This is the story of Raiders of the Lost Dark. You can read along
with me in your book. You will know it is time to turn the
page when you hear the bull whip crack like this. Let's begin now,
I'm retiring. Well in that case, what are we drinking? Same for
the God daughter. God told me you found something on a train during the
war, a dial that could change the course of history. Why are you
choosing the thing that drove your father crazy? Don't move physe get it.
Stop sorry, doctor Jones. Get him. Yeah, it made mistakes,
and with this I won't correct them all. You've stole it, then you
stole it, and then I stole it. It's called capitalism. Yes,
way, first seat built, there might be some tablets. You've taken your
chances, made your mistakes, and now a final triumph it Hey, m
Indiana ponies. A few times in my life we're seeing things. I'm going
torture with voodoo. I'm shot nine times, once by your father. A
sorry, I've been looking for this all my life. Welcome to the final
chapter of our reading of the Lost Arc series aka a crossover between the Projection
Booth and the Culture Cast. I'm one of your hosts Mike White, though
you may know me as Lawrence Casting. Joining me, of course, is
mister George Lucas himself aka Chris Stassue. It's like poetry rhymes, and of
course Steven Spielberg aka Andrew Rausch. Hey, what's up, there's Steven Spielberg.
We are wrapping things up with the discussion of Indiana Jones and the Dial
of Destiny. This film has all of these folks credited as writers, Jazz
and John Butterworth, David Kepp, and James Mangold, who also directed the
film. Mangold has a real knack for looking at older characters at the end
of the run, as he's almost doing for Indiana Jones what he did for
Logan. This film tells the tale of Indiana Jones finding an artifact that may
change the course of history, but that's kind of always his thing. We're
going to be spoiling the heck out of this movie, so if you don't
want anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come back. Don't be like
the jackass who posted spoilers on my Twitter feed the day the movie open.
So let's go ahead and start at the beginning and work our way through this
thing, and we've got our extended James Bond type opening with the d aged
Harrison Ford and Chris. I think you're a big fan of the d aging
process. If you want to make your movie feel like a Marvel movie,
there's a really easy way to do it. Step one d aging actor,
in this case Harrison Ford, because you know, thankfully, you know,
we just watched Blade Runner twenty forty nine, no d aging there. The
reluctance of Harrison Ford to come back is felt not only in the role,
but also in his appearance here. I'm assuming he was reluctant to come back.
Maybe not. He seems to be enjoying himself on this kind of last
hurrah with Indiana Jones. But you know, we kind of knew it was
coming. There had been whispers of like there was someone wearing it, Indiana
Jones mask writing a motorcycle at one point, like a young Harrison Ford mask.
And then you know, again, like we've seen this technology in the
Marvel movies so much now that it's kind of commonplace. I mean, the
grandmaf Tarken thing in Rogue one being another case, but that's also a Disney
thing. It's just never been this prolonged and pronounced, and again it felt
like the character that Malcolm McDowell plays in The Clockwork Orange. It's like holding
my eyes open because with grandmof tark And you can look away it it's like
a minute. With this, it's like what am I gonna do? Go
get a bucket of popcorn for thirty fucking minutes. Like again, the action
and everything else aside, just I didn't want to look at it because it's
not It's varying degrees of quality, but most of it is below what I
would consider to be worth showing, at least for twenty five minutes. The
Indiana Jones d aging is ghoulish, and I think in a front too common
sense. And look, I understand why they did it. I understand why
they did it the way that they did it, frankly, because hey,
if you're gonna do it, just fucking full board, don't do the Justice
League shit where it's like half dozen in bullshit. Just they went for it.
They show it. It's the first time we see Harrison Ford in this
movie. He's da. The shot that they show in the trailer is the
best shot in the movie, because beyond that it's just it's varying degrees of
horrifying, and we have to watch it for twenty minutes at least. In
the James Bond movie, it's fifteen minutes of a backstory of a character who
were being forced to carry about, and then fifteen to twenty minutes, or
about fifteen minutes of actual Daniel Craig being actual James Bond. While you can
d h Harrison Ford's face, you cannot dage his voice, and you cannot
dage the way that he holds himself. And anytime they show Indiana Jones from
any sort of long distance, it's clearly an old guy doing and that with
an older voice. And then they d age his face and he looks like
he is a giant head. So my ranting and raving aside, Boy,
what an opening. I actually didn't mind the daging all the time. There
were a few times where I was like, oh, looks kind of decent
here, But that's very rare that he looks decent when they do things like
shine the light on his face looks really bad. When he's doing a lot
of real quick motion on the motorcycle stuff, it looks really bad. But
there are times where I'm like, Okay, this looks all right, but
it's more just like an approximation of Harrison Ford rather than oh, I believe
that this is young Indiana Jones. I believe that this is the guy that
we grew up with who looked this way in you know, the Raiders took
place and what thirty six this would have been forty four that we're going here
and didn't look good. I thought it was very funny that they brought up
the Spear of Lnginas, the sphere of Destiny, since we were talking when
we read the story of Transcripts that that was the mcguffin for before they came
up with the arc, that that's what George and Phil Kaufman were talking about.
And they're like, oh, yeah, Spear of Destiny, and it
kind of has the same thing here where it's oh, if Hitler gets his
hands on this, he's going to win the war. This is going to
be rate And then that they proved that it's a fake within the first fifteen
minutes, if not sooner. I thought that was kind of a neat thing.
But I thought it was a nice little nod to the fans. So
I'm gonna be the odd man out here. It wasn't as bad as I
thought it could have been. You know, there were times I thought it
looked really good. The eyes are that's the bad part. The eyes always
looked dead, no matter, but they look funky. But you know,
I thought it was better used than the Irishman. It was one of the
people that didn't hate the Irishman, but they they still walked around like old
people. I thought that this was one thing that they did better by using,
you know, in the in the action scenes, using a body double
at a distance, and not having an eighty one year old man hobbling around
on top of a speeding train. I don't know, I didn't hate it.
It was a lot more than I had expected. I mean, it
was a lot, but I don't know. I mean, it wasn't one
of the part parts of the movie that I hated the most, and I
know a lot of people do, but hey, I'm fucking Steven Spielberg.
You know, I could do what I wanted and it didn't. It didn't
bother me that much. You feel like a Robert Downey junior and tropic thunder
thing here, Like I'm not pretaking character until we're character right. You mentioned
you mentioned that they used a body double. There are a couple of shots
where they clearly didn't. And it's old Harrison Ford, and you mentioned the
body double, and the voice is the other thing, Like it is him
doing old man Indiana Jones and a young body like Disney hire somebody to help
with voice modulation or get an impersonator or something, because if you're trying to
sell forty four, you're not successful in that regard. And I put in
all this other effort to do it. It seems kind of strange. They
just be like, well, nobody can do India's voice other than Harrison.
And it's like other than all the times in video games that he did it.
Like I don't know, like it feels like a video game enough,
why not just go whole hog? It seems a little strange to me.
What was it like working with young Harrison Ford? Oh my gosh, Well,
the thing is he walked on. George likes to cast people that are
so close to what he wants. He doesn't have to really get in there
and give you a lot of directions. Yeah, and Harrison had a really
firm grasp, Like the overview I think he'd make a really good director if
he weren't so lazy. For instance, we were doing the scene where it
was right after we got out of the trash compactor. We hadn't filmed that
scene yet, and I'm looking into continuity and I said, we'll wait a
second. This is right after we got out of the trash compactor. Shouldn't
my hair be all wet and matted with Schmutz all through it? And he
turns to me and says, hey, good, it ain't that kind of
movie. If people are looking at your hair, We're all in big trouble.
This shit with this CGI has got to stop because it doesn't look good
enough. I couldn't believe that this is a fucking three hundred million dollar movie,
because like, there's no amount of this that will make Like, if
this is the amount that you even with the three hundred million dollar budget,
and this is how it looks, you can't fucking do this. Then do
something else. Just write a different opening, introduce us to the fucking abe
waller Bridge character in the opening of the movie, subvert our expectations completely.
Don't force us to watch this fucking weird chat GPT third act or first Act
to Last Crusade all over again. Like it's just I don't know, maybe
it just pisses me off more than other people, but it just it felt
like Disney just going, look at this thing we can do, and it's
like, I'm as impressive as it seems like. I mean, it's like,
given another I was gonna say ten years, but give it five years.
I mean that we've seen the progression since that really awful. Well,
the worst I think is still Graham Moth Tarkan and Princess Leah in Rogue one.
And then it just it gets a little bit better with Luke Skywalker the
first time we see him in The Mandalorian, and then better the second time
we see him in the Mandalorian. But here we are now and it's not
much better. It's really yeah, and yeah, there's gonna be a way
to Dah the voice a little bit as well, and I'm sure that you
could do that. What's even more kind of not upsetting, but again,
it just makes it stand out even more is when he interacts with other actors,
real living actors, like the fantastic Toby Jones, who's in this movie
for a couple minutes and Thomas Kraishman, who's also in this movie, for
a couple minutes like they're both fantastic actors, and then when they have to
interact with this like weird, homunculous monster of an Indiana Jones, it's just
I can't stress enough. So I guess other people like myself out there,
like, I don't think that this is going to stick around, thankfully.
I think that we're coming to a logical point where this is either going to
have to get better and then we can do it, or we've got to
stop doing it until it gets better. Because I haven't seen anybody go,
well, this is a good part of the movie that I really like,
because everybody has to say other than the fact that he looks weird and he's
got this giant head. Taking all that aside, the action's fine, But
to be honest with you, the action in this movie was not very compelling.
None of it seemed to be, even the intro, which is a
shave like Indiana Jones. You're here for the character and the interactions and kind
of the puzzles, and not the puzzles but kind of the world of archaeology,
and there for the action and this movie, Like from the start,
it just feels very marvel, very marvel esque, and Indiana Jones's action has
never been marvel. Even in the fourth movie, it wasn't. And I
don't know if they d age Mads Mickelson, but if they did, it
wasn't very pronounced. And Mad's Michelson not as old as Harrison Ford. He
almost looked like the same fucking guy. He almost looked like the same fucking
guy, but with shitty, shitty blonde hair like that was I don't know.
The real problem for me, and I know I'm jumping ahead is he
gets I would think he gets half of his head caved in by the thing.
