I take it you mean Steven Spielberg? Eh? Dumbass.
Funny thing is, my real name is Steven, and all my life people have been misspelling it Stephen. Hoist by my own petard.
Oh, and in case it hasn’t been mentioned yet: there’s no character in the movie named Mudd. Not a matter of opinion.
I found it OK, not as good as the previous three (I too am surprised by the Temple of Doom hate, I like that film), requiring even more in the suspension of disbelief department, and lacking a strong story.
One thing that bothered me that hasn’t been mentioned yet: No way would a man with Indiana Jones’s education and knowledge refer to the Bhagavad Gita as “the Hindu Bible”.
Perhaps he was explaining it to dumb Russians and the general movie going public. 
No one has mentioned the one absolutely unforgivable piece of this movie. In all of the other movies, Indy is motivated by scholarship. It’s a BIG deal to be an archaeologist and there’s always talk about how artifacts are important because of their historical value, not their monetary value. It’s why he is what he is. And yet:
He wantonly destroys objects he comes across, including the carvings on the obelisk. “everybody get a rock and have at these things. it’s not like they could tell us anything about the time, the people or the purpose of the thing” :rolleyes:
And worse. At the climatic scene in the movie, he sees all of the artifacts carefully collected by the aliens and says with wonder “they’re archaeologists”. If they are, though, their collection plan really, really sucked. At the end, the whole fricking spaceship thing rises up into the air and the priceless relics, collected over vast amounts of time and with careful consideration by the alien archaeologists, go spinning around and are destroyed. Great plan by the advanced alien scientists.
I thought this was definitely a C- movie with only Shia as a saving grace.
He always does that. He is more of a tomb raider than an archaeologist.
If they bump the time up to the Vietnam war era, they could turn him into a bit of a long hair.
I knew a girl once who thought being an archaeologist would be SO romantic, presumably on the basis of the Indiana Jones films, but I never asked. But having studied a bit of archaeology myself, I assured her it was in reality a back-breaking chore with the rewards few and far between and then only if you’re lucky and that being a bricklayer would probably be more romantic and less tedious. Her look assured me I probably did not know what I was talking about.
I’ve just seen it today. It sucked. It wasn’t just bad, it was Superman 4 bad.
There’s one thing I thought they were going to do, but they didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was in early drafts of the script.
setup:
The scene where Mutt learns not to bring a knife to a gunfight.
the scene where Mutt says he has been trained in fencing.
The scene where Mutt and CommieWoman fight with swords.
expected payoff :
In the climatic scene, CommieWoman comes back with a sword for round two … Mutt shoots her, then says “she brought a knife to a gunfight”
By investing in his electric moped concept? 
I saw it for the firts time yesterday, got to say I agree with Peter Morris, it was terrible, although to be fair, not as bad as Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
I know there is a lot of suspension of disbelief in Indy films and I don’t class myself as a fanboy, but come on, he gets nuked in the first 10-15 minutes and survives and it goes downhill from there.
It was more like a dodgy script for the second X-Files movie that didn’t make the grade than an Indy film.
It also seemed like all of the main set pieces had been lifted from the previous films; driving along the edge of a valley (Indy 3), truck chases (indy 1 and 3) and so on.
I was looking forward to seeing what they did with an older Indy, but it just seemed to me like the actors just drifted through the film with little effort. The dialogue wasn’t as witty as the others either.
Not a truly terrible film, but not a worthy addition to the series either.
One of many problems with the film - there was just way too much science fiction in it. The first three films only had a bit of fantasy, mostly at the climax. You could have had almost the same film if it had been cut out altogether. Young Indy had none at all, as far as I can remember. But this film was full of it from the first scene to the last.
Another thing, in the first three movies he went after artifacts from the Jewish, Hindu and Christian faiths. In this one he went after an alien spaceship. Aliens? In Indianna Jones? WTF?
Seen this for the third time last night; for a movie I don’t really like, I seem to be watching it a lot! Was on a date and she wanted to see it… I really was considering Sex and the City.
OK JUST ONE THING.
Why is Indy’s fridge the only fridge that survives?
If you assume that every one of those mock houses had a fridge, shouldn’t dozens of fridges have flown through the air? Shouldn’t Indy have landed in a field full of fridges? Why is that one fridge the only discernable piece of wreckage from the mock town?
ARRARARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
His was the only refrigerator with 200 lbs or so of mass in it. The other were blown much further away off camera.
:rolleyes:
Good lord, what a steaming pile of dung! The major issues have been covered here, except for one…
Remember the scene where Indy is opening the shrouds of the conquistadors? And he borrows Mud’s knife? I guess that’s supposed to show that Mud is actually useful and all but…
Indiana Jones doesn’t carry a knife?
