Also, the villains in Temple of Doom weren’t as good as Belloq and the Nazis in Raiders. In fact, the Chinese gangster at the beginning was a much more colorful and compelling foe for Indy than the temple cultists. I would’ve preferred it if he had been the main bad guy in the movie.
Very cool link, thank you.
Warehouse 23 the website is named in honor of a tabletop RPG book from the site owners of the same name. It’s a sourcebook giving information on the history and contents of the warehouse where the Conspiracy stashes all the stuff that’s Too Cool To Reveal - basically the warehouse we see at the end of Raiders.
It amuses me that the first film features an Old Testament artifact, while the third features a New Testament artifact (best to ignore the second film). They could have had the next one feature a Koranic artifact (perhaps the legendary missing piece of the Black Stone). That would have made an Abrahamic faith trilogy.
I always felt that the Gubmint showed real wisdom burying the ark in a warehouse. Through sheer luck, the genie got put back in the bottle and someone knew better than to try to open it again. Even if it was the result of overly-conservative bureaucratic thinking, it was the right course of inaction.
My memory is failing over the years. Did they ever state exactly how Indy and Marion 1) got off the island, 2) got the Ark off the island, 3) kept it out of the hands of the British, since American presence in the Med was non-existent? Was there a scene I’m totally forgetting, or did the movie go from “Lid slamming down on Ark” to “Top men.”? We won’t even mention the question of how they explained all the dead Nazis to whoever showed up to rescue them.
nope.
We can speculate. For example, assuming that everyone else on the island was obliterated, they could have made their way back to the sub base, and either used the radios there or taken a boat from there.
Would the British even want the Ark? If Indy radioed for help from a nearby British ship I assume they would have just picked him and his package up and taken him to an American embassy somewhere. They might not even know what the thing is, just assuming since Indy is a legit archaeologist that it’s just something else he’s taken back to a museum. Also he could bargain for safe passage from the British by telling them there’s this big empty German U-Boat base and a potential enigma machine and code-books in there.
What would Indy know about codes and Enigma? Plus, if the British find the base during the rescue, there is no freaking way they let Indy and Marion walk. Too many questions that need to be answered to let them go.
My fanwank is that the Bantu Wind was still in the area, and Captain Katanga picked them up and took them to the US.
Or at least to someplace they could contact an embassy and arrange transport back to the states. Good wank.
Watched Raiders the other day, for the first time in a few decades. It held up as well for me as it did for everyone else here, IOW, terrifically.
One question: once Indy & Co. have figured out that the Nazis are digging in the wrong place (and the right place is just far enough from where they’re digging that they’re not likely to stumble into it by accident), why don’t they just get the hell out of there, get back to Cairo and send a telegram to the intel types who hired Indy for this gig in the first place? Once the Nazis clear out (the movie makes it appear they’re getting ready to throw in the towel on the prospect that the Ark is there), they can either let the Ark just remain there in perpetuity, or get some unofficial U.S. Army armed support while they dig now, or wait until after WWII and dig up the Ark then.
But the idea that they’re going to dig within sight of where the Nazis are digging, while the Nazis are digging - that never made a lick of sense to me. (Yeah, I know - lots of the plot twists make no sense. Why this one is the one that I can’t let go of, I can’t tell you. Still an outstanding movie, though.)
I want to know why no one ever picked up on the opto-sensor technology that those ancient South American tomb-builders had. Talk about Lost Technology.
It’s pretty impressive that their pressure-sensitive devices continued to work after such a long time in a hostile jungle environment, even with moss growing on it – those pressure-triggered darts (what WAS propelling them through hose holes? I suppose it could’ve been bent natural springs or tiny crossbows, although you’d think that those would deteriorate quickly. And they sounded as if they were pneumatic. But no matter) and the platform the golden idol was sitting on* .
But I’m really impressed that they had that bamboo-spear grate set up so that breaking a beam of light triggered it. “Stay out of the light”, Indy cautions Alfred Molina, and shows how it got Forrestal. They must had primitive selenium cell technology, because I can’t picture them using some other combination of semiconductors. Too bad their descendants lost the technology.
- As another thought, it’s always bothered me that the platform the idol was sitting on went down after Indy misjudged the weight he replaced it with. I woulda thought, naively, that the platform would go up if you removed the weight, thus triggering the mechanism. The fact that whatever balance it was sitting on was so sensitive that it could detect a weight too heavy suggests incredibly detailed technology. And also that their priests must have been real careful not to drop anything on that platform.
I’ve always noted that were Indiana Jones a real archeologist he’d be a lot less interested in a few gold idols than he would in the existence of extremely sophisticated pre-Colombian stone-based trap technology. That’d be a gamechanger for the whole profession, but he’s more interested in trinkets.
And, sure, the Ark of the Covenant would be interesting, but the entire city of Tanis, buried and undisturbed for centuries, would be fascinating to study. The map room alone would be very cool.
I always thought that the pneumatic darts could be propelled by a weight falling in a semi-sealed chamber pushing air out of a tube. The chamber might not even need to be sealed that well if the weight fell fast enough.
The capability of lost civilizations with limited resources to fabricate flawlessly functioning devices that stand up to periods of long neglect never ceases to amaze me.
What neglect? Perhaps the Peruvian tribespeople who were chasing Indy were responsible for upkeep of the mechanisms? (Kidding, sort of.)
You didn’t notice the traps that failed, only the few that survived. The tanks of sharks with lasers were filled with algae. The deathbots got too much sand in their gears. Ultrasonic disintegrators went out of tune. Even the contact poison on the golden idol had sublimated off. Only the last few traps remained.