Does not have a How does he not have a guy? Like I
thought when we first see him and they're talking to him when he comes back
right like, there's a long scene where he's got his head turned and I
thought, he's gonna turn and we're gonna see this, you know, crazy
scar like you know, the guy and Raiders have lost art glory. There's
gonna be something, you know, and it's nothing. It was just he
just looked like the same fucking guy. Yeah, he's Mad's Michelson with gray
hair and a few wrinkles. Yeah, same glasses, same everything. He's
a superman. You know. They talked about the Hitler wanted the Nazi superman.
Maybe he was one of them. I don't know, but it was
weird. He had the super soldier serum. That's why he recovered so quickly.
And I haven't say the Dial of Destiny, and I'm not going to
try to pronounce the Greek at to cathera mechanism. I guess that's really strange
because it's a real thing, whereas I know, I have at least two
atheists on this call. So the spear of long guyness, who knows if
that was really a thing? Who knows if Jesus was a real person,
this kind of stuff, But like, you know, all the mythology that
goes along with the spear, all the stuff that goes along with the arc,
with the cup, you know, the Holy Grail, Shankar stones,
Nobody other than Mulam, nobody really wanted those for much of anything. And
then Mulram, what's he wanted? He's just like, oh, when we
get all these, we have power. And I'm like, okay, great,
you know this is a real item we're playing with real history here,
which is just an odd turn for Indiana Jones, because so many of his
adventures mix science with with mythology, and now it's like pure science, but
then taking the pure science of the dial and making that into a mythological thing
with time travel. Does this movie suffer from not being directed by Steven Spielberg?
Well, I think Steven would say yes, of course, not addressing
you Andy as Steven Spielberg, but as Andy. I mean is does this
movie suffer from not having me Spielbergian touch to it? I don't know.
I don't know if he's got that same touch now. I think he does
really good with big, grandiose movies now, but I don't know if an
action movie is really going to be his sporting anywhere. I don't know.
I don't know if it would have made a difference for me. So much
of the movie is about the script, and you know, obviously we talked
for six hours about the script when it came to Raiders, and just all
that tinkering, all the stuff that went into it, all the things that
were good, all the things that were bad, all the things that got
pulled out into other things, and there's you know, of course, as
I'm watching this movie, I keep thinking about our script conversation and just like
looking for little things that they might have still kind of kept alive after all
these years. Yeah, I don't know if it really would have mattered had
it been Steven Spielberg in the director's chair, or if it would have been
better if it was Lawrence Casden behind the type writer. The one thing that
I think might have been different though, was the editing, because it felt
like this film, even though it wasn't like super flabby, I felt like
there was some flab to it. And I can't say specifically. It was
just in the second half, and I don't want to go into that,
but it's just just yet but didn't feel streamlined enough. There was a point
later on in the movie where you know, I'd have been looking at my
watch if i'd have had one. I mean, it wasn't bad, it
didn't feel long, but it just and even though we were getting a lot
of action. I can't say what it was, but it felt draggy a
little in the in the final third. So if I had been there,
if Steven Spielberg had been there, I think I'd had a little more control
in the editing bay and would have been smoother. Well, it wasn't Michael
Khan. It was three editors. It was Andrew Buckland, Michael mccuster,
and Dick Westerveldt, three editors for this. I think the problem was not
enough editors and not enough screenwriters, you know what I mean? Like and
also, why didn't we have nine directors? You know, if we're gonna
have nine people at every other job, why not nine directors? We could
had like a big committee of fucking head Spielberg and Mangold and Lucas, all
of them all. He could all we could have all been here and Frank
Marshall could have come on in and you know, done his you know,
a rackmophobia thing. We could have had it, pull out a wigia board
and get Bogdanovitch on the horn. I mean all right, it had a
spiritual stylings of Peter Bugdanovitch. Right, we could have made it just like
What's Up? Doc? Or Last Picture Show? It would be great.
You know, one thing that bothers me if they took in there real quick.
We're talking about the train scene, and that's worth the b aging.
Do you know what I'm really really sick of and it was fun once upon
a time, and maybe it would have been fun once in this movie.
But the thing where he's ever on like some speeding train, speeding car,
speeding fucking anything, and his head is being held off and then oh my
god, there's a big thing coming at his face and then he moves his
head and we never think the Indiana Joe's gonna lose his head. It's never
a real fear. But they did it I think about four times in this
movie, Like that is fucking overkill. Well it's between that and putting his
head in a bag. You know, his head is a bag at least
twice, if not three times in this movie. Well maybe they could have
done that instead of the d aging. Then you wouldn't have the complaints.
He could have just had a bag on his end for twenty minutes. Damn,
I can't see fucking shit out. It's like I've just made mine worse.
Anybody Brandy extra bags? No, nobody brought an extra bag. I'm
just asking. With the thing with the motorcycle on the train, I was
hoping they were going to do a super cop thing and have him shoot the
motorcycle onto the train. It's like we get so close to having big stunts
in here, but then we don't. It's like we're in the age where
we have seen so many of these spectacular stunts, whether they're done for real
like a Jackie Chan would do, or whether they're completely CGI. And I
would say all of the stunts in here seemed like they're very CGI, which
is a little sad, you know. And I will be honest, I
winda got fatigue from some of the action films because it was I kind of
was not a fan of the action in this movie. It seemed like overkill
when it was happening. The chase scene went on and on and on and
then on some more, and then on and on, like they'd take a
corner of zoom zoom in the little cart and shit. And then I felt
like that was never going to end. And when I was watching John Wick
four and he kept going up the fucking steps and back down and up,
I thought that was going to get in this way, I mean, it
was okay, it was workable. This shit just kept going, and I
thought the rest of this movie, like the next hour is just going to
beat them driving around in this fucking car going down streets and little alleys.
Thankfully that wasn't the case. It was only like a quarter of the next
hour. But I'm gonna watched that movie just them driving in a circle and
they just make a loop of that fifteen minutes and it's just so Keystone cop
shit. I'd watch right. I mean, between the chase in New York
with the horse versus the motorcycle in the car and then the Tuck Tuck chase,
I was just I was chased that. I was like, okay,
in one he's chasing and the other he's being chased. I'm just like,
okay enough. And by the way, going back to that train fight,
I kept thinking of Top Secret, when the Nazi comes out of the smoke
of the train and he's there and he's ready to fight Indiana Jones and there's
a bridge that comes I was just hoping that he would stand there and the
bridge would collapse underneath, you know, like would break around him. It
would have been more compelling than what we got. Because the original three Indiana
Jones movies are of a piece, they are their own thing, and I
think I think that these two movies have more or less confirmed that those movies
one was obviously Lightning in the Bottle. Two is my favorite, and three
is the favorite of many, and it is the third. One is very
different than the first, and the second is very different than the third,
but they all feel of a piece. Four does not feel of a piece.
It feels like its own thing, and five really feels like its own
thing. And this open is it sets that tone because it just lets you
know, like a it's not gonna be what you think. It's going to
be like a flashback thing that everything does now anymore, where it's like,
we're gonna show you this thing that you didn't know about. We're gonna retcon.
It's kind of a retcon. It's a very lazy retcon, but it's
a retcon none nonetheless, because again, oh now he had a god daughter
that's never been mentioned in all these four movies. Wouldn't be convenient if he
had a son, and we'll talk about that. But it sets the tone
in a way that the openings of the other movies kind of did as well
for their respective movies. I just think the tone of this movie is check
your expectations at the door. This is not your mom and Dad's Indiana Jones
movie. This is very different in a lot of ways. This is kind
of what Ryan Johnson was trying to do with that Star Wars movie, and
he varying degrees of success based on the person. But this, in the
very same way feels like, I want to do my own thing that's not
Spielberg with a character that is in the kind of pop culture pantheon, and
Mangold does his own thing that is for sure. Get me, Steven Spielberg,
he's not available, then get me he's non union Mexican equivalent. Listen,
senior spielbergo, I want you to do for me with Spielberg did for
Rosca Shindy for me. The tonal stuff really becomes a challenge. It really
changes tone. When we moved to August of sixty nine and we get the
Beatles music, we get him interacting with the hippies, we see the Shiitthole
apartment that he's living in, We get to see the picture of Marian the
vorce decree that we have going so we're introduced to that there's trouble in Paradise
type of thing, and then him going in and of course he has to
be lecturing about Archimedes on that particular day. So yeay us So here's oh
my gosh, yeah, we are just putting in this exposition right here,
it happens to also be moon landing day. We have to go right for
all of the iconic shit, and what are the odds of any of this?
Right? And I know it's you know, I mean, the last
movie had UFOs and it's so who gives a ship? And this one has
time travel, so we know we're not going for realism, but it just
also happens to be the moon travel day. And the music that's loud that
he's hearing is the Beatles. It just has to be something that's so iconic
that we hear today and not one of the eight hundred groups. They were
listening to a nineteen sixty nine that we no longer here today. And it's
just or even the thing, the little little shit like that where the picture
of Marion is on the fridge and this is the first day forever that he
puts the sting on it, or does he do that every fucking day?
I don't know, but it's just seems so convenient and maybe this is ridiculous,
bitch, but it's just I hate that that feels lazy to me.
