Indiana Jones & The Suspension of Disbelief

TheFedora

Active member
kongisking said:
I've always wondered how the heck all those different religions can co-exist in Indy's world....and all be true. Part of me likes to think by introducing the IDBs, Lucas was trying to hint that all religions are based on ancient astronauts, each of whom took on different forms and tried to teach/conquer humanity in their own way. Basically, he was creating an explanation for how all these different mythologies can co-exist and all be true somehow. Of course, that concept probably pisses off the relig-y crowd, but it at least could fix that plot hole in this series...and even explain why Indy is always skeptical of different supernatural things.

I could interpret his skepticism as not of the supernatural itself, but of that specific mythology, since he's seen proof that such-and-such religion is true, hence he automatically assumes all others are false...until the next one proves true. Basically, he's always skeptical just in case this new mythology he's dealing with happens to be the rare one that doesn't have any truth to it.

I would accept that, but that seems to make me wonder why he doubted the grail then. Christianity is accepted to be an offshoot of Judaism I think, so I don't know if by that point he was thinking that the Grail had the same sort of power that the ark imbued or not. Remember the power was in the grail not the water itself...rather the grail was able to turn the water into a destructive force when the evil guy drank it, but was fine for him. Like it had some sort of 'warning device' and the minute you came into contact with it you were tested by the power of God. Also, taking the power of God behind the seal makes me think that there may have been the Grail acting on its own again, some kind of spiritual 'barrier' that it simply can't exist beyond.

Also, thinking about the fourth dimensional beings... it's very possible. Considering that the dimensional beings are able to come back to life once the skulls are returned to body makes me wonder if they were in stasis... Also technology sufficiently advanced is like magic so magical incantations like the Sankara stones could really be code words acting on whatever technology. The ark is a huge booby trap designed to attack all these who view it. (The ark shooting the electric energy to disable the lights kind of makes me think of it as semi-technological) and the false Grail's 'detection system' for a person's true soul kind of reads to me as possibly being technological too, since the false grail could easily dispense acid or whatever into the water to get the results we saw in the Nazi guy after drinking, and the true grail gives lifegiving results once it determines that the person is worthy. Also instead of being a 'spiritual' barrier for the ark, the seal could also be some sort of 'technological' barrier that prevents it being taken. Said technological barrier can keep you in 'stasis' while behind it, which is why the knight was able to live while probably repeatedly drinking the cup.
 

The Drifter

New member
Who's to say the power of the Grail, Ark, and Stones were all from the same God/being? Just worshiped differently by different people, and called other names? They see it as different deities, but in truth it's only one?
 

sheffsteve

New member
The Drifter said:
Who's to say the power of the Grail, Ark, and Stones were all from the same God/being? Just worshiped differently by different people, and called other names? They see it as different deities, but in truth it's only one?

Yes, it's those inter dimensional beings from KOTCS!
 

kongisking

Active member
TheFedora said:
I would accept that, but that seems to make me wonder why he doubted the grail then. Christianity is accepted to be an offshoot of Judaism I think, so I don't know if by that point he was thinking that the Grail had the same sort of power that the ark imbued or not.

Oh, absolutely. I totally admit my idea is flimsy at best. But hey, a fun thing to think about... :p
 

Montana Smith

Active member
If you can accept magical boxes, stones and cups then you should also be able to accept mystical aliens and their skulls.

That's all fantasy and they obey unnatural laws.

The parts that are harder to suspend disbelief for are the real world physical situations. These occur in all the films, but most significantly in KOTCS.

KOTCS fails because there was little or no attempt to explain or justify the situations. The chief culprit is, of course, the landing of the fridge. TOD added the conceit of snow, slope and water to give the impression of survivability.

KOTCS offers nothing but hard rock, and it's at this point that the intentions of the film are clear: nothing matters. The hero is completely impervious to damage. What follows is therefore a series of meaningless action scenes - The Kingdom of the Soporific Skull.

Monkeys, snake, rubber tree, three waterfalls, weak villainess, actors with better places to be. I found it very hard to suspend disinterest after the fridge.

There's no reason why the skull couldn't have worked as well as the artefacts in the other movies. After all, the artefact is only there to provide the basis for the adventure. It could be anything, so long as the story works and all the disparate parts are brought together skilfully, rather than thrown together as they appeared to be in KOTCS.
 

Mickiana

Well-known member
A rare moment here: I can't quite agree with you, Montana, on the crystal skull and their alien owners being quite right in the Indy universe.

