agull said:
Yeah... I love the character of Indiana Jones too. I'm very sad that there is no Indiana Jones in this movie. There is a man with a hat and whip but this guy is not really Indy. Indy is not superman... nobody coukld survide nuke the fridge... Indy wouldn't say "Intolerable!"...
The Indy of KOTCS isn't Superman either. He's a fallible human who has been afforded supernatural luck by his creators.
If he was Superman he wouldn't suffer from a dodgy hip or spatial misjudgment, and he wouldn't need a fridge to escape an atom bomb.
Yet, Indy's always had
super-luck.
What Indy is, is a pulp character existing in a world that is not real. If you want real go and watch a documentary about Roy Chapman Andrews.
The Raiders story transcripts are very illuminating:
Spielberg — And each cliffhanger is better than the one before.
Lucas — That is the progression we have to do. It's hard to come up with. The trouble with cliff hangers is, you get somebody into something, you sort have to get them out in a plausible way. A believable way, anyway. That's another important concept of the movie — that it be totally believable. It's a spaghetti western, only it takes place in the thirties. Or it's James Bond and it takes place in the thirties. Except James Bond tends to get a little outrageous at times. We're going to take the unrealistic side of it off, and make it more like the Clint Eastwood westerns. The thing with this is, we want to make a very believable character. We want him to be extremely good at what he does, as is the Clint Eastwood character or the James Bond character. James Bond and the man with no name were very good at what they did. They were very, fast with a gun, they were very slick, they were very professional. They were Supermen.
There is the core of the issue right there: Cliffhangers necessarily get grander.
What begins as believable necessarily becomes less so as the cliffhangers become bigger. That's the nature of the formula. Yet, each cliffhanger has a solution that is plausible within the world Indy inhabits.
ROTLA was planned to be a less outrageous Bond, and more like the Spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood.
However, in character Indy
was to be like Joe/Manco/Blondie or Bond, whom Lucas describes specifically as "Supermen" purely because they were very good at what they did. They were also imbued with a supernatural level of intuition and luck, which enabled them to survive.
Bond and the Clint character inhabit a stylistic world, as does Indy.
Fitting KOTCS into the Indiana Jones series was a challenge I set myself. At first I was in denial, and didn’t want to see Indy in the 1950s. It took two viewings to really appreciate that there were unbreakable connections.
The character of Indy was intact - he’s still believable as the character we first saw in ROTLA.
Is his world still as believable?
Well, I went back to ROTLA and thought of the anachronisms and implausibilities:
MP-38s and rocket launchers in 1936; a functional flying wing in 1936; German troops in British-controlled Egypt in 1936; an American-run bar in Nepal patronized by foreigners in 1936, a time when Nepal was closed to foreigners; Hitler showing an interest in the Ark (it would have more realistic if Himmler was instigator of that mission; Indy ‘s ever returning hat, and even keeping it during the U-Boat ride; the Hovitos couldn’t catch Indy or hit him with their arrows; the massive Anubis statue happened to be loose; a trench had to be dug under the truck as there wasn’t enough room for a man to pass beneath it.
It’s all far-fetched, and if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be pulp.
Now fast forward to 1957/2008. With Lucas’ obsession with ‘50s culture it was inevitable that the 1950s would become a major character in KOTCS. This is the character that styles the movie. The shift we have to make is not in looking at a new Indiana Jones, but the same old Indy as an anachronism himself, a man out of place in a modern world, with new modern dangers. He tackles this brave new world the same way he tackled the old one – with reckless abandon, riding on a wave of supernatural luck.
Where Lucas and Splieberg went awry was in the maintaining the great scale of the cliffhangers, as though they felt under pressure to out-do everything that had gone before. This was at the loss of suspense and real mystery, which are trademarks where the character of Indy can truly flourish, and where he can still succeed in future films, despite his age.
