For people who have seen it *SPOILERS, DUH*

[Quintus 5,391]

The quicksand scene was terrible and even worse; it was useless. It was just an excuse for an action sequence amidst a great sea of exposition and to think that the 5mins of screen time it ate up could've been used for the fleshing out of proper character writing bothers me.

I can't believe I just said that about an Indy movie, but I did. There is no going back now.

So what got your back up? There's bound to be something, unless you are Miguel, apparently.

[Josh500 1,602]

The quicksand scene was terrible and even worse; it was useless. It was just an excuse for an action sequence amidst a great sea of exposition and to think that the 5mins of screen time it ate up could've been used for the fleshing out of proper character writing bothers me.

I can't believe I just said that about an Indy movie, but I did. There is no going back now.

So what got your back up? There's bound to be something, unless you are Miguel, apparently.

Actually I loved that scene. That was at least funny.

I hated the monkeys swinging on vines along with Mutt 'Tarzan' Williams, I hated the whole nuclear town and Indy escaping in a fridge of all things, I hated the prairie dogs, I hated Marion driving the gang over the cliff only to land on a huge tree which allows them to land softly and which then bounces back to foil the Russian soldiers.

These're the main things...

[Charlie Brigden 5]

Didn't care for the prairie dogs, or the Tarzan sequence. Other than that, nothing. Loved the Doomtown/Fridge sequence.

[Quintus 5,391]

Wow, that's quite a list Josh. Makes your rating of the movie seem sort of, incoherent.

Loved the Doomtown/Fridge sequence.

I didn't love it, but it was certainly one of the better moments in the movie. It was nicely surreal to see

Indy in (full regalia) running around a white picket fenced town in sheer panic.

[Josh500 1,602]

But, don't misunderstand me, I LOVE this movie...

Well, I said "main things" but that's just about it, actually.

These are just short mini-scenes, and I love everything else about the movie.

[Ollie 859]

I'm sure I'll fill this thread later on tonite.

[FattyMcButterpants 1]

I think the Doomtown sequence is worse than anything, *anything*, that has been done to Star Wars in the three prequels. I was sitting there, and couldn't believe they actually pulled this crap off.

I you ask me, they could have cut from Indy escaping the facility directly to Indy teaching a class, and they really wouldn't have lost a dime of the plot.

I don't need to hear about Indy's war record.

[Quintus 5,391]

Funny, I really enjoyed the Doomtown sequence. It was surreal in the best possible way. The fridge thing didn't bother me. No, the bullsh*t didn't start till much later into the movie.

Another thing, for me that sequence provided the movie's one and ONLY real sense of peril. I was kept guessing until the literal last second. The escape was daft, but it didn't make me cringe. Unlike some of the later stuff...

Indy's war record would have fitted better into a movie which spent a little more time 'in' it's characters. This movie didn't spend anywhere nearly long enough.

[FattyMcButterpants 1]

That's really funny!

Because I enjoyed the movie more the closer we got to the end. I exclude the actual ending, the marriage, because it left me cold as ice.

But during the entire climax (say, after Marion pulls off that silly stunt with the car), I kept thinking "where the hell is Williams? Why is this so unmemorable?" I mean, come on! If this isn't a grade A ticket for unabridged, adventurous thematic music, then what is?

Btw, for "living deads", the indios surely pass out quickly.

[Delorean90 32]

Wow, that's quite a list Josh. Makes your rating of the movie seem sort of, incoherent.

Loved the Doomtown/Fridge sequence.

I didn't love it, but it was certainly one of the better moments in the movie. It was nicely surreal to see

Indy in (full regalia) running around a white picket fenced town in sheer panic.

Agreed.

For me, I probably could have done without the prairie dogs, but no major harm. And the swinging bit could have been trimmed, most definitely. And I think the monkey should have died.

[Henry B 49]

Funny, I really enjoyed the Doomtown sequence. It was surreal in the best possible way.

Thanks. Surreal. That's the word I'm looking for. The only way in which I can compliment any element of this film (aside from Harrison Ford's admirable return to the character) is to say that it was surreal.

[FattyMcButterpants 1]

Yes, the sequence was bad in a most surreal way.

[QMM 4]

Tarzan sequence

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

Tarzan sequence

yep

only that.

the sand sequence

is nice to marion to tell indy is mutt's father

.

[John Crichton 4]

Da bomb.

I liked the quicksand (which, as Indy nicely put, isn't really quicksand). And I love hearing anything about Indy's war record. The Tarzan sequence was...OK. Kinda. Maybe fewer monkeys?

