Darth Vile said:
To be fair, the positive reviews all stemmed from the older staff members that had grown up with the series. For example, "Harry", "Moriarty", "Quint", and "Massawyrm". (The latter actually did a pretty good job of echoing my own feelings.)
I'm not that familiar with "Beaks", but I don't remember him reviewing KOTCS. He seems to be parroting the Talkbackers here- a section that has generally been doom and gloom towards Indy 4 for years. It's interesting that while they already expect Indy 5 to be a complete disaster, those two topics quickly shot to the top of the "most active threads" list. So for all the claims of "I will never!", they clearly don't have any problem devoting their spare time to it.
I think for the average fanboy, the experience of discussing a movie long surpassed the actual watching of it. This is why records fall each summer, even as younger audiences claim to hate all the latest blockbusters. This (relatively shallow) decade began with Stephen Sommers' The Mummy and will effectively end with his own G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In between, only a handful of blockbusters are still respected online- generally the ones that are considered "dark".
Moriarty writes for some other site now, and recently did an article on The Phantom Menace that got some attention. It was less about the film itself, and more of a look at how cynical internet fandom has become over the last ten years. I remember telling a friend a few years ago, "If they try to make Indy 4 just like the others, it'll probably take a beating online." This just isn't the same climate I saw the original films in, and like Moriarty, I'm not even sure it's the same one in which I watched Episode I.
sense of fantasy and fiction.
