film?

Jesus, really? Father-daughter was barely a thing in The Lost World.

Never seen The Lost World so I legitimately cannot compare it, but I could kinda tell it was a stupid reason to not give Indy a daughter.

...I think Crystal Skull is a fine movie, and Shia Lebouf did nothing wrong.

...he hasn't actually done anything wrong has he? This is gonna be a lot less funny if he's said something racist or done something sexist like danm near everyone in Hollywood has these days.

Outside of plagiarism from like years ago, not really. If anything he's kinda been Vindicated by History and turned into a meme...and then 4Chan harassed him.

I think you can have Indiana Jones rescue people who aren't white and it not be a Mighty Whitey scenario as there's a specificness to whiteness which needs to be acknowledged. The heart of the Mighty Whitey is the white man has to be superior to the locals by virtue of being a white guy.

So you could easily have Indiana Jones in an Indian-based adventure without it being racist.

That movie is not the Temple of Doom as the sheer IGNORANCE on display is pretty indefensible.

edited 29th May '18 10:55:48 PM by CharlesPhipps

I mean, of course you can easily have Indiana Jones do that. Actually respect the culture and have a character who's just as competent as him with a lot of screentime too.

The irony is there's attempts in the movie.

They're just....badly handled.

But the whole thing is so misunderstood and badly handled, I'm not even sure how you could rewrite it. It's kind of like The Lone Ranger. Disney, obviously, DEEPLY wanted this to be a non-racist Western.

Except.....yeah, not happening.

It's written into the core DNA of the story.

edited 29th May '18 10:58:34 PM by CharlesPhipps

More or less; they can't all be Winnetou, I reckon. Meanwhile, I'm generally of the opinion that one way to retool a sidekick-type character that doesn't involve giving him Kato-level hypercompetence is to try and specialize both them and the respective hero in particular areas - be it brains and brawn, smash and shoot, field ops and mission control, that sort of thing.

For that matter, I'd say a line can be drawn between a blatant example of mighty whiteyism - such as in Avatar, where Jake ends up literally better at being a space elf than the actual space elves - and a story where the main character is a more competent fighter or scholar than the locals, simply because he's a very competent fighter and scholar to begin with - and for Indiana Jones, that's pretty much his thing. It's a bit more difficult to utilize the aforementioned specialization when the character was meant to be a Renaissance Man, someone who'd stand out in any society.

Instead, a good approach would be to focus on him as assisting in a specialized capacity. Not as a grand white savior come to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and introduce a four-day work week. But merely a guy who's rather knowledgeable in antiques, fluent in a variety of languages, decent with a wheelgun, and likely useful for handling a particular problem the locals have right now.

Well, either that or just stick him in Eastern Europe, since that's still one of the places completely acceptable to portray as a backwater shithole for the magnanimous westerners to save. Besides, movie-wise, one of the few pop-culture-familiar cultures of antiquity he hasn't explored is Hellenistic Greece, so that oughta work decent enough.

Another option - looking for Excalibur in some sparsely populated British isle. Again, popular relic, rarely explored location, and of course, lots of white people, so nobody important gets offended. It can even come pre-packaged with a generic British villain, since that's another thing still on the menu.

One thing that was lost after Raiders when Indiana Jones became another good guy was the fact that Indy was originally an Antihero. He was deliberately a thief, a graverobber, and a person who was barely better than Belloq.

When I was an adult, I was surprised that George Lucas said in an interview, "He straight up robs the Amazons of their cultural treasure and does so because it's shiny and will make him famous. It's only after he confronts the Ark that he realizes the value of the treasures to the people he's stealing from."