The power of the Ark, Sankara stones and the Grail is supernatural and tied in with religious/spiritual belief systems already practised by many people throughout history.

The aliens are not supernatural, although they are capable of great physical feats, but to me aliens are within believability in this universe as I don't think we must be the only intelligent life in the universe.

The powers of the trilogy's artefacts are not believable. They are based in religious mysticism. Aliens are a statistical possibility and belong in the realm of science and science fiction, fiction that could be true.

Am I splitting hairs? Maybe, but I think this distinction was one of the divergences in CS that did not help it.
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Mickiana said:
A rare moment here: I can't quite agree with you, Montana...

Micky, me old mucker, you've let me down big time! :D

Mickiana said:
The power of the Ark, Sankara stones and the Grail is supernatural and tied in with religious/spiritual belief systems already practised by many people throughout history.

The aliens are not supernatural, although they are capable of great physical feats, but to me aliens are within believability in this universe as I don't think we must be the only intelligent life in the universe.

The powers of the trilogy's artefacts are not believable. They are based in religious mysticism. Aliens are a statistical possibility and belong in the realm of science and science fiction, fiction that could be true.

Am I splitting hairs? Maybe, but I think this distinction was one of the divergences in CS that did not help it.

The distinction is, I think, between old myths and new myths.

The aliens belong to the newer variety. The ones in KOTCS are the kind that I can't dissociate from the 1960s. We know this variety was in Lucas' consciousness pre-ROTLA.

I view all four artefacts as fairy tale based. Not that aliens are likely to end up as fairy tale beings once humankind discovers them, but Lucas' kind were Däniken's/Clarke's modern fairy tale. As such I don't find it harder to suspend disbelief to accept them more than the first three artefacts.

What they lack is the centuries of speculation, myth-history and faith that pertain to the box, the stones and the cup within their respective fields.

In one way the aliens were a welcome addition because they add a tangible reality to the other strange occurrences throughout Indy's adventures. In another way they were really the wrong type of alien for the 1950s B-movie, and their existence is a 'game changer' for all future (and past) adventures.

Now that this kind of alien exists in Indyverse future artefacts may also be of their design, since they've been meddling in human affairs for thousands of years.

Crossing over with the modern Indy thread, by rights, a modern Indy will be dedicated to uncovering the archaeological evidence for the relationship between the beings and humans, while everything he thought he understood about history will be in turmoil.

Indy will become Däniken, and would soon be marginalized in society if he makes his knowledge public. Would be a perfect lead-in to the one-eyed man telling wacky stories!

KOTCS could well have had a better MacGuffin, which would have leant itself to telling a better Indiana Jones story. But in the list of failings associated with the film I find there are other more contentious elements standing in the way of enjoyment.

There's that other cold war alien mythology concerning reverse engineering alien technology which might have made a better alien story involving Admiral Byrd's and Captain Ritscher's pre-war Antarctic explorations and Soviet post-war UFOs. It's also more modern fiction, but it fits the '50s theme, and would have allowed Indy to see some snow.

Might never even have to show an alien!
 

Mickiana

Well-known member
Good point about the new and old myths. Discovery that an alien race had helped a civilisation to develop with advanced technology puts a bit of a spin on the accepted models of human history. Besides archaeological evidence of alien assistance, the problem is that it relegates mankind to a submissive role in his own world.

We got to see several rooms of the city and some of its technological wonders, but not enough to really confirm what they gave. I know they can only squeeze so much into a movie, but something more than just big stone cogs and water wheels would have backed up Indy's description of the technological wonders.

So we take his word for this benevolence, which takes away from Man's ability to innovate by himself, don't really see much except for stone plinth leveraging, receding stairs that don't really thwart anyone, except men wearing heavy armour and after all that the aliens were collectors of other civilisations' trinkets which they didn't even take with them when they took off.

Where were the metal works, stone mason factories, the engineers and designers' rooms, the great libraries? Basically it was just aqueducts. All the greatness is inferred, which is a problem if you are going to make a foray into science fiction. Science fiction has to be backed up by a good or imaginative scientific explanation or demonstrated well.

So, sort of muddled, half developed ideas which didn't quite capture my imagination. It's the difference in kind from the trilogy that I am harping on about. The trilogy easily allowed me to suspend my belief. CS struggled to allow me to do that. It was ideas and execution as has been discussed so much already.