[jigawatts121 0]

Da bomb.

I liked the quicksand (which, as Indy nicely put, isn't really quicksand). And I love hearing anything about Indy's war record. The Tarzan sequence was...OK. Kinda. Maybe fewer monkeys?

Ok guys, who here has read the original version of Back to the Future? The whole Doomtown thing with hiding in the refrigerator from an atomic explosion was the climax. If you have the BTTF DVDs, you can see the original draft for yourself in the DVDROM portion. No fooling! LMAO. I wonder if Spielberg did this on purpose.

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

Da bomb.

I liked the quicksand (which, as Indy nicely put, isn't really quicksand). And I love hearing anything about Indy's war record. The Tarzan sequence was...OK. Kinda. Maybe fewer monkeys?

Ok guys, who here has read the original version of Back to the Future? The whole Doomtown thing with hiding in the refrigerator from an atomic explosion was the climax. If you have the BTTF DVDs, you can see the original draft for yourself in the DVDROM portion. No fooling! LMAO. I wonder if Spielberg did this on purpose.

possibly. specially if it was an idea of his own

[Guest macrea]

The motorcycle chase around the university doomed the movie. It was fine as an action scene, but in the back of my mind during it I kept thinking that if it ends and they go back to reading the piece of paper they were reading when it started, we'll know what kind of script we've got... and that's exactly what they did - in Indy's house no less! If you can pull out an action scene from an action movie and not affect the plot, it's inherently flawed. After that there were too many annoying and lame things to list.

[Lurker 5]

Too bad the refrigerator wasn't working. We could have had a frozen Indy figure to display next to the frozen Han action figure.

I liked seeing Indy climb out of the car and onto the moving motorcycle. It's impossible and dumb (the bike should have fallen over) but at least it looked real and not artificial, like virtually (no pun intended) everything else in the movie.

Neil

[benefactor 3]

Da bomb.

I liked the quicksand (which, as Indy nicely put, isn't really quicksand). And I love hearing anything about Indy's war record. The Tarzan sequence was...OK. Kinda. Maybe fewer monkeys?

Ok guys, who here has read the original version of Back to the Future? The whole Doomtown thing with hiding in the refrigerator from an atomic explosion was the climax. If you have the BTTF DVDs, you can see the original draft for yourself in the DVDROM portion. No fooling! LMAO. I wonder if Spielberg did this on purpose.

possibly. specially if it was an idea of his own

Holy Grail water somehow changed Ingy's genome, this is why he lived after atomic explosion. Surprised they didn't mention it.

[FattyMcButterpants 1]

I liked seeing Indy climb out of the car and onto the moving motorcycle. It's impossible and dumb (the bike should have fallen over) but at least it looked real and not artificial, like virtually (no pun intended) everything else in the movie.

Yes, that's the kind of "impossible stunt" that works in an Indy movie, not the ones I already mentioned.

[Lurker 5]

Though on the reverse shot it looked like Harrison was on roller skates, certainly not the image I want to have of Indy.

Neil

[BurgaFlippinMan 7]

Wow, that's quite a list Josh. Makes your rating of the movie seem sort of, incoherent.

Loved the Doomtown/Fridge sequence.

I didn't love it, but it was certainly one of the better moments in the movie. It was nicely surreal to see

Indy in (full regalia) running around a white picket fenced town in sheer panic.

I loved Indy running around

Doomtown

too. The escape itself was spectacular, but a bit of an 'uh...?' for an Indy fan. I think it has the possibility of becoming charming over time, like the magic box escape on the train in The Last Crusade. The

Tarzan

bit was just a bad idea in every way. I didn't like the prairie dogs, but those took up mere seconds in actuality. I'm not particularly fond of the

Marion driving over the cliff and the tree bouncing back to swipe the Russians

, but I let it slide. Lets see, what else? Ah, the

three falls

. First one was ok, Fugitive level, second was ok too, Temple of Doom level. Third one, that was maybe a bit too much. I did however love the drop in audio level in accordance with the long shot cut right after Ford says 'three...'.

[ashinyobject 0]

The entire movie

[Ollie 859]

Pretty much the whole film.

[Ray Barnsbury 8]

Didn't care for the prairie dogs, and Mutt's vine-swinging would've been a whole lot better if it had actually been Shia swinging on vines in a real environment. There was too much reliance on CGI overall, though most of it was well done. And I really didn't think it would end with a wedding....that seemed way too domestic for Indiana Jones, especially as the characters had just reunited after such an apparently terrible breakup years earlier. I'd have liked to see it end just with them together, like Raiders.