Which blew my mind. I mean, as an adult I knew Indy was doing that but I didn't realize GEORGE knew that.

edited 30th May '18 9:11:08 AM by CharlesPhipps

Lucas specializes in high-production-value genre throwbacks, warts and all, so this includes protagonists that might raise some red flags nowadays. Indie himself is far-less an archaeologist than he is a schoolteacher moonlighting as, indeed, a grave robber. He embodies the ever-popular fantasy of the seemingly average guy with an adventure-packed secret life, so it's only expected for him to exhibit some of the more unwholesome and immature aspects of that concept. Including, in this case, the treatment of priceless historical and religious relics as mere souvenirs, tokens of his own accomplishment, rather than possessing of objective value. The Ark, the Stones and the Grail are all regarded as, for all intents and purposes, weapons to be kept away from the bad guys. The Skull was the one object in the films that was treated with genuine curiosity, even at the expense of going for sci-fi instead of fantasy. So in that regard, there's at least some progress there.

Mind sourcing that interview? Genuinely curious about this. Might make me rewatch Raiders with that in mind.

Sadly, it's paraphrasing a magazine. It's one of those things which stuck with me when I was obsessed with Indy around age 14 but hadn't been thinking too much about the implications of the movie making.

But yes, George Lucas is a guy who I think has the biggest problem of needing someone to reign him in as he's an amazing idea man.

It's just...not all his ideas are good.

"I've got our next movie, Steve....a Pulp version of GUNGA DIN!"

"...no, George."

edited 30th May '18 10:00:58 AM by CharlesPhipps

I recall Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of the Titanic, really hates Indiana Jones for graverobbing and has even refused to divulge the locations of some of his later discoveries because he doesn’t want them to become tourist attractions the same way the Titanic’s ruins did.

I think an animated Indiana Jones film would be an interesting take on the series. Granted they wouldn't do my ideal project (adaptation of Fate of Atlantis) but depending on the style they went with, its a movie that could do some really out there concepts visually.

Some years ago I had a chance to meet a gentleman who for a long time wrote licensed Indiana Jones novels; he'd been doing it since shortly after Raiders was released, and he talked about the tonal shift in the character after the first film, too. In the first couple of books he wrote, Indy was much shadier, but after awhile he started getting notes from Lucasfilm to make him more conventionally heroic. I've read stuff from around the time that Raiders came out, too, and a number of people comment on Indy's anti-heroism. It's strange looking at it now and seeing how different Indy's persona is as a school teacher and as a field man, too. It's like Clark Kent and Superman.

It's a funny thing, but I've seen the kind of reaction Charles Phipps mentions quite a bit, where someone thinks their reaction to a film or to ideas raised by a film or a character aren't what the filmmaker had in mind, when in fact they are. For some reason it's hard for us to imagine that the filmmaker wants us to see the hero of the boisterous adventure film as a morally ambiguous, disillusioned anti-hero.

edited 1st Jun '18 2:00:48 PM by Robbery

Yeah, it's not an Alternate Character Interpretation of Indy, it's Truer to the Text.

Makes it kind of weird given that Temple of Doom takes place before Raiders but Indy is supposed to be more heroic in there.

It's also kinda weird since in Raiders he's like 'You know I don't believe in magic!' and stuff.

They did not have sequels in mind when making the first one XD

Since Indy was based on Two-Fisted Tales I'm guessing the dissonance was kinda deliberate.

edited 1st Jun '18 4:38:46 PM by lalalei2001

Well Indiana Jones has severe personality shifts in Temple.

He, after all, is selling the ashes of an Imperial Chinese Emperor to a Hong Kong gangster. Which is not only grave robbery but defilement.

Though I wouldn't put it past this Indy to be selling him the contents of an ashtray.

edited 1st Jun '18 5:28:16 PM by CharlesPhipps

I would appreciate not using mental illness as an adjective, thank you.

What's your opinion on Indiana Jones in the film?

Little scummy I guess? I'd need to rewatch it but, of course, I'm not overly fond of Temple as a film.

Temple has its moments but it's damn near impossible to enjoy after attaining even base-level wokeness.

Not even base level wokeness, I hated it when I was younger because of Willy being really annoying.