General Indiana Jones Thread

You ever hear of Operation Paperclip?

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to tie that into the movie.

Oh yeah, that was very convenient of the US. Basically taking the cream of the crop of German scientific development for themselves.

That's not even the tip of the iceberg with regard to post-WWII collaborations between fascists and members of the Allies (minus the USSR).

Oh, I know. Take all that hypothermia research. Later researches just quietly took over the findings and found ways to reproduce them in a more... humane fashion. That sort of thing.

I was more referring to how the U.S. government and other forces willingly and knowingly allowed ex-Nazis to join NATO, the West German government, and the Bundeswehr, campaigned for the early release of convicted Nazis, and promoted the myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht" which has plagued discourse surrounding German war crimes in WWII for decades, all because they wanted to stick it to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Space Race? Will there be aliens in this?

It would be justified, at least. Aliens on the moon!

"You ever hear of Operation Paperclip?

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to tie that into the movie."

Mangold has flat-out said he's tying that into the movie. The villain (played by Mads Mikkelson) is an ex-Nazi working in the US space program who apparently hasn't really given up his Nazi ways. From what I understand, the central conflict isn't about space or the space program, of which the film (at least what little I've heard of it) seems to take a bit of a dim view (it seems to take the view that there's nothing out there worth getting—not really contradicting Crystal Skull as those aliens were extra-dimensional rather than what we generally think of as extra-terrestrial—or at least not worth spending tons of resources for).

Edited by Robbery on Nov 20th 2022 at 12:22:39 PM

So how's Ford's health and condition? Is he going to be able to deliver a good performance?

He's evidently still pretty spry, and Indy seems to be one of the handful of roles he gives a shit about, so I don't see why not.

I really hope there's a joke in the movie where one character goes "Wow! Space travel! I wonder if we'll ever find extraterrestrial life?" and Indy's in the corner looking embarrassed as he desperately tries to change the subject.

There's no way that isn't going to come up, no.

I think the backlash to the previous movie might mean they'll make quieter references

Is there still backlash, though?

Honestly, I always found the backlash a bit overblown. You got supernatural artefacts, ghosts, witchcraft, but aliens are off-limits? It was still connected to archaeology, so I felt it was fine to have aliens.

And those crystal skulls were real artefacts, too, though they turned out to be fake (damn Victorians again!). There were also paranormal claims associated with them. The forgeries were only discovered in 1967, though, so it fits with the Indy timeline that they treated them as real, I suppose.

Film Crit Hulk had an interesting article about Crystal Skull earlier this summer. He argued that the fandom's problem with the movie was never aliens or Mutt or the refrigerator, it's that it had a lot of narrative pitfalls but audiences didn't know how to talk about them so they just latched on the most obvious tangible details and pointed to them as the problem. Same reason why people acted like the problems with the Star Wars prequels were politics scenes and shiny aesthetics when the real issues were more complicated than that.

Personally, I think Crystal Skull is alright and I prefer it to Temple of Doom (a film I deeply, utterly despise as racist colonialist garbage and emblematic of the worst aspects of the franchise uncritically emulating old pulp fiction). It's not a perfect movie but it's fine. It's not bad. Not horrible. It has Cate Blanchett. That's good enough for me.

I'm pretty sure most of the backlash towards Mutt was just because of the general backlash against Shia LaBeouf for reasons I can't quite understand...I mean, yeah, we know NOW that he's just a horrible person who should not be allowed to act anymore, but back then he was just the Even Stevens guy who made it big in the Transformers movies and everyone hated him for...being in the Transformers movies, I guess? It was a weird period.

They can always replace Shia with Chris Pratt .

A big part of the issue is that the filmmakers saw the franchise as schlockey B-Movies given top tier production values and direction. Audiences saw them as top tier blockbuster action movies and wanted to overlook how deliberately silly it was trying to be. Crystal Skull was made under the logic that the 30's B-Movies that inspired the earlier movies were about ancient temples and relics while 29 years later the 50's B-Movies were creature-features and sci-fi. So from their viewpoint they are being just as silly and stupid as they've always been while fans decried the genre shift.

I never really understood the backlash to Crystal Skull either. It's not my favorite Indy movie, but I still think it's okay. I would have rather it had supernatural elements than bring in aliens, but that wasn't a deal-killer for me.

What I remember hearing was that a lot of people felt Crystal Skull "ruined" Indiana Jones in some way. Whether that meant giving him a son and marrying him to Marian, or something else, I don't know. It seemed a lot of fans, for some reason, had the attitude put forth (possibly in parody) by the makers of South Park, who had a scene where Lucas and Spielberg raped Indiana Jones...

Edited by Robbery on Nov 20th 2022 at 8:48:20 AM

It also brought out a lot of the anti-CGI crowd.

My only real criticism with Crystal Skull was it just felt very "run of the mill adventure flick", which was just sort of disappointing for an Indy film we had to wait almost 20 years for.

Also the design of the aliens was generic af.

Even if you can accept stuff like Mutt and the aliens... I think we can all agree the fridge thing was stupid, right? Like, even by the standards of this series, it's a little too much to swallow.

I think Mythbusters even tried testing if a fridge would protect against a regular bomb explosion and concluded that it would help somewhat, but not completely, so a nuclear blast would definitely not be avoided like that.

I don't know how it's less stupid than the inflatable raft from Temple of Doom.

...Okay fair point.

The fridge scene’s issue arguably isn’t that it’s unrealistic. Rather it’s possibly because it hits a nerve that audiences dealing with the aftermath of Cold War MAD couldn’t just brush aside as a pulp stunt like other wacky improv Indy’s done. We’ve been taught so much since childhood about how unstoppable nukes are, whether as the average person isn’t going to know much about minecart physics and stowing away on a submarine. The closing discussion in this article describes that like so.

Indy isn’t real, but nukes are, and sadly they’re too pervasive for us to imagine them under the same serial physics as the rest of the series.