We had a long weekend here, and we ended up seeing the latest Indiana Jones movie. I was able to enjoy a lot of the various scenes when taken separately, but as a whole I mostly was left with a furrowed brow and a single question: “Why?”
Not “why did they make the movie?” but “why didn’t they take even a single day’s worth of work to plug the plot holes?”
If we could spot at least a dozen obvious plot holes to discuss in the car ride home, many of which could have been plugged with only a minor bit of script re-writing, then why didn’t they do it? Okay, so it’s hard to have a lot of respect for Lucas’s judgment after that last trilogy, but Spielberg generally knew what he was doing. It’s hard to believe that he’d have let so many obvious gaffes slip through when one, maybe two days’ worth of work on the part of a halfway-decent writer’s part would have fixed them. A script-writer’s time isn’t that expensive, especially compared to the rest of the costs on a film. It’s also hard to imagine Ford, a man who’s shown a lot of good judgment in terms of choosing scripts, not noticing the huge flaws in this one.
No, I’m not going to go into a long discussion of plot holes. I’m sure actual movie review sites have done that, and what’s the point? It feels like beating a dead horse. I just wish I understood why, because it makes no sense to me. No business sense, no logical sense, no sense at all.
Anyway, I haven’t posted in about a week or something like that, so I have a bunch of reviews to link to. Today’s is J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s Vengeance in Death—I had a yen for another good mystery after reading Mariah Stewart’s Mercy Street. If you’re looking for a particularly spicy romance, there’s Hard to Get by Alyssa Brooks. And finally, I HIGHLY recommend The Waiter’s upcoming Waiter Rant!!
I started to fall asleep at the end of the movie because I was so exhausted–so I honestly didn’t notice the plot holes. The whole alien thing, though, was a little too much for me! Overall I enjoyed it anyway–sometimes that’s all you can do when your brain is fried from work! : /
I felt the same way about this last Indy Jones movie. There were too many plot holes, and too many of the stunts so wildly violated physics that they were unbelievable. I know Indy always somewhat tweaked the “possible physics” barrier, but this time they want over the edge into the Twilight Zone. The movie kept jarring me out of itself, and I found it hard to stay immersed.
I completely agree with you that (other than the silly stunts) the main issues with the script should have been fixable with some very simple writing.
I’m not sure we can blame Lucas for this though. Although he created the basic story, he was not the screenwriter this time… someone else was.
C
Trish: I was ambivalent on the alien thing in general (plenty of anasazi/alien parallels have been drawn for years, so the general idea is okay by me, but the way they carried it out left me ‘meh’).
Chessack: Yeah, the impossible stunts were another thing. It’s absolutely true that Indy’s always been able to do some death-defying and technically impossible stuff, but they always tried to keep it to a sort of comic-book level of nigh-realism. They went so far above and beyond that this time it just broke suspension of disbelief—starting right off with the damn fridge scene (that just left me with my jaw on the floor, and NOT in a good way). And while the various animal scenes with the monkeys and the prairie dogs were funny, they were far too cutesy & Disney-ified. The animal scenes in the earlier IJ movies were of a more mischievous and dark variety.