Man, that fist fight scene was really lazy

Crusade>Raiders said:

I mean his contribution to the film that Oxley apperently couldn't do.

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Oxley was a mad bumbling lunatic on his own. Without Indy along to piece together his madness, Oxley would still be babbling about...and the crystal skull would still be at the gravesite.

No, seriously, do they let monkeys into multiplexes these days?

A discount rate?

Agent Z said:

Oxley was a mad bumbling lunatic on his own. Without Indy along to piece together his madness, Oxley would still be babbling about...and the crystal skull would still be at the gravesite.

No, seriously, do they let monkeys into multiplexes these days?

A discount rate?

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But as a babbling idiot he did everything before Indy was able to even get there. Or did you miss that part?

Anyway...

When one looks at all of the terrible payoffs that Indiana Jones and Crystal Kingdom offered, it's easy to miss the big setup that lacked a payoff of any kind. Of course, I speak of Shia Laboeuf's motorcycle.

The character Mutt Williams is introduced riding his motorcycle. This is because the entire visual of the character, no, the entire conception of the character, really only makes sense when associated with motorcycles. Take him away from them, and he starts to look a little silly. Just look at Fonzie. Riding into Arnold's? Great. Strapping on water skis? Cliche-definingly awful.

Which brings me to my point: Why do they bother bringing Shia Laboeuf's motorcycle to Peru if they're not going to bother having him use it? We're treated to a shot of Harrison, Shia, and the motorcycle packed into the back of an airplane, making the long trip down to South America. They arrive, and the motorcycle is never seen again. Why?

Couldn't they have found something to do with it? Couldn't Shia have ridden it to the rescue in the Jungle chase? Maybe Harrison Ford could have traded it in the marketplace (to Shia's supposedly comedic protestations) for something of more value to them in the jungle, like the location of a graveyard perhaps?

There's nothing like that in the film, though, which leaves the motorcycle a loose-hanging thread in an otherwise tightly-plotted... actually, that's not true at all, is it? No, very little of the film actually made sense, but at least they made awful, awful attempts to wrap things up. Here they didn't even bother to do that. So what's the better choice - coming up with an awful resolution, or not even bothering to try? I mean, its not like the film doesn't already have horrible foreshadowing("Oh, did I mention I'm good with a sword? I thought I should just randomly mention that, not like it'll ever come up later on a horribly CGI-ed scene with low-brow crotch jokes"), why not go the whole way?

That's like asking people whether they'd prefer rotten food, or none at all.

Indiana Jones and the useless motorcycle. Why did they fly the motorcycle to peru if we were never going to see it again.

Crusade>Raiders said:

But as a babbling idiot he did everything before Indy was able to even get there. Or did you miss that part?

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And the Patriots won every game last year except for the Super Bowl...

Oxley fell under the power of the skull, so he wasn't able to finish what Indy was.

So, just because Oxley was able to learn about the skull before Indy, doesn't make Indy's piecing together of the puzzle any less important.

At the end of the day, if Indy doesn't figure out the puzzle and pick up where Oxley failed to finish, then the crystal skull is not brought back to the rightful owners.

I thought this fight seemed more realistic (other than the ants). The German mechanic is still better, but it (like the Thugee fight in TOD) appears choreographed, where the ant fight seems more like two guys just going at it.

Crusade>Raiders:

In Temple of Doom, when Indy fights the Thuggee slavemaster on the rockcrusher, you can see various Thuggees in the background watching the fight and doing nothing. In Last Crusade, during the tank chase, Nazis come at Indy with fists and knives instead of guns.

So if you think the Russians not shooting Indy in Crystal Skull is stupid, don't forget that its in the other three movies too. I might add that they are occupied anyway: they see that Dovchenko is taking care of Indy and Oxley, and so they pursue Marion, Mutt and Mac and try to shoot them down, then later come back to get Spalko. It would be hard for them to shoot Indy anyway, since they'd risk killing Dovchenko, who is a Colonel, not an expendable Sherpa.

With regards to your second point about the Russians stupidly racing the heroes to get to Akator without the Skull, they're not. They're trying to escape the ants.

The use of Henry Jones, Jr. more in this one should be patently obvious (even though people call him Indy many times).

Indy named himself after the dog because he didn't like being in his father's shadow. He didn't like being called Junior. Once he reconciled with his father and came to terms with their past relationship, he was no longer defiant in being Henry Jones, Jr. The longing and affection for Henry, Sr. shown at the beginning of the film indicated to me that Indy accepted his father. Hearing people call Indy by his real name reinforces the closure that took place between Indy and his dad.

