A Romp With Indy

[kevin_standlee]

I don't go to movies very often, but last night, Lisa and I went to the Star Cinema, a single-screen, one-showing-per-weekday-evening, not-a-multiplex-at-a-shopping-mall movie theater in Stayton, Oregon, where we watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I'm not going to say this was a great movie. I found it entertaining the same way I would an amusement park ride, but the plot is even thinner than the other movies, and Lisa was so irritated with the internal inconsistencies that she said were she watching it by herself, she would have walked out on it.

On the way home, she came up with what she thinks would have been a better ending, and one that's more in keeping with the original film, too. Bringing all thirteen crystal skulls into the right configuration triggers off an apocalypse in this movie. But instead of what actually happens, Lisa suggests that we have the big destructive scene, with all the bad guys getting what they deserve, and the good guys coming to on a broken-up plain with the thirteen skulls scattered about, no longer in the "death and destruction" configuration.

One of the characters -- Lisa suggests "Mutt" -- says, "Do you think that could happen again if the skulls ever were put back in that formation?"

Marion says, "We've got to keep that from happening!

Ox says, "But how? These skulls are indestructible!"

Indy looks up and says, "I've got an idea."

CUT TO a quick sequence of shots of individual skulls, boxed up in the same way as the Ark was in Raiders. One of the boxes goes into the repaired Nevada warehouse. Then another goes into the Vatican archives. Then another into a Tibetan monastery. Another into an obviously British safe hiding place. Insert a shot of Ayers Rock. Then a submarine shooting something from a torpedo tube. And so forth, obviously implying that the things are being scattered to the winds to keep them from being reconfigured again, with each of them in a safe and (we hope) hidden location.

I really like her ending better, because I think it evokes the original Raiders of the Lost Ark -- and besides, it also sort of explains how Indy manages to repair his reputation. As it stands, the final scene assumes "Come home, Professor Jones, all is forgiven" without really establishing even with a single throwaway line how that happens.

Comments

[jbriggs.livejournal.com]

One thing that bothers me about this new film:

"The knight informs them that, if they wish for the Grail, they must choose wisely for it, for while drinking from the true Grail will bring them everlasting life, a false Grail will take it from them."

"Indiana picks out the true Grail, a plain cup with a gold interior, worthy of a humble carpenter (Jesus), and drinks from it"

So isn't Indiana Jones supposed to be immortal? How do they explain his aging since the last adventure?

[lunarpenumbra.livejournal.com]

The Knight himself has aged as well. In order for him to protect the Grail and such, and wait for the next Knight to replace him, which has obviously been a long time, he must know the true grail so that he may drink from it to fulfill his duties. Makes sense? However, just a Indy sipped from the cup, the knight likely does the same. Perhaps it required constant drinking, not just sipping, from the cup to have full immortality. As such, Indy only sipped from it and thus has only an extended life, not a hale and hearty immortality.

This is just my thought on why the aging.. I of course, being the mother of two young children, have not had a chance to see the new movie yet.

[jbriggs.livejournal.com]

I suppose that makes sense, its not clear from the film. And I haven't seen the new one either.

[caindog.livejournal.com]

The senior Dr. Jones also drank from the Grail and the new film tells us that he has died in the past year so the whole immortality thing seems not to be completely accurate.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

I haven't gone back to the film to check, but when I had this discussion with someone a few years ago, they told me that the Grail Knight also says that the immortality thing doesn't work if you venture past the great seal.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I agree with her ending over the real ending. I would have prefered that Indy dies at the end of the film and in his final words passes it onto Henry Jones, III. I was wondering whether the movie theatre is nice. Baltimore has an old movie palace in the Senator theatre and I can't wait to see the El Capitan in LA.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Ok, that's even better than the ending I thought of.

One thing that irritated me about their choosing to set it in 1957 with Russians as villains was that there was no mention of Sputnik. I would have been happier had part of the Russian plan been to put the skull in a Sputnik to use it as an orbital mind control satellite, kicking off the space race. But that's more or less a sidebar.

My main idea for improving the ending is that the Kate Blanchett character is given the psi power she craves - and is immediately deluged with telepathic impressions of everyone who is being interrogated or imprisoned, everyone who is starving or suffering from sickness, an atrocity exhibition of everything dark and evil at the time, until she is incapacitated with the agony. That would have been so much more satisfying than the ending we were given - which I can now barely remember a week after seeing the film, except that it struck me as having been copied from either Raiders or Last Crusade.

That said, I still think the film was better than Temple of Doom.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Lisa's ending is better - and your ideas are better. I shake my head that the movie ending was just so darned weak.