Even the thing with his retirement party that happens at this school. This was
the craziest day everything happened. And then how does he not notice by the
way, that his god daughter is sitting there in his last lecture. She
talks, He talks to her, but he doesn't know who she doesn't need
to notice she's not one of his students. Nor does he notice the African
American lady that's sitting right next to her. Who is Is she the first
African American woman that we've gotten in all of these movies and she's an African
American Nazi? No, No, she's CIA. Yeah, the whole but
she was working for the Nazi guy, right, Yeah, the whole thing
is the CIA and nothing against her and plenty against Nazis, but it just
seems like somebody the Nazi would not have really dug working around because they weren't
really big on women, or African Americans or basically anyone that wasn't blonde haired,
blue eyed, or an asshole. It wasn't an asshole. I mean,
the whole thing with the CIA working with former Nazis, it is very
project paperclip and they don't mention the jet propulsion lab. But the whole idea
of We're gonna get all of these Nazi scientists, and it was ironic that
I saw a trailer for Oppenheimer before this. I was like, We're gonna
get all these Nazi scientists to come on over here, help us out with
our stuff, and yes, help put people on the moon. And Mats
Michelson is one of those guys. Somehow he turned from archaeology into rocket scientists,
I suppose, or maybe he was some Verna von Brown type person over
in Nazi Germany. And for me, you know, you're mentioning how Nazis
wouldn't like having a woman, African American woman around the only time that Matt's
Mickelson comes off as a dick is when he is confronted with the African American
gentleman who brings in his lunch or his breakfast and he says question like,
where did you come from? No, I really mean your people, And
he's just kind of being a real asshole about stuff. But for the rest
of the movie, I'm like, I'd rather hang out with Matt's Michelson than
I would most of the other characters in this film. When he says you
thought for your country, didn't you too? The African American guy, did
I miss something? Like? How did he know? Was that just a
guess or was he wearing a patrick like I didn't see anything. That's a
good question. That seemed like a hell of a gas. Yeah, maybe
the mentalist too, you know, now that you mentioned it, let's let's
mention I think the best one of the best things about this movie is they
said, who can play a villain? Really? Well, Mad's Nicholson,
of course, and best casting, I mean, one of the best casting
choices was getting someone of his caliber in this movie. I think. Unfortunately,
he's not much of a villain because I mean, again, he's a
Nazi who was hired by NASA, helps the Apollo moon landing, and now
he wants to go back and kill Hitler, which means that this movie is
about Indiana Jones saving Hitler's life. I think he wants to take over for
Hitler, like if anything, I think he wants to kill Hitler so that
he can become like the new Fur like he sees, Yeah, he sees
all the mistakes that Hitler made and he's just like, no, no,
I could do it better. I know what those mistakes are, Like Hitler
was too much of a pantie for him. He wants to be the ultimate
Hitler, super mega Hitler, and so again like yes, I mean,
yes, obviously mads Mickelson probably not going to be much better than Hitler realistically,
but it is ironic given how many times Indiana Jones has foiled the Nazis
that now it's not as much about foiling the Nazis as foiling a Nazi.
So's I mean, Mads Michelson is the best part of this movie, Like
bar None, it's just how can you make a movie with Indiana Jones and
just focus on the villain? That's that's more of the question, Like you
can't do that. He's no Bellock though, you know, like I think
Bellock as the anti Indiana Jones was so much better than what mads Mickelson is
doing here because Mads Mickelson isn't given a chance to do much and most of
the time it's just him swooping in, taking one part of the dial,
swooping in, taking the other pattern of the dial, swooping in, doing
whatever he needs to do, and just he doesn't seem to have very much
any problems, and he's got Boyd Holebrook and then Olivier Richter's there to help
him out. And Boyd Holebrook, as soon as I saw him, I
was like, Oh, he and James Mangel must have really gotten along on
logan because he's basically playing the exact same character but without an electronic arm.
Well, and I was joking with you about it, but Boyd Holbrook is
not the character that Billy Magnuson plays from No Time to Die, the most
recent James Bond movie. But you could be confused by that because they're both
just kind of blondhaired, blue eyed Sam Worthington's or Sam Whipers or Joel Kinneman.
Like I think it's funny. Boyd Holbrook is kind of not needed here
either. I mean, he's fine, but sorry, he doesn't add much.
I don't think. I don't think they give him much to do.
Unfortunately, either, at times it seemed like there was too much shit going
on. There were too many characters. There was too much shit going on.
It could have been paired down a little. You get the CIA chief
with the bad knee or bad foot or whatever, and I'm just like,
we're gonna find out anything about this bad foot. You want to give us
one line of dialogue. Maybe he's been chasing Wombat aka Fleabag all around the
place and that's why he's got that. I'm sorry, I will say the
person's real name, Phoebe Wallerbridge. He's chasing Helena all over the place,
and that's why he's got this bad foot. Maybe she did something to him
at some point and that's why he's really angry at her. But no,
we don't know. And so yeah, you've got five six people chasing down
her at Indies College where he just happens to keep the dial in this storage
room where it could easily have been stolen. But I don't want to be
this guy, but it really drives me crazy when you show a character shooting
that lady in blue who works for the staff, shoot her in the hallway.
She's there face down because he shot her in the back. He shoots
I guess the head of the department. He falls down, and then later
on Indiana finds her over in a different hallway, different part of that and
on her back and I was like, well, she didn't crawl past that
head of there. And then flip herself over on her back. I mean,
and nobody should have moved the corpse. So why did she move?
Why was the body move? Was this just a weird continuity thing or is
there was there another scene missing? Because there are scenes that are in the
trailer that aren't in the movie that we saw. Oh there. It feels
like there's half of a movie on the cutting room floor, the better half.
Well, that's the thing. I mean, you know, we have
this opening in New York, right, we see old Indiana Jones. He's
got no shirt on. Great Harrison Ford's getting to show off his physique.
I'm glad, but you mentioned it already. Andy. It's like, since
when did this franchise become Forrest Gump? All of a sudden, It's like
he goes outside and they're doing this and it's moon Dame, motherfucker, and
it's like, what the fuck is all of this? Like this? There
was none of this for when we had the Last Crusade, which is kind
of what this feels like. It's aping when he's like he goes to the
book burning in Berlin, right, that made sense contextually, thematically, historically,
those things all make sense here. It's like, all why doesn't have
to be today because the guy looking for the dial is the guy who put
the NAI, the Nazi who put astronauts on the moon. It's like,
that's why. And again, like your point, Mike, like that adds
nothing. Him being NASA adds nothing, like other than like operation paper Clip,
which they don't even mention. They just mentioned that. I mean again,
they're not gonna mention Operation paper Clip by name, I guess, but
they could, given we know that it's a thing. I mean, you
don't have to call it that then, But that's what's going on. And
I was that was the thing I was most excited about in the movie,
was this idea of like drawing on reality and they just don't do anything with
it. They just go, well, it takes place on this day and
this guy did this thing, but as to informing the decisions that he makes
or anything else, and that it's all just kind of expository for no reason.
The reason that doesn't even have to be there, though, is because
they make it seem like mad Michelson is the only guy that was responsible for
the rocketry. And I was going back just a minute here when we were
talking about the unmediated characters departed. About this that really irks me is the
one character we actually want to see again, Sala disappears, just disappears,
and it's like it was kind of like that old I think it was Hitchcock
that said, if you show a gun in the first act, that has
to go off in the third. Well, I mean, okay, Sala
does show up in the third, but we think. I thought he would
show up. I thought, you know, just in the nick of time,
he would show up and save Dye. But isn't he gone until the
end? Or I thought for sure he was going to get marrying and they're
going to save the day. At the end of the film, you know,
he comes in as this Dao sex salo smacking the guy in the face,
punching them the guy the hippie in the face where we find out about
Mutts death just through a random thing on the TV. Good thing. I
was paying attention to that, and they're just like, oh, Ernest sartin
Dard and Rhnam or whatever. I mean, it would be Vietnam and he
died on the way to his home planet. He was boogie bro. I
mean, you know, think back, because again, in preparation for this,
I watched the first four begrudgingly. On that fourth one, and don't
forget, in that fourth one, Sean Connery, still alive at the time,
dies off screen. Den Holm Elliott, dead at the time, dies
off screen, so his death makes sense in the way they handle it.
But they killed off Sean Connery the exact same way, more or less ignominiously.
And here's the thing. I mean, they set up the idea that
like, what would you do if you could go back in time and warn
yourself? And it's like, I would warn my son to not go to
Vietnam. Like it's just it's ridiculous, so fucking it's fucking strange. Because
here's the thing. James Bond was what Spielberg wanted to direct, and they
directed. He directed Indiana Jones instead, Right, what James Bond, who
now spoilers for No Time to Die? There is a child that maybe James
Bond's in that movie. Would that James Bond let his child go into the
Iraq War? No fucking way in what universe would Indiana Jones go, Yes,
you can join the Vietnam War. It's such as Indiana Jones seemed like
a really bad father in a really weird way, given that there was an
entire movie about his interrelational problems with his own father and four was kind of
about that too, And then they're like, but he just went to Vietnam
and died. The d like, why do you just had doesn't have to
be there? This is kind of a day in Indiana Jones' life this movie.
It's like, I don't know why we needed to even fucking address it,
frankly well, And why would he go back and try to talk Mutt
out of enrolling in the arm services. Why doesn't he go back to when
Marian found out that she was pregnant and actually be a father for this child
who didn't have a father for years and years. When he finds out that
he has a kid, he's just like, whoa, why didn't you tell
me? And he's kind of upset in that fourth one, if memory serves,
go ahead and go back and be the father that Henry Jones sor never
was for you. The weird tonal thing about this movie is Phoebe waller Bridge.
I was she's some sort of now mercenary and she's always talking about like,
oh yeah, I've got all these gambling debts and there was this prince
here in Morocco who you know, I was supposed to marry and I left
him at the altar, I sold the ring, YadA YadA, and she's
just all like happy, go lucky. It's like she's in one movie and
Harrison Ford's in another movie because she's there having a great time, like,
oh, wouldn't it be great if he had a time machine? What would
you do? And he's like, I'd go back and tell my son not
to right right, Wait a second, there's a wait in the movie where
an actor who shouldn't be in this series but it is for five minutes,
Antonio Vonderis gets murdered and she's like, yeah, we got away. Isn't
that awesome. He's like, my friend just got for get murdered. It's
like this is something that would have been addressed in the writer's room. You're
doing this on screen like makes nose this. This is like a It's like
one of those Marvel joke moments where it's like sincere moment brought to you by
Marvel, also ruined with a joke by Marvel. It's like that worse because
like this is also fucked up and not funny. It's this movie is a
tonal mess in a way that I was not expecting, because four is not
a tonal mess. Four is consistently bad. The tone thing there is so
weird. It'd be like if she made a joke about maybe you'll get lucky
when we go over there and he says I got my penis cut up,
you know, like it's the tone, it would just go from it.
It was so weird. Yes, the transition is so even. She's like,
fuck, what the thought just happened? After he says you know my
son died blah blah blah, and then he turns and walk away. Yeah,
you expect her to do the thing with the collar going. Other weird
things in here, like that poor horse that he rides through the subway and
I'm just like, watch out for the third rail. But when he think
gets the horse back on another subway platform, jumps onto a train and takes
off. And I have no idea how the fuck boy to Holbrook knew which
stopped to be at made no sense whatsoever. But he gets on the t
gets on the train and then he has to say a joke, right,
and he says the joke to this older here's another older African American woman.
He says a joke to her, like he puts the button on it.