No government agency like the FBI is going to call him by his nickname. But a military buddy might - and does.

The Russians called him Dr. Jones just like the Nazis and other villains called him Dr. Jones. Why would the villains call him Indiana?

His name is Henry Jones, Jr.

What is with the film's steadfast refusal to refer to its main character by the name "Indiana Jones"?

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ok. you've officially entered the "i'm just whining about anything" stage.

Jones Disciple said:

For that matter why don’t the Germans sitting in the back of the truck shoot through the canvas to knock Indy off his horse when he first shows up?

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You can thank Gobler's gunner for that. The soldiers in back of the truck were too busy ducking while he recklessly fired in their general direction to stop Indy coming up alongside, and by the time they must've figured out he was on the side of the truck he was already opening the passenger's side door and tossing the first guy out.

Crusade>Raiders said:

3. Ewoks somehow managing to destroy an entire fully armed Imperial force and bringing down the shields.

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If you wanna get technical, all they really did was keep the majority of the Imperial in the woods while the Rebels blew up the shield generator bunker. Which was the ground battle's entire objective; not to destroy the Imperial ground forces, but to infiltrate the bunker and knock out the generator, so the attack against the Death Star could commence. For all the scenes of them comically beating up Stormtroopers, the Ewoks were at best a glorified distraction to keep the bad guys busy.

Crusade>Raiders said:

At that point he was stymied by a opening mechanism that requires a person to pick up a rock, and use it to dislodge small rocks from a wall. Finding himself too weak to hit rocks with other rocks he managed to walk somewhere between one and two hundred miles back to civilization in order to return the skull to its resting place. Because he couldn't hit a rock with a rock.

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Now there is an interesting point. The only explanation is Oxley just didn't know how to get inside the pyramid, which wouldn't make any sense given that the Skull is supposed to be telling him what to do, so, what was stopping him from just dislodging those stones?

Crusade>Raiders said:

Do I have to remind everyone?

Adventure has a name.

And it's not Henry Jones Junior.

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Yeah, but his formal birth name is Henry Jones, Jr. Thus letters are addressed to him under this name. Note that until Henry, Sr. reveals why he keeps calling Indy Junior throughout LC, Sallah was totally unaware that Indiana wasn't actually Indy's first name. Also it isn't until after Henry, Sr. has died that any of his friends (Dean Stanforth in particular) actually call him Henry. Until then he preferred to go by his self-given name.

And Oxley, who is kind of a nutjob for most of Crystal Skull, repeating the name "Henry Jones, Jr." is, well, just him being a loon. Like Abner he would've known Indy when was very young, and it's possibly Oxley disapproved of Indy going by his nickname rather than the name Henry, Sr. gave him (it wouldn't be only time he disapproved of Indy; it's mentioned the reason he quit speaking to Indy because Indy didn't go through with his marriage to Marion, an interesting parallel with Abner), and this memory is about all of reality that Oxley's frail mind can latch onto at the time.

Anyway throughout Crystal Skull, he's still called Indy a lot. There's just a feeling of him becoming more comfortable with his birth name, just as his father learned to accept the name his son chose for himself.

And to be more practical, from a screenwriting standpoint, they introduced the idea of his real first name being Henry in LC, so there was an obligation for them to incorporate this into future adventures.

The fightscene was very good. Ford even lost his head during the fight, and normally Indiana never looses his had unless in very difficult situatcions, and this was because of elderly, old indy trying to kick ass..

How did he lose his head? Unless you mean metaphorically, i.e., he goes nuts, you must mean his hat, and he lost that because Dovchenko actually pulled it off of him and threw it away, which I thought was a great bit. So was Indy pretending he wanted to get it.

"Hang on, hang on, lemme just get my hat..." *LOG-SMASH!*

And Dovchenko buys it because he himself threw the hat away, and could easily infer that Indy has an attachment to the hat, and so he's like, "Yeah, fine, whatever, just hurry up and get it so we can continue fighting."

Kooshmeister said:

How did he lose his head? Unless you mean metaphorically, i.e., he goes nuts, you must mean his hat, and he lost that because Dovchenko actually pulled it off of him and threw it away, which I thought was a great bit. So was Indy pretending he wanted to get it.