[jigawatts121 0]

I'm still waiting to see the Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies with everything in them that you fanboys want. When are they coming out? Some people are never happy.

[pixie_twinkle 44]

at least it looked real and not artificial, like virtually (no pun intended) everything else in the movie.

That's one of the film's biggest flaws. Almost none of the landscapes in the movie looked as realistic as the first three. I felt like I was staring at a computer game for much of it. After a while it started grating on the nerves. Damn, I miss the days when people actually had to build sets and props. The end result was always worth the extra time taken.

The other flaw was mixing Indy with the X-Files. What the hell? Aliens from the "spaces in between space" was a really misjudged addition to the Indy mythology. Just didn't seem to fit. Oh well.

None of this alters the fact that I loved the film. Ford was wonderful! It all just felt a bit too didgy.

[Quintus 5,391]

Mutt's vine-swinging would've been a whole lot better if it had actually been Shia swinging on vines in a real environment.

Yep, I think you just pin-pointed precisely what was wrong with that moment. They should have had a real stuntman doing it for real, in the friggin jungle. I bet that would've been far more convincing, even pretty cool. Oh well.

[MissPadmé 17]

Everything from the psycho junglecamp scene to the endcredits ..

Interruptd by some things I liked but the way it was done.. just to overthetop, fast paced, underdeveloped...

I had no problem with the fridge scene at all... to me taht was just so crazy and funny... like the raft in TOD or the magic box in tLC.. only tranformed into something more 50ies

[Unlucky Bastard 7,765]

They should have had a real stuntman doing it for real, in the friggin jungle.

They couldn't find a sufficient stuntman with a wolfman hairline like Shia's.

[Quintus 5,391]

^

I had no problem with the fridge scene at all... to me taht was just so crazy and funny... like the raft in TOD or the magic box in tLC.. only tranformed into something more 50ies

I agree, the whole sequence was one of the better ones in the movie.

I just remembered something else too. I hated the stupid 'comedy' dialogue in the quicksand sequence. The tit-for-tat here was badly judged and neither funny nor appropriate. Imagine Indy spoke to Willie as casually as that during the spike room trap in ToD. Both him and Short Round would've been impaled. The bit where Indy explains the constitution of what sort of sand pit they are stood in was possibly the worst thing about the whole scene, I cringed, again.

David Koepp has a lot to answer for, but then, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old expression goes.

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

Am i the only one that saw a real nevada desert, a real downtown, a real new york academy, a real indy house, a real trainstation, a real bar, a real peruvian village and madhouse, a real cemetery, a real jungle, a real waterfall, a real church...

The jungle chase cliffs didnt look worse than the cliffs on Raiders, anyway

[Quintus 5,391]

No, I noticed all that stuff too and it was all gorgeously shot. The cg cliff edge race stuff looked good too.

[Neimoidian 13]

(...)

The jungle chase cliffs didnt look worse than the cliffs on Raiders, anyway

No, it didn't.

But it was CGI! Yest, bad CGI. Computer ... *splitting* ... generated ...*yuck* ... images. That's abomination to the human kind, because it's the machine that does it!

What? What you are saying... the talented painters are working beside the computers as they used to with paint and brushes? No way!

I could do without

prairie dogs and Tarzan scene

though I don't mind them too much. I'd certainly like to get rid of

fridge scene

since it's embarassing. However, I like the Doomtown scene. They could have droped the

explosion scene

and just cut to US soliders finding Jones in that town or nearby area as he was looking for a way to come back to civilisation.

I agree that A Whirl through Academe wasn't particularly necessary, but it's one of my favourite action scenes of the movie, so I'm glad it is there.

[Ray Barnsbury 8]

at least it looked real and not artificial, like virtually (no pun intended) everything else in the movie.

That's one of the film's biggest flaws. Almost none of the landscapes in the movie looked as realistic as the first three. I felt like I was staring at a computer game for much of it. After a while it started grating on the nerves. Damn, I miss the days when people actually had to build sets and props. The end result was always worth the extra time taken.

Mutt's vine-swinging would've been a whole lot better if it had actually been Shia swinging on vines in a real environment.

Yep, I think you just pin-pointed precisely what was wrong with that moment. They should have had a real stuntman doing it for real, in the friggin jungle. I bet that would've been far more convincing, even pretty cool. Oh well.

George Lucas is of course an easy scapegoat for this aspect of the film, but do you guys think it would've been less CGI-reliant without his influence? I'd say almost definitely yes.

[Neimoidian 13]

at least it looked real and not artificial, like virtually (no pun intended) everything else in the movie.

