I did not love it. I also wasn't a huge fan of the 10 year bump. I'd rather just see indy punching out nazi's than commies I guess.

Oh, just love it. Just accept that maybe, just maybe, that sort of thing is possible if you have the knowledge to create it and that it doesn't matter, anyway, because it was a fun ride.

Remember: Frank Darabont (The Mist, Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) turned in a script that Spielburg called "the best script I've ever read." Not "the best Indy script," but "the best script I've ever read."

And Lucas turned it down, handing it over to one of the guys responsible for editing his prequels.

Spielburg eventually convinced Lucas to let a real screenwriter clean it up (and that would be the amazing David Keopp), but I'm certain Lucas went through it with his Suck and screwed everything up.

I'm in the same boat: I loved the movie all the way up to the end. It felt like a really great episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Not as great as the movies, but still damn good.

Right up to the end. An ending Lucas has gone on record as insisting--or he wouldn't allow the movie to be made.

Edited at 2008-05-23 06:05 pm (UTC)

I thought the ending was hilarious - it was really just the sort of crack I was expecting from how things had been lined up in the movie earlier.

It's not gonna be my favourite, but it was fun. Fun is what matters in these things! It was, in fact, more fun than I'd feared it would be.

I thought it was an interesting way to deal with one of the more crackpot (and, incidentally, patronizing and paternalistic) ideas in archaeology. He used the idea, but desperately tried to redeem himself at the end ("they were archaeologists!").

What gets me (in a sense of 'amuses me') is that the made-for-tv MacGuyver movie where they find Atlantis did a very similar thing :)

Yeah.... As I said, I saw it coming pretty early on, so i was able to mentally prepare myself for it. But hell, IJ has already used the Arc of the Covenant to kill Nazis, and drank from the Grail... And lets not forget about the Thugee cult and the Black Blood of Kali. Because that was culturally sensitive, right? It didn't seem particularly off-base for the franchise, all told, so I could swallow what might have otherwise been a more bitter pill. And hey! It was a still a fun trip!

I also confess that at the end, being a big giant dork, I leaned over to my friend to whisper that this was just when they needed to call in the *nautical* archaeologists...

I read that Spielberg said one main difference was that the first three movies were based on adventure serials of the period and this one more rooted in the 50's sci-fi B movies. So it *is* different.

Oh, just go ahead and love it. The ending? Not my favorite thing, but I found it was certainly in keeping with the Indiana Jones franchise in that it tapped into the perceived threats of the decade and mythologies of South America and then revealed that what seemed the most fantastic part of it was also true. As in, the Ark was exactly what it was cracked up to be, Kali is one pissy goddess and the Holy Grail was the real deal.

I loved that they didn't recast Indy, as the Bond franchise has done. I love that Indy romanced Karen Allen and not some starlet 40 years his junior. And I appreciate that Ford hasn't goe the way of Sylvester Stallone with the obvious facial work and growth hormones.

But surely that was made up for by the sly bit with the monkeys? Remember Marion calling the monkey in Raiders their "child"? I thought that was a clever reference back to the first movie.

You didn't get the parallel of the monkey in the first movie (their "child") and Mutt swinging through the trees in this one (also their child)?

I think I have said it before, but Spielberg is a much more subtle filmmaker than he is usually given credit for.

I really don't get how a 700-year-old knight (sitting in a cave reading the SAME book for all those years, by the way) is more believable than something technically possible??

Right, one is religious. And the other IS technically possible. Personally, I ascribe the nutcases to the religious traditions. If you're an incredibly technologically advance society, which we know by our own accomplishments is possible, then it's not fantasy at all. It's futurism. Look at all the technology we have today that would have been fantasy 50 years.

That is regardless to your point, which is that the ending of this movie is pure fantasy, which it is not. That, and I believe you to be more intelligent than 9/10ths of the world's population and it's your opinion of which we're speaking and not theirs.