"Hang on, hang on, lemme just get my hat..." *LOG-SMASH!*

And Dovchenko buys it because he himself threw the hat away, and could easily infer that Indy has an attachment to the hat, and so he's like, "Yeah, fine, whatever, just hurry up and get it so we can continue fighting."

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That was my favourite part in the fight.

Thats what i ment..i just explained it wrong.. Thought it was a great fight,not the best but great.

caats said:

ok. you've officially entered the "i'm just whining about anything" stage.

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Oh sure, I could complain about the cliche-defining nuking of fridges, the superfluous characters that add nothing to the story, the weak villain who can't even use her so-called psychic powers, the overuse of CGI, Indy standing around for the last 30 mins, the worst booby trap EVER(which I'll get to in a sec), Mutt swinging with CGI monkey armies...but the movie is so ****ing flawed it goes even DEEPER than that.

Crusade>Raiders said:

Oh sure, I could complain about the cliche-defining nuking of fridges, the superfluous characters that add nothing to the story, the weak villain who can't even use her so-called psychic powers, the overuse of CGI, Indy standing around for the last 30 mins, the worst booby trap EVER(which I'll get to in a sec), Mutt swinging with CGI monkey armies...but the movie is so ****ing flawed it goes even DEEPER than that.

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What about the ant scene though?

Your problem with Spalko and co. stupidly racing the heroes to get to Akator without the Skull shouldn't be one anymore, since we've explained to you that thats not what they're doing. They're just trying to escape from the ants.

Your problem with the Russians not shooting Indy shouldn't be a problem either, unless you have a problem with similar, if not more blatantly stupid, scenes in Temple of Doom and Last Crusade where Nazis/Thuggees don't shoot Indy and have even more opportunity to do so.

The first shots of an Indiana Jones film follow a very simple formula. Start with the Paramount logo, then fade into a matching shot of a similar mountain. The first film featured a mountain somewhere in South America. Ok, thats a cool shot. The second twisted expectations by fading to a gong with the Paramount logo on it. Thats clever, and its probably a homage to Gunga Din, which Temple of Doom borrows heavily from. In the third film we were back to a mountain(much like the film is back to Raiders' epic globe-trotting adventure formula), the twist that time being that it was some manner of "Young Indiana Jones" standing near it.

It's an integral part of the franchise, so people were obviously excited to see just what that Paramount logo was going to be fading into this time around. Imagine their surprise when it turned out to be a pile of dirt that bares only the slightest of resemblances to the Logo. A little underwhelming, to be sure. I think that says a lot about what to expect. Indy trilogy = Mountain while Kingdom = tiny little mount of dirt.

Buckle up, though, because it's about to get a whole lot less whelming.

The mount of dirt shakes and crumbles, revealing a CGI gopher.

I don't know what I was expecting from a new Indiana Jones film, but I'm extremely familiar with the franchise, and had I been forced to sit down and list five hundred things that could possibly appear in the forth film in the series, CGI gophers would have appeared nowhere on that list.

It's not just a momentary appearance, either. After the gopher shakes off the dirt and ducks out of the way of a speeding roadster, he appears a few more times in the film. In fact, it seems that Indiana Jones can't do anything in the desert without the filmmakers cutting to the CGI gopher for a reaction shot.

Just to be clear. This is an Indiana Jones movie where comic relief is gained by cutting to animals being puzzled by the activities of Harrison Ford. That makes the previous lowest point of humor in the series - Willie Scott being scared by animals in the Jungle - look like Fawlty Towers in comparison.

Apart from the borderline madness that led to the gopher reaction shots appearing in the film at all, why CGI gophers? Are there no trained gophers in Hollywood any more? Would it be that hard to get an actual gopher out there for the reaction shots? If the Internet is to be believed, it's really easy to get them to look dramatically at things.

There's only one possible explanation for the presence of CGI gophers in the film: Dreamworks spent so much money on CGI gopher technology for the film Over the Hedge that they had to split the cost between a number of films, Indiana Jones be damned.

Did you read my post just above yours?

Anyway, with regards to the prairie hill, in Last Crusade it was a rock outcropping, which isn't much more "exciting" than a prairie hill if you ask me.

With regards to the prairie dog appearing when Indy rolls out of the fridge, that part is cleverer than you think. It brings the whole 20 minute sequence full circle right back to the very first moment.

I like the formula for this thread.