The button is so bad that I can't even remember what it was because it
was terrible, and I was just like, no, there should have been
like I was waiting for no ticket or something like that. You know,
because this movie also feels the need to call back to all of the other
movies, and we've got mentions of the Blood of Kalie, We've got mentions
of him being shot by his own five. Yeah, there's just like all
of these well, of course, Mutt in here all of this stuff where
you're like, okay, this is kind of weird, Like he's really cementing
this in there were four other adventures before this adventure, whereas the Indiana Jones
that we know would have had a thousand adventures. But he feels very compelled
to tell us about the four or at least three of the four that he's
had before. It's almost as awkward as when they're in that big warehouse at
the beginning of four and you hear the arc theme and you know that the
Ark of the Covenant is in this warehouse. Its weird. We've mentioned,
and you know, Phoebe Wallerbridge did some script punching up on No Time to
Die, the most recent Bond film. Can't help but keep bringing it up
because in a same way, similar to what this movie is trying to do.
This movie is the final story that Harrison Ford is doing as Indiana Jones.
They've said they're not going to recast the role. They've said that this
is the final Indiana Jones adventure with Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones. Should they
do something else with Phoebe waller Bridge. Cool, but that's not going to
be Indiana Jones. It's gonna be bombat and that whatever. Terrible time with
the biggest mustache. This little boy has a mustache thick as fuck. I
don't even know that. I was like, you know, is this like
a dwarf. No, he's a little boy, but he's just got a
fucking mustache. And he was a hairy little guy. Speaking of her Villa
Chez and James Bond. But any all that aside the idea that this is
a movie about the end of something and we're paying lip service to things that
have come before. And No Time to Die, I mean again, this
is not spoiling the movie. It's in the trailer he drives the asked in
Martin dB five and there that's the entire opening of the movie has to do
with that car, which is the iconic car. And there's so many iconic
things in James Bond, just like there are in Indiana Jones. They are
parallel properties in a lot of ways. It's just Indiana Jones didn't make use
of the fucking time the way James Bond has, because it's all about Harrison
Ford playing Indiana Jones until it's not and you can have Sean Patrick Flannery doing
a halfway decent job as young Indiana Jones and you've got all of that backlog.
But No Time to Die is a much more successful ending of a story
than this movie is, because while that movie has its problems, it understands
that we have to be an entertaining movie while also ending the story. And
this movie just feels more like it's just it feels like you're with Indie on
a train, just passing stops and getting to see them and wave at them
as you conclude to the end of the line and you get off at the
end of the movie. It's just so yeah, mentioned Temple a Doom and
mentioned Mutt, which means you mentioned the fourth movie. It's like, to
what end, there's nothing else, There's nothing coming from any of this,
like there's this is it? And so feels very it falls very short of
being even sentimental. It just kind of feels like they didn't know what to
do because this movie has been being kicked around for another ten years since the
last one. I love Phoebe waller Bridge, but she did feel like she
was in a different movie a lot of times. And yeah, it was
like she's got so much backstory that I'm like, okay, hitting me with
all this stuff that really doesn't matter. Like adding that prince with the scimitar
in the Tuck Tuck chase just made it longer, and I'm like, I
don't need this. I don't need there to be the third group that's chasing
and being chased. You know, just it's enough. Because I can't remember
if I said this this time around or not because we started re recording,
but the whole thing of the between the horse chase and the Tuck Tuck Chase,
I was just chased out. I was like okay, yeah, train
chase at the beginning exactly because he's going through all these and yeah, running
away from the guys. But I was really kind of tired by all of
this stuff that's going on. I'm just like, please take a break,
have a discussion. Let's hear a little bit more about this. Okay,
great, you got this little flashback. Okay, cool. Indie promises that
he's going to destroy the dial. I don't think he ever keeps that promise,
no matter what, Like even by the end of the movie, I
don't think that that dial is destroyed. He takes it back with him.
So the way to go. Poor poor fucking Toby Jones. That poor guy,
he's just I don't know why he couldn't survive. But he dies off
screen too, and I don't understand his character. Like his character again,
I was expecting more of him in the movie. It just seems like they're
they're God, we should mention. In the Toby Jones scene, we get
to see another another iteration of d aged Indiana Jones, and this time it's
older than last time, but younger than he is now. So it's like
it's a time that we, I guess, have never really seen in his
life. And it's it may be worse than the opening of the movie,
but at least it's like one scene stands out even more because he's in like
a really well lit room and he's like interacting directly with Toby Jones, and
they have to keep showing them like next to one another. It's like,
oh my god, Like guys, like it worked a little bit better in
the opening just because he was just constantly moving and you didn't have to see
it constantly well lit. I agree with that it did better for me in
the beginning, and real quick on Wombat, if it's okay, I want
to make two quick points. When she first showed up, I was thinking,
please God, don't let her be his gallipal for this movie. Like
I didn't want her to be a love interest. And I thought, this
is a classy enough movie that hopefully they're not going to pay an eighty one
year old with this hot thirty year old. And I was so glad that
did not become a thing. And so instead, yes, we got the
weird Oh my god, he's got a goddaughter we've never heard once about.
That's one. And then two, I didn't buy her backstory that she goes
from having this father that's really in love with these pieces, to becoming a
mercenary of these pieces. And also if she really did become that, if
she knew her this giant peace was and the whole time the one that she
could really make the money on, why did she wait so long to go
after it? Not that that really matters. It could happen, but he
just seemed a little weird to me when it was so screenwriting One oh one
as well, when we see Teddy the kid being introduced and he's got all
of the gauges and dials set out before him, and he's teaching himself how
to fly while working security or something at this hotel. And I'm like,
okay, well that kid's gonna be flying a plane anytime now. And a
plane that had a guy in it who didn't need to be there. I
don't know what this guy who sleeps better than I ever could in my entire
life, a guy slept for a thousand years, but just backwards, I
don't know. It was. It was so weird. It was all just
to make the one joke of him going, you stole my plane, and
then we go, oh my god, there's a guy there. And that
was it, and it wasn't a funny joke like you know what's in you
were talking about the butts African American woman in the subway. This was even
shittier. And the line there was trains faster. It was the shitty line
in that one. But it's like, it's all just to make this dumb
joke of the man sitting up and that's it. There's nothing else. He
doesn't knock the shit out of the little kid. He doesn't go why are
there? You know what is going on with all these warships like I had
their arrows coming through the door here, So just really weird. I don't
think he did with theirs, but it was just weird, even when it
comes to the punchline of I know a guy and he's got a great ship
and I'm like, okay, then you cut to the guy and he's got
this really shitty ship, and I think at one point she just says I
was expecting a different ship or something like that. I'm like, no,
that was the joke. Guys, like he's he's got this really shitty shit
that that should have been the thing, And please God tell me why it
wasn't, Katanga, why wasn't George Harris in this movie. I mean,
I don't know, is George Harris with us? But this should have been
fucking get another actor and d ageum or age him up or something to make
it fucking katanga. Don't have it be Antonio Bandettis in here for five fucking
minutes. One of the biggest wastes of this man's time ever. I mean,
he had more presence in the SpongeBob movies, you know, come on,
It's like he's just here to die and that's his only him and that
other guy, the other guy that's on the boat. Actually the two other
guys are like, you don't know. Red Shirt dies and then red Shirt
two dies, and then Antonio Banderis is like, shit, I'm a red
Shirt too. I went to the bathroom, and I never go to the
bathroom. Maybe it's because I'm fifty, Maybe it was because I'd been busy
all day. I never go to the bathroom. But I ran, I
was trying to get done really fast. I come back and fucking Antonio Banderis
is on the screen. I thought I walked into the wrong theater, Like,
where the hell did this guy come from? And why is he here
if it's the right movie. Hey, they never answer that because he has
what two lines two one. There's a point where he's like going to open
his mouth and someone else cuts him off, and I was like, wait,
wait a second, like, is that going to be the joke that
he doesn't have a lot. It's Antonio Benders was in one of the best
movies of this year. That Puss in Boots last Wish movie is fantastic,
and he is what is why why? It was really distracting too to have
a big name person there to play that little bitty role. And then in
what I saw, they didn't really like I said, I Pete, but
it didn't really say him like you know, they had this long friendship here
and it's like, oh, that was my friend, like and he's all
pissed about it, like fuck that it's an old friend. Okay, he's
an old friend. You've never heard of him. It's like Mike and Barney
Miller. It's the same thing they did with Phoebe waller Bridge. Is that
same like just have never heard of him. He was there all the time.
He's you know, it was Agath all along. It's that same shit.
It's like very you know, it's just like Inspector, I am the
author of all of your pain James, like, no, you're not.
And the fact that they're they're trying to lazy chain like Daisy chain, but
lazy chain it together is lazy. And again like, oh, well,
Phoebe waller Bridge is your goddaughter, Like yeah, sure, I guess,
I guess. He's never mentioned he didn't have one at any point, so
he didn't mention he did either. So but yeah, like Antonio van Dara's
man, like what a waste, what a shame. Amy's third build,
he must have one of the best agents in the world. And if you
look at some of the posters, it's like he is bigger than Phoebe waller
Bridge is on the posters, it's like Indiana Jones man and then on the
poster. Because I successfully until that motherfucker posted stuff on my Twitter, I
had successfully avoided all spoilers for this movie. I hadn't seen any trailers for
it, so when I saw the posters, I thought it was Pedro Pascal
and I'm just like, this is another Pedro Pascal thing. This guy's everywhere.
Well and here's the other thing. So I didn't see his main build
because the theater that I went to cocksuckers. I almost feel like I should
tell it on here, like an ad started the movie early, so I
walk in, and yes, I walked in, and I was two minutes
after the ships that I started rolling right, so I don't even get one
trailer. I'm already they're on the fucking train doing shit. So I didn't
even get to see baa baa, Like I missed all of that. So
I also apparently missed missed his name, which I'm okay with that, but
the Baa baa, I would like. I don't think they showed any names
at the beginning. I think it was a very cold open. It was
the there was the Disney open, it was a Paramount open. It was
Lucasfilm and Disney present or the Lucasfilm Icon. And then they went into the
movie. They started with Indiana Jones with a bag over his head, and
then it says, okay, that's where I came in. He already had
the rope. They were putting the world on it, and that's when it
says Disney and Lucasfilm, which was a weird credit to see. And then
Indiana Jones and the Dial Destiny, so no names at the beginning until the
end. Yeah, and it feels like a Disney movie. It's so weird
to me because again I rewatched Four, and I don't want to be an
apologist for four, and I don't think anybody should, because Four is not
a great movie. But at least Four felt like an Indiana Jones movie,
Like, at least it still had the DNA at the heart of it that
made it an Indiana Jones movie. Yes, I didn't like where it went,
and yes it where it went to so cuckoo Banana's bullshit with the ancient
aliens and stuff, and I think it's funny. I think it's funny,
how horseshit it is because again that ancient astronaut theorists and all that stuff aside.
