Le Saboteur said:
Here was a character who was... morally & emotionally complex while still being a so-called hero. His motives were less than wholesome, worse was hinted at, and there were no cartoon Nazis to pummel in order to make the audience feel good about themselves.
That's a good summary.
This thread is concerned with TOD and KOTCS (which being better), yet it's inevitable that both are being judged against the original
Raiders movie. Both are generally seen as inferior products, when compared to
Raiders.
However, I still think there is too much reverence paid to the original. I don't mean that to be contentious, but merely practical.
If we go back to the beginning, to understand what Lucas and Spielberg had in mind, it wasn't in their minds that they were going to create a piece of movie history that would potentially spawn four other movies. Lucas wanted to make his own version of Bond, but set in a rip-roaring 1930s pulp style. It started out as a bit of fun, a feel-good action movie full of comedy and shocks.
They paid so little reverence to their own project that they failed to check for historical and geographical innaccuracies: the German army in Egypt, foreigners running taverns in Nepal, machine-pistols that weren't yet invented, an Afrika Korps before it's creation etc. There are so many ananchronisms that we're forced to see Indy's world as a fantasy world, rather than an account of the 1930s we know from our own history.
Raiders was born of naivety. The idea for the Raven in Nepal came about because Lucas knew that there was an American run 'Rick's place' there in the 1970s. The fact that this would have been impossible in 1936 was not checked.
Even after Raiders was seen to be highly successful, Lucas was still committing anachronisms to film (a Kubelwagen in
The Last Crusade, for example).
This isn't to say that
Raiders wasn't a great movie, just that to understand TOD or KOTCS, I think we must understand what the intention of the first movie actually was.