I don't enjoy pulling CS apart. I can see it could have been much better. I almost feel sorry for David Koepp, trying to tie in all the ideas and characters that Lucas and Nathanson gave him. Considering that, maybe he didn't do too bad a job?
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Mickiana said:
Good point about the new and old myths. Discovery that an alien race had helped a civilisation to develop with advanced technology puts a bit of a spin on the accepted models of human history. Besides archaeological evidence of alien assistance, the problem is that it relegates mankind to a submissive role in his own world.

We got to see several rooms of the city and some of its technological wonders, but not enough to really confirm what they gave. I know they can only squeeze so much into a movie, but something more than just big stone cogs and water wheels would have backed up Indy's description of the technological wonders.

So we take his word for this benevolence, which takes away from Man's ability to innovate by himself, don't really see much except for stone plinth leveraging, receding stairs that don't really thwart anyone, except men wearing heavy armour and after all that the aliens were collectors of other civilisations' trinkets which they didn't even take with them when they took off.

Where were the metal works, stone mason factories, the engineers and designers' rooms, the great libraries? Basically it was just aqueducts. All the greatness is inferred, which is a problem if you are going to make a foray into science fiction. Science fiction has to be backed up by a good or imaginative scientific explanation or demonstrated well.

So, sort of muddled, half developed ideas which didn't quite capture my imagination. It's the difference in kind from the trilogy that I am harping on about. The trilogy easily allowed me to suspend my belief. CS struggled to allow me to do that. It was ideas and execution as has been discussed so much already.

I agree that it was muddled, and rushed. Indy sees the wall paintings showing the aliens sharing the skills of irrigation and agriculture as evidence of ancient assistance to man. In return the aliens presumably had human assistance to build the elaborate stone residence (from locally sourced materials) to conceal their interdimensional craft, store their loot and protect themselves.

A conquistador breaks in, one of the aliens loses their head and the remainder go to sleep because they're literally the embodiment of pure communism!

As you wrote, the temple could have been much more science fiction, rather than being representative of something typically found by explorers hacking through a South American jungle. No great metal working or mining? There were already civilizations far in advance of the Ugha elsewhere in the world - do we presume that the aliens had already been to them? The aliens didn't even use those higher skills to sufficiently protect themselves. No Resident Evil style laser traps to slice and dice burglars?

Also, as you wrote, the benevolence "takes away from Man's ability to innovate by himself". And that steals away a big chunk of Indy's world and education. For that reason I doubt that the aliens will get much mention again in any future films because it writes history into a corner in which every detail will be held under a new suspicion.

Mickiana said:
I don't enjoy pulling CS apart. I can see it could have been much better. I almost feel sorry for David Koepp, trying to tie in all the ideas and characters that Lucas and Nathanson gave him. Considering that, maybe he didn't do too bad a job?

I think it falls apart naturally as there really were so many ideas thrown together, with Indy the only substantial thing trying to hold them all together:

Hot rod, Soviets, Communism, Area 51, Roswell, magnetic alien, rocket sled, atom bomb, flying refrigerator, prairie dogs, ants, monkeys, a snake in a sandpit, McCarthy, student protests, greasers, the mind-controlling skull, a cemetery with skull-masked guards, Nazca, conquistadors, the hive mind, a jungle cutter, a double/triple agent friend, a nutty professor, the return of Marion, three waterfalls, a rubber tree, an Ugha attack, a UFO, a son, marriage and promotion.

That's a crazy amount of stuff to cram into one film - divided between 1950s elements and the other disparate ideas. That's where I find the suspension of disbelief/disinterest to be difficult. The film becomes a series of ideas and set pieces that do not connect in the manner that they have in previous films.

It has long felt as though it was Lucas' last chance with Indy, so he literally threw everything he could at him.
 

Mickiana

Well-known member
When you put it like that, all those ideas crammed in, it's like a super supreme pizza where you can't taste anything because of the taste of everything. (place Mr Creosote emoticon here)
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Mickiana said:
When you put it like that, all those ideas crammed in, it's like a super supreme pizza where you can't taste anything because of the taste of everything. (place Mr Creosote emoticon here)

:D


Spielberg: One more praire dog, George? Oh, George, just-- just one.

Lucas: [groaning] All right. Just one.

U9899-1233663318.jpg
 

otto rahn

New member
I think that "Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull" would have been better if they had had the skull looking more like the Mitchell-Hedges skull and less alien and if they had left the aliens out all together.:(
 
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