Grizzlor said:
The late 40's or early 50's is too early for Harrison. The time period likely has to do with the plot, of course, as Raiders and Last Crusade did. I have said my ideal period would be the late 50's. Good point about the Bond era of the 60's, that is too modern for Indiana Jones, I don't want that, if possible. Communism was a lurking force in the 50's, just as Facism was in the 30's. By the 60's, all hell had broken loose, and I think they want to avoid those periods. As for his age and shape, Harrison looked good, if you ask me, in Firewall. Not for nothing, but he didn't do near the kind of stunts in Last Crusade that he did in the other movies. Nor was his shirt off as much!
Why do people say that the 60s is too modern for Indy? We've seen Indy at all ages and in almost every decade of the 20th century...We've even seen him in the 1990s, in his 90s! We've seen him in the trenches during WWI, and we've seen him wade through gas attacks and fly with photo reconnaisance. It doesn't get much more chaotic than the Great War.
One touch which would be nice would be to open the film with a flashback to Indy's past like in Last Crusade, perhaps to ''Palestine, 1926'' or something, and maybe in this flashback we'd finally get to see Abner, and it would be Indy and Abner working on a dig or something where we'd see Indy on his first true, mercenery adventure.
Another element I hope they keep was in the ''Saucermen'' script in which it revealed that Indy had worked as a spy for the O.S.S during WWII. Seeing his past as a spy for French Intelligence and his passion for peace during the first world war, it wouldn't be too unbelievable
And yeah, ''Last Crusade'' was much more watered down than the previous two. You could tell his age was clearly starting to affect the series. There was barely any action when compared to RotLA and ToD, and none of the physical, bare knuckle fighting of the previous two. In each one, we had Indy getting into a big fist fight with a much bigger opponent and getting his a** handed to him.
Not so in ''LC'', the only real physical action piece of the film was the Tank scene, and there wasn't the same gritty, dirty fights of the first two. I mean, yeah, you had the motorcycle chase, and the dogfight, but those weren't really ''physical'' pieces. The action in LC is definately not as intense as in the previous two and seemed, I don't know, tired.