But like this movie, it feels so like a Disney movie, and
the fact that I saw it at the beginning, just like you mentioned Disney
one hundred, one hundred years of Disney, Like, oh right, this
is a Disney thing now, like we're going back to for real quick.
Generally I would like aliens, right, Generally I would like time travel,
But somehow both of these movies have made that aspect kind of shitty, Like,
I mean, look, there are aspects of the time travel here that
was interesting, but somehow they made it kind of overall feel sucky. And
that's how I felt with the Aliens and four, like how do you make
Indiana Jones and Aliens be so shitty? And they did it? I don't
know. And so these movies do have something in common and something to be
impressed about, and it's the way that they ruined things that should have been
more well. It kind of goes back to the thing that we're talking about
with the weaponization of the mcguffin the Crystal Skull. Did the Russians think that
they were going to revive the Aliens or join with the Aliens and then have
them attack America or something, because there's nothing there's no reason why the Russians
should be interested in these aliens whatsoever. There's no like we will take a
part the capitalist worldview with these aliens or something. If anything, I think
they would ransom knowledge. That's what it's supposed it gave them, like infinite
knowledge. Her head explodes, right, be careful what you wish for you.
But again, like the Arc and the Holy Grail play into the climax
in the movies in a way that makes sense because what they do has been
established, and what the aliens do was never established, and what the Dial
does is established up until till like thirty seconds before it happens. And then
it's like Indiana Jones finds the oh shit, oh no, he's the only
one. He's the only one who realized, and it's like, fucking Christ
movie. Here we go, like all bets are off. Do you know
what he's doing. He's doing George Lucas in those story sessions that we read
where George just like, well, you know, the sun would have shifted
and the stars would have changed. So really, we can't use the sun
to figure out where the Ark of the Covenant is because thousands of years have
passed. And Indiana Jones becomes that guy he says saying, oh you it
is. There's continental drift. Our committees didn't know about that. We're gonna
go back to the wrong period, which is like so fucking hilarious and talk
about last minute. It's like once again things that could have been brought to
my attention yesterday, and like I get why they do it. When they
do it. But it just again comes back to this idea of introduced so
many characters and so many other things that we never really get to focus on
the Like you mentioned, Andy, we never get to focus on the time
travel, just like in the fourth movie, we never really I mean,
we get to talk more about the Aliens in the fourth movie than in this
movie with the dial. But the dial in this movie is more of a
mcguffin than any of the other things we're in the other movies, because even
in two the Shankra Stones play into the way the movie concludes with molar Ram,
you know, grabbing him and burning his hands and you know, freaking
out and dying. But in this it's just like, okay, sure we
only ever see it do its thing one time, which I know the Arc
and the Holy Grail are the same way, but in this it's like even
that it just kind of happens. I don't know, It's it's very strange
to me that this is what they after all this time and all these other
ideas and going to the Well of Aliens, this is still where they landed
his time travel. Like fuck, it is that not the last gasp of
a dying franchise. Is that why they did it in an end game is
because that was the last time to do it then and then you never have
to do it again. Like I just think should have time traveled back to
when people gave more of a shit about these movies. That would have been
helpful. Did you see the numbers on this movie. It's making the same
numbers as the Flash it's going to it's a bomb. Who is this movie
for? Ultimately? Like the fans of this movie are what I mean?
I don't know how old you are, Chris. I think it's for me
and Mike and I'm in my early third I'm in my early I grew up
with the first three movies, Like I saw the fourth movie twice in theaters
the day it came out, Like I was overjoyed to be able to buy
Indiana Jones merchandise in two thousand and seventeen thousand and eight because there was none
of that, Like I had an Indiana Jones hat growing up, like that
fucking Fedora. I had the template Doom poster in my room. Like that's
why it feels like I know that South Park did that. It's a personal
attack episode on Indiana Jones. But like at this point, I wonder,
like, who the fuck is this shit for, because like, I don't
know if young kids are like Indiana Jones. I'm a huge fan of that,
Like, so I'm glad, I'm you established your credit and that's great
for thirty one year old, But I want to say that the majority of
the fans are forty in off right, Like, I mean, you grew
up with them. But I think Mike and I'm not this is doesn't give
a shit. I don't give a shit. But there are people in a
different way that grew up with them like Mike and I did, and people
that are older than us. But it's like, I don't even though you're
an exception and I'm really glad you're an exception, I don't think there's that
many people under forty that are super fucking amped to see another Indiana Jones movie.
And I think that that's part of the problem. And the other part
of the problem is a lot of the older audiences, hopefully older than Mike
and I, are the people that just want to stream now because it's too
much of a pain and ask to go to the theater. So who is
the audience there is no audience. That's the problem. There's not really an
audience. I think they're looking for a nostalgia that people don't seem to give
enough of a shit about to really be there for many people other than us.
I was amped. I bet you guys were amped, But I mean
my amptness left as the movie went on. Now, Phoebe waller Bridge is
immensely talented, mas Mickelson wonderful, and Tonio Bandera's fucking a. Buts are
probably not that super thrilled for Harrison Ford. If anything, you would think
you would want to put another big star in here to make it appeal more
to the kids. It's not like a twenty five year old is going,
oh man, I can't wait for that new Phoebe waller Bridge movie to open.
That's going to be lit, you know, or whatever the kids say
these days. Oh man. I watched Fleabag all the way back in twenty
sixteen, and that was so great. You know, I watched a little
mustache boy with the fucking unibrow. A big fan of him. You know.
It's like, but you know, what are you gonna do? You
gotta put something or somebody else in here to make it appeal to a little
bit more wider audience and and I don't many twenty year olds you're going,
I can't wait to see an eighty one year old in an action movie.
And that's where the total disconnect comes from, because Phoebe waller Bridge is in
the movie that they should have made, and Indiana Jones Allah Harrison Ford is
in the movie that they couldn't help themselves but make because James Manold made it.
Like it's that like musing on life and age and going grilling older and
you're lead losing because ultimately the climax of the movie comes down to do you
want to be out of time and admit you're out of time? Or do
you want to get with the times? Motherfucker? And like that's ultimately that
the question of the movie is are you ever going to feel out of time?
Even if you're in and again whatever, Fine, you want to go
that route movie, Fine, James Mangold, go for it. But I
just for me, it's like Indiana Jones is not that avenue. It should
have just been a triumphant finish to a career and a character that so many
people like We've mentioned though, many people that are not more of more of
being made every day again, your point, like this should have been a
last hurrah for the people that were fans of this fucking franchise, not attempting
to make something to kind of bridge the divide when you know that there's nothing
to bridge, there's nothing else here. They're not doing anything else like you
were on the right track with Mad's Michelson. Everything else kind of fatal.
So it's just like everything else kind of fails, other than the fact that
they got Jonathan rees Davies back into the movie again, which I'm sure he
would have come back for four willingly. God, he looks like he's five
thousand years old. He looks like the Mummy that they dug up. I
mean, I feel bad, but as you know, we can talk about
Harrison Ford being eighty one, but god, he looks like he's fifty years
older than Indiana. Like, it looks bad. I was glad to see
him, but God, he looks so shitty. Almost wasn't sure it was
him. Going back to my screenwriting stuff that I was talking about before,
with the kid and the flying one thing that never seems to pay off,
and I've seen writers do backflips to try to make this payoff. Is her
forcing the card And there have been writers that I've I've read over the last
few days that are just like, oh, well, you get it.
Her forcing that seven of spades on everyone with the cards is like Archimedes forcing
them to go back to the Battle of Syracuse with the dial. And I'm
like, really, that's where you're gonna go with this, that's what you're
going to try to prove to me. To me, it just made no
sense because I was waiting for her to do another card trick or something later
on than the film. I mean, she does little thing with the dynamite
sticking out of her back pocket, those kind of things, but nothing to
do with cards. And then the other thing is that he's got those papers
which seemed to disappear pretty quickly after that, where they have the dates of
eight twenty sixty nine all over the place, and I'm like, all right,
well, first off, we know that an American had to write that,
otherwise it would be twenty eight sixty nine. They don't seem to give
a shit about that that Toby Jones and Mads Michelson are both from Europe.
But anyway, We've got a date here, folks, eight twenty sixty nine.
The ticket tape parade for the Astronauts took place on eight thirteen sixty nine,
So we've got a ticking clock. Something's going to happen on eight twenty
sixty nine. And they really never tie the thread that the gate is going
to open on eight twenty sixty nine, that we are we have a ticking
clock. We don't feel like we have a ticking clock with this movie.
We don't get the Nazis are going and digging at tennis scene from the first
movie, the scene with you know, it's it's the arc, you know,
and you know that whole thing with the specialists, Like there's none of
that in this movie, and they it needed that, Like if these are
James Bond, which again they kind of are, then this movie doesn't have
the scene that the other movies have had, which is the explanation of the
thing. I will say I appreciate. As someone who played a lot of
Indiana Jones video games, including the Lucas Art Point and Clicks, I can't
help but feel like the whole scene in the Archives is a callback to the
Fate of Atlantis video game which would have made a much more impelling movie,
because again it's just for me. It's like you have to I know that
the dial is a real thing, but like that kind of actually wasn't never
the point of the other things. The Arc and the Holy Grail are maybe
real things, like and you've imbued them with what one could consider and I
would think a lot of people would agree, like an understandable level of power
associated with these biblical frelics in this it's like this could do whatever the fuck.
Frankly, like it does. I'm not even sure they understand what the
fuck they're they're trying to introduce, because yes, Harrison Ford says, well,
we can travel to a fissure in time, and this finds that fissure,
but it seems like there's actually more going on and they never kind of
explain it, and they kind of just YadA YadA it, which in of
all the movies to YadA YadA, even in the fourth movie, Indiana Jones
doesn't YadA YadA the explanation of what they're going after. It never does that.
It takes a moment to do it. And this movie is just not
as concerned as the other movies have been, which is kind of strange.
He's his own m in this one. When he's giving the lecture. That's
as much backstory as we get. And I'll tell you that whole thing with
the Battle of Syracuse when he's talking about those claw things that would grab the
ships and we see those kind of peripherally as the planes are flying way too
low over this battle. Fucking pull up, man, or else you're gonna
get speared like they do. But anyway, they also talk about the mirrors
and how they were setting fire to the ships with these mirrors, and I
was like, yeah, I want to see that. I want to see
like death laser beam from these mirrors, like that casino in Vegas that was
cooking people by the pool because the windows were all set up in correctly.