We are supposed to believe that Indiana Jones doesn’t have a knife on him?
The intrepid adventurer and world traveler DIDN’T HAVE A KNIFE???
Gimme a fucking break, guys. I’ll believe just about anything you show me in a dumb action movie, but that’s some stupid shit right there.
p.s. I saw it with my mom…afterwards, she asked me what that pouch that he was carrying the whole time was for. I replied “it was his colostomy bag.” Yeah, that makes no sense, but we thought it was pretty funny. Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Colostomy Bag. In theaters June 2010!
Who said it is? Maybe all the others did too, you just didn’t see them.
Good point. And, What We Learned. Note how the B-58 Hustler escape pods resemble refrigerators. 
I enjoyed the movie, though as I was watching it I was conscious of just how much I had to turn off my brain to do so. Where earlier Indy installments drew inspiration from pulp novels and serials, this one seems to owe more to Warner Brothers cartoons. I also noticed a certain similarity to Die Hard 4. Both films feature an aging-yet-indestructible hero who swaggers his way through a string of ridiculous set pieces on the way to a showdown whose outcome is never really in doubt.
A few other things:
Callbacks
Making references to previous movies in a series is a tricky thing. It’s very easy to make a neat little moment into a smarmy schmaltz-fest. For my money, the gold standard of callbacks is in Last Crusade when they’re exploring the catacombs under Venice. Elsa sees a drawing on the wall which Indy identifies as the Ark of the Covenant. She asks, “Are you sure?” He says, “Pretty sure.” And just for a second the soundtrack switches to the Ark’s theme from Raiders.
That’s it. They don’t dwell. The people who recognize the reference get a little laugh and for the ones who don’t it’s right on to the next scene. That’s the way it’s supposed to be done.
Crystal Skull blows this a couple of times. When they open the warehouse doors at Area 51 we see all the crates and again the Ark’s theme plays. This is fine. It’s a little bit derivative but it’s still brief and reasonably subtle. Then later on they go and smash open a crate and we see a corner of the Ark sticking out. This is needless. It’s beating the audience over the head with the reference.
Then there’s the matter of Marcus. When Indy gets back to the university there’s a shot of a hallway and Marcus’s portrait is on the wall. This made me glad. It’s a nice tip of the hat and you feel clever for noticing it. Then Indy sits down at his desk and says a few lines over pictures of his father and Marcus. This is heavy-handed but not too awful. Then comes the statue scene. The less said about that the better; if they were going to knock the poor guy’s head off then they shouldn’t have bothered with the other two tributes first. Go for dignified or sentimental or funny, but not all three.
And now that others have mentioned it, I agree that it would have been great to have Sallah and/or Short Round at the wedding. No lines, just faces in the crowd.
The Kid
Mr. TheBeef did a pretty good job, but I also thought he introduced himself as “Mud” the first time.
The Nazca Burial Chamber
This looked an awful lot like the set of Tales From the Crypt. When the first capoeira ninja burst out of the walls I was half-expecting him to start cackling madly with the voice of John Kassir.
The Waterfalls
As they went over the third one did anyone else have the overwhelming urge to yell, “I didn’t kill my wife!”?
What happened to Short Round? Did Indy get him a grant to go to college and study Archeology, or did he get a job at a house of ill repute in Bangkok?
That’s Mutt! Not Mud and not Mudd! :mad:
I prefer the Crystal Skull used in this other Indiana Jones adventure:
(NOTE: Embedded flash video of Tokyo DisneySea attraction.)
http://www.tokyodisneyresort.co.jp/tds/japanese/7port/lostriver/atrc_indiana.html
You know you don’t have to get angry all the time to show everybody how tough you are.
Indy took him to the States and got him into school, but poor diction derailed his college career early when the registrar misheard his choice of major. Finding himself enrolled in Entomology, Shorty’s old phobias quickly kicked in. This led to a nervous breakdown during a midterm when he erroneously identified every single specimen as “fortune cookie”.
After dropping out he hotwired the dean’s car and headed eastward to pursue his boyhood ambition of pitching for the New York Yankees. Unfortunately his great enthusiasm and arm strength were not accompanied by an equivalent amount of control. His tryout was marred by a series of inadvertent beanballs, one of which ended the baseball career of fellow Yankees prospect Fidel Castro.
Despondent, Shorty returned to his old job of driving a taxi. He still finds time to write Indy letters which contain reminiscences about the old times, requests for loans, and reminders that, while occasionally irksome, he still wasn’t half as annoying a sidekick as Willie Scott.