1. Start a wholly flawed rant.
2. Be corrected several dozen times.
3. Lose face and derail own thread.
4. Repeat.

So Harrison Ford finds himself standing in the famous 'Hangar 51', the giant secret warehouse at the heart of Area 51. A dozen commies are pointing guns at him, and he's got a rifle in his hands. Obviously he can't shoot his way out, both because it would be suicidal to try, and because Steven Spielberg won't allow the hero of a film to ever solve a problem with a gun, recently.

Knowing these two facts, I was excited to see how Indiana Jones was going to get out of the situation. While he may not be the type to have a plan for every situation, Indiana Jones has a combination of innate scrappiness and a talent for improvisation that manages to get him out of even the toughest scrapes.

Imagine my disappointment when Harrison Ford simply drops his gun to the ground, causing it to serendipitously go off, firing a bullet into one of the Commies' boots. Rather than motivating all of the Russians to open fire on Harrison in unison, this sound shocks and confuses them long enough so that Harrison can slip away between two rows of boxes.

That's it? He got lucky? It's not like he could have possibly known that the gun would go off when he dropped it, let alone what the Commies' reaction to him doing so would be. Not only is this an unsatisfying result for the viewer, it's just terrible writing. Yes, luck has swung Indy's way before, but this is possibly the first time that his success has been entirely dependent on it.

The crazy thing is that the script actually sets up a much better out for the scene - while the commies are aiming their guns at Harrison Ford, they're standing just a few feet away from an impossibly powerful sci-fi magnet. Harrison is the only person in the scene who has any familiarity with the sci-fi magnet, so it's entirely plausible that he knows something about it that none of the commies do: It's so powerful that guns won't work near it, because it causes their workings to seize up. Then Harrison would take advantage of this knowledge to make a quick getaway as the commies ineffectually tried to pull their triggers.

Not only would this change have made Harrison look clever, but it would have established the magnet's power in a dramatic way, and even provided with a plot-based reason to limit the use of firearms in the flim.

Instead of failure, we could have had a win/win/win situation.

if that magnet freezes all the guns accept Indy's scene happened, you'd be throwing a fit. haha it's so obvious he knows it's going to go off if he drops it, you can see it in his face. he's doing that improvisation stuff you're asking about. not to mention his improvisation to get the gun in first place with the punch out and whip usage.

caats said:

if that magnet freezes all the guns accept Indy's scene happened, you'd be throwing a fit. haha it's so obvious he knows it's going to go off if he drops it, you can see it in his face. he's doing that improvisation stuff you're asking about. not to mention his improvisation to get the gun in first place with the punch out and whip usage.

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What? Did you see his face? He stood there for a sec looking like "Um...ok? That was a lame escape gtg!"

--

Tragically, in the 19 years since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, two of the franchise's most beloved figures, actor Denholm Elliot and stuntman Pat Roach, have died. This is not a criticism of the film's inability to resurrect the dead, nor is it a condemnation of their refusal to recast a part.

I'm completely satisfied with the decision to kill off the character Marcus Brody. What disturbs me is just what happens next. After a relatively touching scene between Harrison Ford and new University Dean Jim Broadbent in which they commiserate about their advancing years, I assumed that a photograph on Indy's desk would be the last that we'd see of Marcus Brody. A quiet, respectful send-off for the actor and character.

If only.

A few minutes later in the film, as Harrison Ford and Shia LaBoeuf are riding a motorcycle, attempting to escape from a couple of Commie spies, they swerve at the last minute to avoid a statue, causing the pursuing Commies to plow right into it. It's a statue of Denholm Elliot, and the crash causes its head to go flying off, smashing through the window of the Commies' car, winding up in the lap of the diver.

The camera even focuses on the statue's face, as it stares up from the Communist lap, as if to ensure that Marcus' character leaves the series with as little dignity as Spielberg can offer him.

The entire scene is capped in the worst possible way, with Shia LaBoeuf looking pleased with himself for causing the accident, and having his good mood killed by a withering look from Harrison Ford, who's none to entertained to see his good friend's memorial defaced.

This callback to The Last Crusade is especially awkward, since the scene being mirrored in that was so wonderful - Harrison Ford thrusts a stick through the spokes of a Nazi Motorcycle's front wheel, causing the bike to explode and send its rider flying off into the air. It's an amazing stunt, that Harrison Ford is rightly proud of himself for having caused. Then Sean Connery gives him a look which suggests that maybe he shouldn't be enjoying having killed someone that much.

It's a beautiful father-son moment that this film's scene pales in comparison to.