First thing to toss out, I’m not a hater of the final Indy Movie, I really liked a lot of things, but there were a number of things that threw my suspension of disbelief out the window. And actually, that’s not the aliens so much, I could let the aliens go. (warning, rant about Kingdom of Crystal Skull begins here)
What epitomizes the suspension is, of course, the nuking of the fridge. However, the first call of BS was with the coffin that apparently could attract metal variably, being strong enough to pull gunpowder, shotgun pellets, pull lights towards it and slow bullets and, variably, didn’t pull the pants and belts off the soldiers, they could draw and carry their guns, and were able to actually pull it along the bed of the truck. Of course, after that is the nuking of the fridge, (which I buy less because of the nuking, but more that even if you were thrown that distance inside a fridge by any other method your insides would get totally busted up), and the rocket sled. That whole opening was just too over the top.
The next things that get me are in the jungle chase scene, the sudden clear ground to drive on I will let go, but the fencing on the front of two moving cars on dirt roads seems improbable at best. Compare it to the tank fight scene in Last Crusade. People are falling, tripping, and getting bumped off balance left and right in that fight, yet somehow in the jungle, Mutt is managing to fight standing on a speeding car with a sword. And then he grabs a jungle vine, morphs into Tarzan of the Apes, calls up his monkey friends, and goes on. A Tarzan swing is hard as hell to do if you’ve never tried, and the first time you do it, most people won’t let go of the first rope to grab the second (or land on a platform) I 'll let the ants go, they could have been acting crazy because of the skull for all I know. But the next thing that comes almost to the level of nuking the fridge is the waterfall. People survived Niagara Falls, this is true, but the falls in the film were the Iguazu Falls in South America, on average about four times as tall as Niagara, and the entire party manages to survive not one, but three falls without injury.
I love Indianna Jones, and I know there are a lot of things that stretch credulity or defy reality (various other fight scenes and the holy grail and the ark of the covenant), but they don’t do it like this. Until this movie, Indiana Jones is kind of like Batman, if you did the work out and the studying for enough time you could be a lot like him. They completely went into the land of out there in this movie. Things like the Ark and the Grail you accept as items that work outside of what we rationally know because they have some special property. Everything else, however, we should be able to treat as if it was in the real world.
A friend of mine says he prefers to think the nuking of the fridge killed Indy, and the rest of the movie was a hallucination he had before dying. I say this more for the laughs than anything else.
If not for the things above, this movie would definitely beat out Temple of Doom on my Indy list (and be making a case against Raiders). I do love the interactions. I love how Mutt acts with Mariam and Indy, and the characters. I wholeheartedly concede that aliens aren’t any more outlandish than Indian Stones or the Holy Grail. I bought the motorcycle sequence and loved it. The bar fight was classic Indy. I just feel like there were some areas where somebody (and I’m willing to guess it was Lucas) said ‘hey, we’ve got better technology now, wouldn’t it be cool to do this.’ It’s not the question of plausible or not, it’s the question of humanly possible. I never had an issue with the shark tank in Jaws or flaming-exploding cars (which mythbusters loves to do), but rather with this movie seeming to jump from the old tradition of ‘wow, it’s awesome he did that’ to ‘no way in hell he can do it’.
Okay, rant over.
Audra mentioned something about ratings and face melting. Actually the exploding head of the priest in Raiders nearly go the film an R rating, they had to put the pillar of fire over it and tone some other stuff down to make it be PG. They also did the Raider’s face melt with a dental compound in colored layers that melted when put under a heat lamp. They shot it at one frame per second, which makes it appear to melt the way it does. I forget how they did it in Last Crusade, and I’m sure the Skull one was digital.
With the Nazis, there is actual historical fact to the the notion of the Nazi’s looking for various artifacts. Hitler was all about the whole “Aryan Master Race” bit, and that included finding historical and archaeological justification for where the master race had been, what they had done, etc. They might not have been as blatantly military as in the movies, but they were definitely Nazis doing it. I can only imagine a quest to recover the grail would have been kept secret and had security personnel.
From what I’ve read, one plan for Temple of Doom involved Indiana Jones motorbiking down a length of the Great Wall while looking for some religious artifact, but the Chinese Government of the time wasn’t so hot on it. Don’t know how true that is though.
Thanks Robin, I really enjoyed the explanations!
