Chen G.

If that's what it takes to lure John back for more Star Wars, then so be it! So, which wig are you taking for the job, then?

Stay away from Tristan, then! More and more, I find this kind of treatment to have a much more inherent musicality compared to the more "lexical" approach of "this figure going up in major means X, going down in minor means Y, going up in minor means Z..."

My point is taken nonetheless, I trust. And, in general, I can only imagine the fool (of a Took?) who goes into a Peter Jackson Tolkien movie NOT expecting an action film. They're all action films. Doesn't mean their drama is diminished for it in the least.

Less than half the film is the battle...

Just what he said about Star Wars? Pfft! I've gone back to short stories and class reports the man had given in the third grade! I looked up his grandparents!

A stroke of genius would have been to push Dial of Destiny to 1981...

Yeah, the Rhinedaughters would like to have a word with you about it...

I look at this accomplishment a little differently: John Williams took one body of basic musical material, and had managed to spin out of it a yarn that extends across nine film scores, a trailer, several concert stage works, and pieces for a spinoff film, a miniseries AND an amusement park. In that sense its like the Ring cycle on steroids.

I can't quite articulate what it is about Indiana Jones that doesn't make me see it as "timeless." I mean, Star Wars has a "timelessness" to it, partially because it takes place outside our space and time, AND because Star Wars entries have been drip-fed to us over a very extended period of time. Indiana Jones belongs, as Nick points out, in the 1930s and very much appealed in its day to people who, not so much had nostalgia for the 1930s but for media set in the 1930s (Republic serials and the like) AND after The Last Crusade, it had been very sporadically released. Also, while series like Star Wars, Marvel or Harry Potter went through directors like tissue paper, Indiana Jones had been so identified with Spielberg and his mise-en-scene... I just do not know... I won't be holding up for a reboot of Indiana Jones being a runaway success.

Title should be "first and latest"

Sure. But I personally just don't see it being succesfull, and therefore don't see it becoming a thing again...

I feel like a reboot is very unlikely. This is not James Bond: this is a series that had gone fifty years with Ford. It’s too identified with that persons to work without him.

it’s the mileage on the ruler! 🤣

The truck chase in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is kind of emblematic of this for me: Mutt does all the action, Indy drives the car.

But he can't. The reason characters like Mut Williams and Helena exist is because, Indy now being an older man, you need someone to more believably helm the more outrageous action beats.

Me, too. But I always thought it was a good movie, just an obtuse one.

Of course its all relative! But I've never made up my mind about a film, and then had that changed drastically by having seen another film. That's not to say my opinion about certain films isn't suspectible to change: when I first saw Lawrence of Arabia, I thought the second part basically sank the movie; and while I still think (as did Lean) that its not as good as the first part, I obviously don't think it tanks the movie anymore.

I must say I don't really have that kind of way of looking at things. I mean, yeah, all qualitative discussion is relative in nature, but if I find a movie good, I just find it good; and if I find it bad, I find it bad. Like, I don't like Attack of the Clones AND I don't like The Rise of Skywalker.

Lets put it this way: when people saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, they surely knew there'd be sequels. But did any of them imagine that there would be a sequel that would end with an elderly Marion and Jones boinking? When you put it like that, it really does sound like the stuff of farce.

I think audiences were just jaded about the concept of an action-adventure film starring an octagenarian. When I told a friend that this film exists, he called it "Indiana Jones and the Calcium Deficit."

No, they wanted Olivier. He turned them down. Would have been a great casting coup! You can see the actor they chose is quite Larry-ish.

The only wrong thing about that is that it wasn't Lord Laurence Olivier as intended.

I don't like either of the two beats.

I mean, having been directed Spielberg, it does have that Spielberg "touch" that's less a virtue by itself so much as something that connects it, stylistically, to the previous films in a way that Dial of Destiny is not. Dial of the Destiny feels like the odd one out, which is surely a demerit.