That's one of the film's biggest flaws. Almost none of the landscapes in the movie looked as realistic as the first three. I felt like I was staring at a computer game for much of it. After a while it started grating on the nerves. Damn, I miss the days when people actually had to build sets and props. The end result was always worth the extra time taken.

Mutt's vine-swinging would've been a whole lot better if it had actually been Shia swinging on vines in a real environment.

Yep, I think you just pin-pointed precisely what was wrong with that moment. They should have had a real stuntman doing it for real, in the friggin jungle. I bet that would've been far more convincing, even pretty cool. Oh well.

George Lucas is of course an easy scapegoat for this aspect of the film, but do you guys think it would've been less CGI-reliant without his influence? I'd say almost definitely yes.

No way. In previous Joneses and many of his other movies, Spielberg also heavily relied on f-x. It's only technology that has changed. Instead of painting landscapes on a piece of glass, one does it on a computer.

If you want to blame Lucas, blame him for bringing this technology to the industry, not for implementing it to this paricular movie.

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

the only CGI i can complain about is the animals.

Landscapes and set? I cant really say if some are models (yes Kerner Optical formerly ILM model branch is involved), sets or really CGI.

[Toontje 0]

Why comment it so harshly? I saw it once now, and find it IMPOSSIBLE to give a clear opinion about it altough some scenes will never grow imho like the tarzan scene. But really, as steven said about TOD that it was Indy going to hell, This is Indy going into the 50ies, and a little thing about the CGI. The movie as it is wouldn't have worked without it these days. For us fanboys it would have but for everyone else, which is about 99% of the audience it would have looked fake.

[Ollie 859]

Yes Indy fighting on and being dragged behind a real truck, climbing on board a real submarine in the water, walking thru a real jungle, floating down a real river, riding in a real boat, riding a real motorcycle being pursued by villians on real bikes and fighting on a real tank with real backgrounds are so phony looking.

[Ray Barnsbury 8]

No way. In previous Joneses and many of his other movies, Spielberg also heavily relied on f-x. It's only technology that has changed. Instead of painting landscapes on a piece of glass, one does it on a computer.

If you want to blame Lucas, blame him for bringing this technology to the industry, not for implementing it to this paricular movie.

True, but there were plenty of things besides extravagant landscapes that were CG and could've been done with stunts or other "real" effects. I don't blame Lucas persay, but I do wonder about his influence on the film in that regard.

[Ray Barnsbury 8]

Yes Indy fighting on and being dragged behind a real truck, climbing on board a real submarine in the water, walking thru a real jungle, floating down a real river, riding in a real boat, riding a real motorcycle being pursued by villians on real bikes and fighting on a real tank with real backgrounds are so phony looking.

That's the kind of tangible realism I thought was missing from parts of the film. And I have to say, even if something has to be done with effects, I often like minatures and mattes better than CG; at least they're actually there.

[Ollie 859]

Thank you.

[Lurker 5]

Which is also why the ants sequence is a failure. We can relate to snakes and bugs and rats other creepy crawlies when they look real. In this there was never a moment where we were convinced that the ants were real. They never looked like anything beyond a cartoon added in post-production.

Neil

[Quintus 5,391]

LOTR proved better than any other modern blockbuster that miniatures work a whole lot better than cg as far as realism is concerned.

The fact that WETA effectively used both, speaks volumes.

[Delorean90 32]

Which is also why the ants sequence is a failure. We can relate to snakes and bugs and rats other creepy crawlies when they look real. In this there was never a moment where we were convinced that the ants were real. They never looked like anything beyond a cartoon added in post-production.

Neil

Actually, I found the ants quite convincing. The only thing really tipping me off is the fact that they just couldn't do it without CG.

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

LOTR proved better than any other modern blockbuster that miniatures work a whole lot better than cg as far as realism is concerned.

The fact that WETA effectively used both, speaks volumes.

There are miniatures in this film.

I think that the temple entrance with the sand etc part could be one.

It looks like a LOTR model anyway.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,251]

It's a pity WETA was not brought in to work on some of the CGI in the jungle chase.

[Luke Skywalker 1,284]

Am i the only one that does not notice CGI on the jungle chase (

except the monkeys and groin punching plants

)

And WETA is doing Tin Tin already. Happy?

[Toontje 0]

To Mark Olivarez

I was trying to say that in this movie it wouldn't have worked for the most now CGI parts. Some things would've worked, like jungle chase some parts which would have been better without CGI

(WHY THE MONKEYS :S WHY) but an alien puppet, temple being blown away bij the UFO, couldn't have worked without CGI.

So it's a story problem.