It's like, yeah, I want to see that kind of stuff. No,
no, we're not going to see that. We're gonna see old ur
commedies come out. We're gonna see this Roman soldier get ganked and apparently our
commedianes died at that battle, so that he isn't dead when Indiana leaves allegedly
or however that happens, because he gets knocked out cold I think that Roman,
who was coming after Indiana was the one that should have been killing our
comedies. And they're all worried about the sanctity of time, and I'm like,
since when is Indiana Jones worried about the sanctity of time? Well,
I was convinced that the entire third act of this movie was going to be
he goes back in time. He's like, well, I'm going to leave
a note for myself about my son. And then in that kind of the
coda you have, well, Marian is back because like Mutt is still alive
being let to fucking see him. But it's like, well, I got
a call from Mutt or you know, answers the phone and it's Mutt or
you know, it's like back to the future, right back to the future.
Wanted it, wanted it one way and had its cake, and then
ate it too twice with the second and third movie. But even it understood
that you can tease that hole, don't don't mess up time. But if
you mess up time for the positive, nobody cares. And that's the thing
that they do an end game. It's like, yes, we fuck put
the timeline, but guess what we got ostensibly quantitatively a better timeline out of
it, so nobody cares, and that should always be the way time travel
is addressed in these movies. It's not we can't fuck up time, it's
we can't make it worse, so do whatever you can to make it better.
And yes, I get that, that's where you kind of get the
paradox of it. But at least that's more interesting than just doing this.
Well, I'm not going to stick around because I'll fuck up time thing because
it's like, jeesus, what is this the butterfly effect all over again?
Like it's so so played out at this point. Well, she's like,
oh, there's not enough medicine and you you've been shot and blah blah blah.
I'm like, first off, he's walking around just fine after being shot.
Of course there's a shoulder wound. But I'm like, hey, guys,
don't forget our Chimedes was also a physician, so you know, maybe
you're in okay hands here and if not, you die at home, you
die here in ancient Greece. Yeah, what do you want? So?
But yeah, totally thought that they would have had some sort of thing where
either him or phoebe Wallerbridge, make that trip and talk to Mutt, and
he's there alive, and we're good. By the end of the film,
great Marion comes back. They do the little kiss on the elbow thing,
which was a nice throwback. I guess do call back to Raiders with that,
but yeah, I really wanted his son to be alive too, and
they don't really. He gives that speech about how you know they've broke apart
after Mutt died and that he's basically living as this bitter old man, but
they don't really address that too much in this I mean, other than just
Harrison Ford being a bitter old man. I felt like the ending is totally
unearned, right, like, like, what do we do here? Let's
make everything perfect to this ridiculous amount. So we have Marian with the biggest
bullshit appearance, like she's there for thirty seconds, and Solids like they all
come in like here's our happy family and there all of this shit happening at
the very third, last thirty seconds or whatever, and it's like, oh,
everything's happy. The police aren't even looking for him anymore. What has
changed that? Like I don't understand, Like that really pissed me off.
Like and there no one goes, well, we have to lay low until
we figure out. You know, did they figure out the whole situation with
the cops and clear him while he was asleep? It was awful. I'm
sorry that lad. The ending was awful. I thought that the twenty minutes
leading up to it was awful, but then it got there and I thought
I still missed it up. I'm not gonna lie him and Marian, but
I thought it was an awful scene. Well, when they played Marion's theme,
that's when it got me because I was just like, oh, that
music, that love affair that they had, and you know, I'll remember
when she was twelve and he was twenty two. Thank you, thank you.
Hey, it's not weird though we promised, Okay, Steven Spielberg,
he's here with us now, and he wasn't grooming her. He wasn't.
It wasn't none of that he was. He wasn't. It wasn't like an
Elvis Jerry Lee Lewis thing at all. It was just they were married,
they had kids. In the end, come on, what's the problem.
Yeah, It's like someone saw a return of the King and they were like,
how can we make this like that, but dumb. I mean again,
it has that same feeling because if you think about Return of the King,
Frodo drops and it's like, what happened? Where am I? And
you have to come to the realization of what's happening with the character. You
don't see the character coming to, you come to with the character. And
in this it's so bizarre because they go back in time in an Indiana Jones
movie to a time that has nothing to do with anything other than contradential drift,
and it's like, okay, sure, and there's a bunch of Nazis
and we get to see Mads Michelson in a straight up Nazi outfit, which
is a wild piece of imagery. I will say, to my wife's credit,
she mentioned and I think we should mention here Michelson doesn't look remotely German
even when they put him in a Nazi outfit. But what an ignominious way
to end an interest in character. It feels like they really had no idea.
I know that there were mentions of rewrites of the third act of this
movie, and that's the only expert. It feels like they improvised the whole
movie, like and then they get to the third act and it's like,
what happens? So he goes back in time and they're plane crashes and they
die and they meet Archimedes and then well does he stay or not? And
they're like, well those last movie and well maybe, and it's like,
just make a fucking decision here, and they don't even they make a decision,
and then they don't let the character get the decision that they made.
They go the character is going to make a decision. Bop du sex fist
to the fucking face. And it's like, and that is a better way
of doing this how than actually earning your ending. I loved it when they
get there Archimedes. They just happened to be right the fuck where Archimedes is
walking around one But the other thing was is that was I wrong on this?
Like I felt like there was an location and it's that trope thing where
Archimedes doesn't realize that he's going to make this thing until he sees theirs.
But if any and if that's I like that kind of trope. But the
problem here is if he died at that battle, how would that have ever
happened? I mean, even if it's changed now, if in the original
timeline, he wouldn't have known until that. How would that even be possible.
The other thing is we talked about how no one seems to know exactly
how the dial works, but he looks at it and instantly knows, like
I don't know it. It was fascinating to me that aspect. The whole
movie just seems really sloppy. Some of it. I had fun with its
sloppiness. Your wife brought up a really good point. My wife was also
bringing up when when he goes to the airport, she's like, wait,
aren't the cops looking for him for murder? And then when they're doing the
whole map with the dot stuff later on, she raises up her hand in
the theater and does the fingers mean the money thing, And she's like,
where are they getting all the money to pay for these trips? And I
was like, because he lives in a huvel, it's not like he's got
a money belt. When he leaves the house, he has no ideas to
be going on an adventure. At this point, Stala gave him some money.
That's what. Oh, that's what. Let's compare the scene of the
kind of the tomb rating, because we get a little bit of tomb rating
in this movie. We got some in the fourth movie as well, when
they're looking for the tomb of oh whoever, whoever has the skull buried under
his chest and the thing with the tilting plate. It's actually kind of fun.
The third movie, I guess you could consider the third act the tomb
rating thing or the part with these a little in Venice as well, right,
the thing with the rats, and then the thing in the palace in
Indy two and then the Well of Souls thing. For me, this was
the best part of the movie because it was kind of the most like Indiana
Jones of the things that we see. And you don't have to have Harrison
for doing a lot in these scenes compared to him, like rolling around on
top of a fucking train or jumping out of an airplane with hair shoots,
all sorts of things that no like, you know, Timothy Nolton was doing
in Living Daylights and now Indiana Jones is doing in this movie. But the
face that I will say though, because the tomb rating scene has the thing
that you mentioned Andy in it, they're like, oh my god, the
sarcophagus. It has an eagle, right with propellers on it. I'm like,
oh no, it's doing that thing that so many time travel things do
where it's like, wait, he has the watch on his arm that Jurgen
Vollers watch and it's like, oh no, movie like, so they're going
to travel back in time. The movie is telegraphing what it's gonna do twenty
minutes before it does it, and it's just I don't know's it takes the
wind out of what ends up happening, because what ends up like, if
you don't spoil it, it actually is kind of interesting, but if you
tell the audience what's about to happen, like with characters going look at this
thing. It has propellers like an air. I thought it was some low
budget looking tomb rating too, because until they get to the actual room where
the coffin is like, you've got this ten minutes to them going through this
really narrow space that looked like it could have been a sound set or something
like a sound stage, and it looks like shit, and then all of
a sudden it's' know, it just looked and all of a sudden there's like,
you know, the fucking bugs on them and shit, Like I don't
know. It's just and they were only in that one area, Like I
thought, this is a perfect place for a snake, not a bullshit you
know eel like they use eels. Oh he looks like a snake. But
no, I mean because that's the endy thing, right, like we're gonna
have a snake reference. No, there's no snakes, and there's really nothing
worth the ship until you get there and then I don't know it just that
was my thing is I thought this looks really low budget this particular scene.
Everything else is overdone with CGI and shit for no particular reason, but this
it looked like shit to me. I don't know, if anything. I
thought they were going to do an homage to the first three films and do
here's a room with bugs, here's a room with rats, and here's a
room with snakes, like and then when they went into the one room and
they're like, oh, well, this methane which seems to bother Phoebe waller
Bridge but doesn't seem to bother No, he's just like it's good. He's
a terminator. Doesn't even like put a scarf over his face. Nothing.
