On Vox: How to piss away your legacy, Indiana Jones Edition
Caution: Spoilers abound ahead. Well, they'd be spoilers if the scrip hadn't been written by George Lucas's five-year-old nephew. If you want to be "surprised" by anything, stop reading.
Let's start with age. It's been nineteen years since the last Indiana Jones film. Do you know how long that is? If you counted one number per minute, it would take you almost 20 minutes to get there. That's a long time.
But your movie has a legacy, so you're gonna need some callbacks. You have Harrison Ford, but he's getting a little old to play the action hero, and it shows. It does NOT help that every third line in the film mentions how old he is. Bring in Karen Allen. She's still cute, and add in a black-and-white photo of Sean Connery and you're set, right?
Every movie needs bad guys, and Indiana Jones typically squares off against Nazis. Of course, since we waited so long to make the movie, setting it in WWII like the others isn't gonna work, so you need new bad guys. But don't forget the thinly-veiled political allegory. Add in a couple of G-Men to the beginning of the movie to remind us all about how much McCarthyism sucked, and how bad it was for all of us the last time the United States was a near-police state, with people being rounded up arbitrarily and waterboarded interrogated. But make your point and drop it, because we all know that the REAL bad guys are the terrorists Russians Communists (Can't be Russians, one is an ENGLISH DOUBLE AGENT! It's not racism, really! So what if the head bad girl looks and talks like Natasha from Bullwinkle?)
Snakes. Indiana Jones is basically a Jedi Archaeologist (whoops! Retcon alert! Did you know he was actually mostly a spy for OSS? Neither did I, until I saw this piece of shit), who can speak every ancient language, decipher ancient riddles in his head, make logical deductions in no time flat, and swing over pits filled with spikes and alligators even better than that little guy from "Pitfall." Given all those superpowers, he's gonna need some Kryptonite. So make him afraid of snakes. He sees snakes, he paralyzes. So in his swan song movie, there is exactly ...one snake. Which is played for laughs, as in "Indy is in quicksand, and is too scared to grab the snake and save himself."
To connect with the younger audience (you know, the ones who can buy cigarettes now, but weren't born for the last film,) you'll be needing a new character. Introduce your audience to Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher Mary Sue "Mudd." If you didn't know by the end of the opening credits that he's Indy's bastard son, then you probably can't read either, so this is going to go right past you. Incidentally, while I have nothing against Wesley Shia, casting him as a Harley-riding greaser thug was a mistake. He looks slightly less convincing as a shave-tailed biker hoodlum than John Travolta did, and Travolta sang and danced.
Now that we have the casting out of the way, a note on effects. CGI has come a long way since Jurassic Park lumbered onto the screen and ate Jeff Goldblum, so there's no reason whatsoever that your movie can't basically be a cartoon. When Wesley Crusher catches up to a Jeep chase via Tarzan-style vine-swinging, it's totally unnecessary to pretend that the scene took place anywhere but on a computer. Ditto for the final scene.
Let's talk plot. The first three films were about humanity's quest to touch the relics of God. They were about our interactions with God, and the things God left to remind us of His power. The fourth movie takes that concept and fucks us all with it by being about aliens. That's right. The gods of the Ancient Mayans were from outer space, or "interdimensional space, actually," as one of the three worst lines in the film tells us. The crystal skull isn't crystal at all, it's alien bone, and it's necessary so that, let's see...ah, yes. The skull has to be returned so that the thirteen alien bodies can meld into one body, come back to life, arbitrarily incinerate the bad girl character for being a terrorist having an accent being a woman Communism, and take off in its interdimensional spaceship. No. I'm actually NOT fucking kidding you.
There's a throwaway scene, right in the beginning, where they're involved in a competently-done Jeep chase through the warehouse from "Raiders of the Lost Ark." We know it's that warehouse because we actually get to see the Ark from the first movie. We get to see it because it gets hit by a car. Way to go, guys. Which genius screenwriter decided to literally RUN OVER YOUR BEST MOVIE WITH A TRUCK deserves an award. I'm left with the impression that those in charge of this film not only wrote the screenplay in crayon, but actually hate the series for some reason.
Originally posted on bibphile.vox.com