Bannister
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I wish I had seen this post sooner. I would have told you to treat yourself and Adam to a pretentious elixir on me.
Adam Hughes' KOTCS Review
- Thread starter Radagaster
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You're right - we had it explained to us before Indy ever found the Ark.
I don't have a problem with people who dislike the alien on aesthetic grounds. I can understand that even if I don't agree with it. What irks me is that Internet thing where insecurities mean people can't simply say a film wasn't to their taste; instead they have to vindictively obliterate every aspect of the movie so they can reassure themselves they live in a black-and-white world where the film was objectively bad and that's it. When they do this by using examples that are also present in the films they're defending they just look like idiots.
I am not referring to you. Having watched all three films just before seeing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the first time, nothing in the film seemed out of place to me. Raiders of course is in a league of its own but it still has a comedy monkey and more or less the same ending as Crystal Skull. Put that simian "Heil!" in a film today and people would be moaning about how Lucas raped their childhoods. It's incredible that people will excuse major characters like Willie Scott but three seconds of a gopher ruins everything.
Word. Because "they're interdimensional actually" is over-explaining but "he chose poorly" after a guy's face ages 1000 years in 10 seconds was totally necessary. I really wondered whether he drank from the correct grail until the knight said that.
In all seriousness though all four films had about the same level of exposition. They explain (and show a picture) of what the Ark is capable of, Indy tells how the Sankara stones glow when placed together, and its also explained that the Holy Grail gives you eternal life if you drink it and don't cross the seal. All we know about the aliens is that they come from another dimension and can pull a mean Tetsuo on your cranium if you rub them the wrong way. Where do the aliens come from? We don't know. Why do they fry your brain if you help them? We don't know. What do they want and are ultimately capable of? We just don't know. KOTCS ended with more mysteries about its MacGuffin than any of the others IMO.
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Its funny I left KOTCS unsure of whether or not I really loved it because of what I considered a somewhat anticlimactic ending. But now after reading post after post of totally bogus criticisms I'm finding that it holds up extremely well to the potshots being taken at its expense. I actually appreciate it more and more for that fact alone.
I think a movie like Indy or SW are such enormous experiences that its sometimes hard to digest after just one viewing.
People have made fun of KOTCS because some have said "wait until you see it a second or third time." That isn't a diss people. It wasn't until I had seen FOTR for the third time that I realized, "holy crap, this is my new favorite movie of all time!" I didn't know how I felt about Jackson's effort until it settled after a couple of viewings. I wonder if The Hobbit will be an instant success/fail or take a couple of viewings to overcome preconceived notions of "how Jackson would have done it" before being judged on its own merits.
I think that's the case with the new Indy movie. People have been trashing Temple of Doom and Last Crusade for YEARS. Suddenly there's a new movie to bash and TOD and TLC are suddenly lumped in with the almighty Raiders as the only "worthy" Indy movies. Yeah right....
I think a movie like Indy or SW are such enormous experiences that its sometimes hard to digest after just one viewing.
People have made fun of KOTCS because some have said "wait until you see it a second or third time." That isn't a diss people. It wasn't until I had seen FOTR for the third time that I realized, "holy crap, this is my new favorite movie of all time!" I didn't know how I felt about Jackson's effort until it settled after a couple of viewings. I wonder if The Hobbit will be an instant success/fail or take a couple of viewings to overcome preconceived notions of "how Jackson would have done it" before being judged on its own merits.
I think that's the case with the new Indy movie. People have been trashing Temple of Doom and Last Crusade for YEARS. Suddenly there's a new movie to bash and TOD and TLC are suddenly lumped in with the almighty Raiders as the only "worthy" Indy movies. Yeah right....
I think part of the problem is that the original movies aren't just movies for many of us. They're experiences so tightly entwined with our childhood it becomes impossible to consider them objectively, no matter how hard we wish to pretend otherwise. I maintain that if Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 1984 or 1989 we'd now consider it a classic, and if Temple of Doom or The Last Crusade came out last month the Internet would be eviscerating them with knives out.
There is no joy in Internet fandom.
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