He's just like, yeah, he doesn't cough. She's coughing her head off,
and eventually he's like, oh, this guy was all into water displacement,
and I'm like, oh, yeah, Eureka. And I thought that
was really funny when he says, Eureka, when he sees the eighty one
year old body is immune to nothing. Okay, I'm sorry, but it's
just like whatever. But I thought they're going to do this homage and seven
then of course no. And then apparently, like you can see stills from
the trailer, there's a giant of stone ball that they find at one point
that I think Phoebe Wallbridge releases, and I was like, okay, yeah,
they I think they were going for more of an homage to the earlier
films, and they trimmed it down to be just the bugs, which look
terrible. They all look like gi bugs now, and I'm like, no,
they were probably half real in Temple of Doom. I think unfortunately,
James Bond and Mission Impossible and a lot of other franchises action franchises have gone
the correct route, which is focusing on doing things practically. I mean,
look, Tom Cruise is doing a lot of his own stunts. Daniel Craig
did a lot of his own stunts in those Bond movies. But you know
who didn't do a lot of their own stunts in those Bond movies was Roger
Moore, late in his tenure in a View to a Kill, where it's
every shot of a person doing something is a body double or a stunt man,
and then close up shots of him being James Bond are just him Roger
Moore. And this is what this felt like. It has that weird disconnect,
you know. In Lord of the Rings, which we've kind of already
mentioned, Peter Jackson is the god of making disparate things that shouldn't work work,
like the fact that they're filming with small actors, using masks, using
force, perspective, all of those things in multiple times. They're using multiple
things in multiple scenes and it all works together and it never looks cheap or
shoddily put together. And here to your point, Andy, everything looks really
shodily put together and cheap. And they spent like three hundred million dollars on
this movie. And I just don't understand. If you know your actor can't
do things, why do you do this thing again that requires him to do
things? Why not have him beat again? I'm not advocating for this,
but why not have just killed him off like they did with Han Solo and
have that be half of the movie is then them coming to terms with the
death of Indiana Jones and avenging his death like I just because then you free
up a lot of space and room to actually do things believably as opposed to
doing a lot of the things in CGI and again all those other action franchises
that I mentioned, they are really committed to doing things practically, and it
shows, it really shows that Indiana Jones one, two, and three really
were committed to it, because again they also came before time where it was
as prevalent as it is now. But now it just feels like a bacsimile
of something that we grew up loving, just with all of the love and
fun kind of drained out of it, and not in the way that four
was just goofy and dumb. This movie just feels kind of decisions being made
by committee, which I think is like a Marvel movie or a Star Wars
movie. At this point, I think that Laura Croft really eight Indiana Jones's
lunch while he was away from the table, because I kept thinking of the
two earlier Laura Croft movies and the one that came out just a few years
ago, and I was thinking that I liked the tomb rerading in those better
than I liked the tomb reading in this one. A lot of the stuff
in this felt derivative of things in those, and so I just was like,
oh, yeah, no, Like I want to see more of the
water displacement thing, all of the puzzles, all of those things that you
need to do, Like, Okay, great, there's a crescent up on
the rock, so let's go up here rather then go through this entrance.
But then once you get inside of those caves, it gets really confusing,
and there's no sense of geography. There's no I have no idea how long
they're traveling. That the bad guys can show up wherever they want to.
As far as I know, they don't have teleportation powers, but it definitely
feels that way. The death of that one giant guy seems really horrific to
me. That kid handcuffs him to the gate underground and he drowns. I
was kind of horrified by that. I'd much rather have my villains get their
faces chopped off by propeller blades or get shot in the in the heart or
something. My god, that was really warm bed that was dark. The
weaponization of the mcguffin is you know, there there isn't any because it's a
time travel device, you know, like the Holy Grail allows Julian Glover to
quickly age and like oh okay, like makes perfect sense. Like and the
thing with Kate Blanche, you know, she gets so much knowledge that her
brain can't contain it and her head explodes, like makes sense in this it's
what yeah, And there and there's Mad's Michelson just like his head on a
rock, like with his face burned. It's so it's so unfulfilling, like
and look, here's the thing. In another role that Mads Michelson had where
he played a villain in Casino Royal, you could almost compare how he's treated
there and here simultaneously, because that has a rather anticlimactic and to his character
in that movie. But I wouldn't consider that death ignominious. I would consider
in this movie the villain's death is so ignominious. It's like, what was
why was he even in this? Because ultimately, you know, this movie
has the biggest criticism that can be leveled against it is. Remember in Readers
Who Lost Art in Deiana, Jones didn't do anything, the Nazis would have
killed themselves. Well yes and no, but the Nazis would have still had
the arc, So yeah, someone needed to be there to take it away.
In this it's like if they if he had just let them be,
they would have gone through time eight shit, and then what like he didn't
need to be there at all at all this time is what I'm getting at,
And I just kept thinking of other time travel movies I can't remember.
I don't think Chris, you were on the tomorrow I'll wake up and scald
myself with tea episode where it's three basically ex Nazis that are living in rio
higher plane or hire a time travel machine and they want to go back and
give Hitler a nuclear bomb near the end of the war when things have taken
a bad turn for Hitler, and at one point they go back and they
think that they're in one year, but they're actually another year. And I'm
just like, yeah, that was a much better movie than when I'm watching
here with Matts Michelson suddenly revealing his plan here of I'm going to go back
and out, Hitler, Hitler. The other one that I kept thinking of
is a movie that I liked up until the very end of it, which
was Days of Future Past, the X Men movie, where when Logan wakes
up at the end, everything seems to be normal and good and all this,
and I'm just like, wait, no, things have changed, like
you, things that you were doing have changed where we're at, like everything's
good now, Like everything's fine. And that was totally the end of this
movie, where he just wakes up and it's like, oh, everybody's good
now, all right, but you know, but MUD's still dead. I
cannot believe that the climax of this movie is decided against the character's wishes in
a way, like Indiana Jones dying in the past. It could have worked,
like I look, I think it could have, as much as I
don't want to see Indiana Jones die, Like he's effectively dead as a character
anyways, because they're not doing anything else. So yes, he survived in
the final closing minutes of his story, but to what end, even ostensibly
if you were like, well, Indiana Jones in twenty twenty three, long
fucking dead, that's what he is. Because he would be like a hundred
something now so AND's and that's the problem ultimately with all these movies that they
had to set it in sixty nine because Harrison Ford is I gonna say,
unforeseeably old. But he's so old that you can't cover up how old he
is anymore. Like when four came out, it's like, oh, he's
kind of he looks seventy. Yeah he's seventy, but he looks nam late
fifties, early sixties, because again he's an actor and he takes good care
of himself like he can. But here it's like the guy is so old
that we can't cover up the fact that he's old, which means the action
has to be what it ends up being. And because of that we have
a movie that's it's climax is like I want to stay in the past.
No, you don't bang the end. I really would have liked to have
had more of a conversation rather than them just yelling in ancient Greek. Too.
This befuddled Archimedes, And of course I keep thinking of Socrates from Bill
and Ted's Excellent Adventure too. And I'm waiting for you know, all we
are is dust and the wind. Dude for a time travel movie, because
this now is an Indiana Jones movie that's time travel. It wastes every opportunity
to do anything with it other than the one thing it does and again notes
the stack deck. Okay, that's really boring. Yeah, I get that
it's kind of a trope now that the thing can only do it once.
I mean again, the arc, the grail, the stones, the skull.
But you want to do something different, dude, don't do that,
then do something else, like have them fucking with the time travel thing and
him going back and forward in time over and over again. Like if you're
gonna do it, dged Indiana Jones. Anyways, why not just go full
fucking hog. I just don't understand, or have him interact with his younger
self again. I don't get why they passed up all these opportunities given what
the budget of this movie is. Because guys, this movie's budget is like
three hundred million dollars. It's one of the most expensive movies ever made.
When we talk about the better time travel movies, which is most of them,
their budgets were so much smaller. And what's crazy to me is there
was a time when we thought, you know, Batman for fifty million dollars
was an outrageous budget. Now we're looking at three hundred million. And yeah,
you have an account for you know, the time and stuff, but
you look at like, you know, different kinds of movies. But I
was thinking of this, you know, like movies like The Godfather when you're
going way back, but it's still proportionally nowhere close to what three hundred million
dollars would have been, or even something like Pulp Fiction, which was like
seven million you know today proportionally still nowhere close to three hundred million. Those
are better movies. And the point I wanted to make that I thought was
interesting, and it's always been that way, is that great filmmakers have to
find ways to work around a budget. Right, if you only have so
much money, you have to find a way to make that budget work.
And it seems like a lot of times they have to come up with more
creative things to make that work. And in the opposite way, it seems
like when you have three hundred million dollars, your creativity seems to go right
out the window. And it's been that way with most of these gigantic budget
movies. It's interesting to me because it's like, here's money, we don't
need any intelligent anything, We'll rely on CGI everything. I don't know,
it's just it was just a thought I had though that it seems like so
many great movies are made with no budget, and these movies suck for three
hundred million time Crimes, which cost probably two hundred dollars. Right, absolutely,
it is one of the best time travel movies ever, even something like
Endgame. Right, Okay, so the budget of Endgame was three hundred and
fifty six million dollars. I could actually see where the budget of that movie
went. I'm not even sure where the budget of this movie went three three
hundred million dollars. I mean there was a massive advertising campaign. Does that
include in the three hundred million, because at least I could see where that
went. It didn't help, but I can see where that went. But
nothing in the movie other than a ridiculous amount of CGI speaks three hundred million
to me. And it's not for acting, because most of these actors they're
not three hundred million dollar actors. I mean, you're belis your biggest actor
is going to be Harrison Forward. I mean, come on, and then
not shooting on location. I mean, the New York stuff is definitely just
all the lot kind of stuff. I mean, and the camera is set
up I think, exactly the same place for both when he walks out to
go to work and then also when the Sala walks out with the kids to
go get ice cream, it just seemed so yeah, cheap in so many
ways. Did somebody walk around with a walk out with a hundred million in
their pocket? This is the budget of four again two thousand and eight,
the budget of four was one hundred and eighty five million. I genuinely don't
understand, because to learn, I didn't realize going into the movie that it
was such an expensive movie. And frankly now it makes me kind of more
perturbed at this movie because for this movie to be three hundred million dollars,
there should be more. There should be more things. The action should have
been good, the action should have been compelling, anything should have been compelling,
because the only things that are compelling, I guess, are what Harrison
Ford doing Indiana Jones one more time in a version of Indiana Jones we've never
seen before. I don't yet what the point of the movie ultimately is because
even at the end of the movie, they looney tunes themselves out of existence,
and it's like, what is Is this the end? Or is there
more to come? Like, I just don't understand because you said there's no
more. Oh that's stupid. Yeah, the hat being pulled off the line,
I was surprised there wasn't nan good bye folks like and then he speeds
off into the distance, like, I just don't understand. Was who was
this for? And if whoever it was Ford, did they enjoy it?
And I just died. The amount of people that saw this movie feels like
it just for James Mangold. I mean, really, I don't imagine James
Mangold had a good time. I'm on this movie. I just have a
feeling that he didn't have a nice time because he was probably answering to a
lot of executives on this right, That's what it feels like. Like the
third act of this movie is the Worst Offender, But it feels like a
film by committee. They were like, well, we like maybe James Mangold
and David Kapp and some of the other folks fought for Harrison Ford to stay
in the past. Maybe they fought for it. Maybe they fought what I
would consider to be the good fight. If you're making this kind of movie
and you're addressing this kind of thing, which is he wants to be part
of the past. He spent his entire life chasing the past, and now
he can be there, which is like a thing that almost seems impossible in
the context of this time travel feels almost like a bridge too far. But
yet he's there and he's in the past. So why go all the way
and not give him that? That would have been almost poetic, It really
would have. At the time, I was like, don't end this way,
And then when we ended with what we ended with, I think I
was thinking, no, go back and end with that. It's like,
you have this opportunity to say, well, you know, I've ruined my
life where I live now, and my only option is maybe to go back
and live a life somewhere else and maybe leave a note for my future self,
and like there you go, and you know, you could then have
a Phoebe waller Bridge epilogue where in the future Mutt is still alive or something,
and that's where that in road is where it's like, you know,
Indiana Jones sacrificed himself some mutt could live type thing and it doesn't even have
to be life. You could interject in there, I've ruined this series where
I live now, and maybe I could go back. Was that a bridge
too far? I'm sorry, but I honestly don't think that James Mangold really
gets Indiana. Jones was talking about the whole idea of the Archimedes dial thing,
and he's talking about like, oh, yeah, I came up with
that before we even did this because of time, and it's really about Indie
getting old and blah blah blah. And I'm like, Okay, yeah,
that's good, that all makes sense. I'm with you there. But then
he talks about how the Arc of the Covenant, that that was a test
of Indiana's faith, that he didn't believe in any sort of spiritualism. That
there's a bunch of hocus pocus to him. And I know he talks a
little bit about hocus pocus, but when he brings up the Ark of the
Covenant to those army guys, you can see the excitement in his face.
He one percent believes that there is an arc. It's not like he doesn't
believe in this thing, and the way he's just like, didn't you guys
ever go to Sunday School? I mean, why when they're talking about Tannis,
he's just like, oh, Tannis, you know, he's just so
excited about it. I don't think that he was testing his faith in that
movie. I think that James Mangold is totally off base with that. This
movie smacks of again, to go back to James Bond. This smacks of
what Sam Mendez tried to do with Skyfall and Specter, where it's like,
we're gonna have amusing on the character of James Bond and what really drives him
and who is he as a man and what does he do? And it's
like, you know, I just want to be this guy for once.
I don't fucking give a shit if he's gonna cook breakfast for himself, if
he's gonna eat a waffle or a pancake, I give a shit about what
adventure he's going on, because that's the way that I can get that.
We want to have amusing on the finale of a character, and you want
to have Phoebe waller Bridge calling him a tomb raider and a grave Robert I
seem to remember that in Hungaras you would accuse of being a grave robber rather
than an archeologist. Well, the newspapers greatly exaggerated the incident. And wasn't
it the Soudan and Madagasvel who threatened to cut your head off if you ever
returned to his country? No, it wasn't my head, Dan, your
hands. Perhaps it wasn't my hands, it was my I misunderstanding exactly what
we have here, doctor Jones. It's fine, you're gonna do that,
but you don't have to. You could just make a movie that is in
the vein of the other movies that were in the vein of other things intentionally,
that weren't trying to be some musing on face or other bullshit. They
were just action movies. And for once, I want to be that guy
to just go they were just fucking action movies and that's why we loved them,
not because they were some introspective anything. And then they try to do
this and it's like, yah's see what I mean, Like it just doesn't
really work. I think Mangold's a darn goood director. I really love what
he did with Logan, though I think a lot of that comes from the
Scott Frank script of Memory Serves, But I mean Jess Butterworth, his brother
John Henry. They're really pretty solid writers as well. David Kepp I have
some issues with here and there, not always liking everything that he's done,
though he's done some great stuff. Thinking about Indiana with the whip in the
scene where they're doing the auction and he brings out the whip and he's whipping
around and everybody is freaking out, and then they all pull out guns.
That's where there needs to be a punchline, and there really is no punchline.
Like the punchline, I guess is the pulling out of the guns,
but there needs to be something else after that. And all that happens is
they just fall to the ground like he and Phoebe Wallerber is just ducked down.
I'm like, that's it. That's your solution to stuff. As they're
shooting all the guns, You're just gonna duck down in here. So and
it worked, and it works, but that's not the way to end that
scene. Hey, I did, but there was one part that I thought
was fun moving back that I forgot to mention, and no one else mentioned
the part when that big gun on top of the train gets stuck and it
just keeps firing, and the train is going around the bend and it's just
picking off Nazi one by one by one. I thought that was awesome.
Now, if anything else in the movie had been as fun as that,
I would love this movie anyway. I just thought that was great. That
was a really good thing, and the sound of the gun sounded really good.
Yeah, and seeing all those Nazis being picked off, It's always fun
to watch Nazis get killed. Let's be honest. This is a pro Nazi
punching, so I was gonna make the joke. I almost wondered if the
reason that this movie is flopping at the box office because there are now so
many Nazi sympathizers and they knew that the Nazis were not going to win,
therefore they did not want to go. But that is only a theory,
just like the card game thing, It's just a theory. There are movie
fans on both sides. Andy, do you want to give your final thoughts
first or should I go mixed bag? I wanted it to be better.
I liked some of it. Probably I was a little bit of a stand
in that. You know, I talked about the beginning part. It didn't
really bother me that much. But like I said, my enthusiasm for the
movie. I came in with it super high. I was going to accept
a lot as long as it didn't take place in the fridge. But it
got more and more into the fridge as it went. I just, I
don't know, I lost my enthusiasm and the last third was mostly boring for
me. Thankfully, this is the last time that we ever have to talk
about Indiana Jones. And I say thankfully only because the final movie I think
kind of I don't think it did anything better worse than four in terms of
leaving the character in a spot that's interesting. I think four was a little
bit more of a resounding success in the terms of how we left to the
character of Indiana Jones, and that the journey he goes on, he finds
out that he's a dad, he finds out that he has a son that's
kind of an ass like he is. He reunites with Marian, and he
saves the day, and you know, John hurts along for the ride.
And by the end of this movie, sure, I guess Salah and Marian
are there and they went for ice cream and who the fuck knows frankly,
And you know, I as an Indiana Jones fan who remembers when he was
too short to go on the ride at Disneyland when he went when he was
six, who had a fedora, who wanted to be an archaeologist, and
had the Temple a Doom poster in his room for twelve years, essentially this
movie. I can't believe it, but I fell asleep for like two or
three minutes in this movie when they were underwater like and I'm ashamed to admit
it, but for me kind of speaks to more where I came into this
movie. After the fourth movie. I was so jaded that I was not
excited for this movie. I was just hoping it wouldn't be an affront,
And there are some parts that I enjoyed, but I think ultimately I'm glad
this is the last time we have to talk about Indiana Jones. But I'm
glad that the three of us got to talk about Raiders at the Lost Dark
for six hours, which I think, for me is what I will always
think about when I think of this movie. Is the reading of the Lost
Dark as opposed to the Dial of Destiny, ultimately being kind of the worst
of all. Five. The best part of the movie was us getting to
talk about it. It was good seeing you guys again. I'm not that
huge of a fan of Last Crusade, but them riding off into the sunset
was the way to end this whole franchise that hits me more emotionally than anything
four or five ever did. And I think I read on the ring or
they were like four and five or less sequels and more epilogus to the first
three unneeded epilogus unfortunately. And you know, I refer to this entertainment weekly
that I had as a kid in the late early two thousands, and it
was all about sequels and things in development. Hell, and they talked about
Indiana Jones four And to think that we now have Indiana Jones five to if
I could go back and tell myself then, like you're not only going to
get four, but you're also gonna get five. Like it's still crazy.
I can't believe that it happened, But like, please stop with these sequels.
We like we need to start doing, we need to start understanding the
top culture things that people used to get animated about don't do it for people
anymore. And if you want to make money in this show business, you
gotta stop going back to the well because I think it's dry. You know
what I think we should do, guys. We should all just take a
vacation to a beach in Hawaii and start pitching ideas. Yeah, all right,
I got this guy, Indiana Smith. They wouldn't let us make an
Indiana Jones movies, so we're gonna make our Yeah, yeah, Do you
remember Mike White. At the end of the nineties one we were going to
do that book on the unproduced Screenplays, and there were a shit load of
Indiana Jones screenplays, which all got obviously crammed into the last movie before this.
But I just thought of that that was great, And at the time
we were like, these are so weird ideas, you know, and now
here we are, and I wish they'd maybe made those instead of these movies.
I much rather would have had a monkey that has a peach pit that
makes you immortal. That would have been pretty great. I mean again,
I come back to the Indiana Jones video games that I played as a kid.
Fate of Atlantis. Fucking the other one, the one where it's like
in China and it takes place right before Temple of Doom, Like fuck,
just just don't don't do this this I don't know, like you know what
a Mummy was the best Indiana Jones sequel. Fucking fight me on that one.
Guys, Come on, you know how bad these are? Is it?
Atari? I'm going back here? Atari twenty six hundred had the Raiders
of the Lost Art game, which was awful. I mean it was terrible
and I played the shit out of that and it was so bad, and
yet it was better than these movies. James Mangold, it's all good,
It's all yeah, you know what et this this makes this is like et
It's just like there's a bridge too far. Thank you so much Chris and
Andrew, who have been with me on this incredibly long journey talking about Raiders
of the Lost Dark. It's taken a year almost for us to put this
together, which is kind of wild. But thank you Chris for reminding me
that there was a fifth Indiana Jones movie. It's like, Mike, why
are we doing what are you doing this for something? Thank you guys for
putting up with me. I was late to twice I think on this.
Thank you guys both. This was so much fun. We expect nothink less
of Spielbergieber the Spielbergie and the Spielbergie. And so, Chris, what is
happening with you lately? Sir? Not a whole lot, just not going
to the movies, not seeing new movies, but talking about movies on the
Culture Cast, which you can find over weirdingwaymedia dot Com, along with the
aforementioned reading of The Lost Dark on the Projection Booth, RSS feed, or
plenty of other things like Andy and I did an episode on Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas a couple months back, which was a fun one. So
that's where you can find all the things that I work on Weirdingwaymedia dot Com.
And Andy, you always give me a run for my money when it
comes to being busy. What is going on with you these days? So
I'll just cut it down to three books. I've got two that just came
out and one that's coming out. The two that just came out, one
is a novel which is a sequel of my novel Layliss Score, which is
called Layliss gone, but moviewise. I just had the book on Watermelon Man
come out. It's called Melvin Van Peebles Watermelon Man. And the other thing
is I have the oral History of the Room finally coming out in December.
Very proud of both of those. Beyond that, I've got a couple of
books in the future that I'm working on for Applause books, Gay and if
I live long enough, they will get finished and it will be great times
for all of them. Well, thank you so much guys for being on
the show. Thanks everybody for listening again. If you want to hear more
of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that
I work on, like Chris, they are all available on Weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community,
visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the
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