Yeah, I was including the Celtic antecedents to the Grail myth when I said it had been around for thousands of years. Which is debatable, of course, as the myth changed significantly when it was Christianized, but even if you throw that out, de Boron’s work is, what, eight centuries old now? Sufficiently ancient that it doesn’t undercut my point about the cultural weight behind the myths used in the first and third movies not being present in the ancient astronauts theme of the fourth, at any rate.
Not sure what you mean about the Grail’s powers being an invention of the screenwriters, though. The only power it demonstrates in the film is the ability to heal mortal wounds, which I understand to have been fairly constant in the myth, at least since it became attached to the Arthurian mythos. We see some other supernatural events at the end of the third Indy movie, but I don’t think these were powers of the grail itself, but rather, wards and safeguards placed around it.
I figured that was the case, but I don’t know much about Hindu mythology, so I wasn’t sure.
I’ll second Stranger on a Train. The Lingam stones are indeed a symbol of fertility, though, which is where I guess they got the correlation to crops and such.
Here’s a funny thing. The Lingam is a symbol of male fertility. Specifically, Lord Shiva’s. It is shaped sort of like a male penis, if you squint a bit. And we worship it…by pouring white milk over it.
Yeah.
Anyway, as to the aliens. I don’t mind aliens in a story sometimes but most of the time they feel like an annoying copout. I hate when people make aliens out to be these great, grand, powerful things - so much more intelligent than us poor shoddy humans and obviously NO human could have ever built X thing. When the fact is that humans do amazing things. It just seems insulting to our intelligence.
They’re only mundane to the agents. To everyone else, such things are fantasy because as soon as they’re discovered, they’re snatched up and locked away. But we can presume that Indy happens to prefer going after items that are supposed to have powers, so he ends up in competition to the Warehouse agents.
Welllllll they kind of win that one just by virtue of having presumeably developed a means of travelling to another solar system. They’ve pretty much got us beat on that one. Anything amazing that humans do would be about as amazing to them as an ant hill is to us.
I liked the beginning, where the russians were so nicely menacing. I could see the russians trying to get the Arc, or some other artifact that they need. I could even see the crystal skull, as some sort of lead to a resource [mine of rare element perhaps, linked with a lost city like Opar just in south America]
I think the atomic bomb bit sucked, lose that part. Running through the test site and getting nicked by the government, OK. We were paranoid at that time. The paranoia works.
Keep the meeting with Shia and the pursuit through campus, I liked the bit in the library. You could keep the wandering through the lunatic asylum, and the bit with his friend in the russian camp. Keep a little bit of the race through the forest, lose the waterfalls. Use the skull as a compass to find the lost city - just need to figure out what is in the lost city for the end - the alien bit sucks. Maybe an element with some sort of radiation that heals instead of kills, and that spanish explorer is still alive because of the element.
There was a lot of good stuff in the beginning, I agree. The first chase scene was fun, and it was an Indiana Jones-ish scene. After that… well, it had a ton of the same problems as the Star Wars prequels. Too much CGI, not enough heart. Look, we don’t get excited just because it’s Indiana Jones anymore than we get excited just because it’s Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi. You have to earn it and then keep earning it. And I have to give a shit.
That’s what I was just thinking. I didn’t see it when it came out and it was on my ‘get around to someday’ list. But I didn’t know there were aliens and now it’s pretty much been bumped off even that list.
I suppose I should thank the OP, even though a spoiler like that really has no place in a thread title.
come one guys at least I used a question mark in the title this time. I haven’t worked my way up to capital letters yet. no need to be so mean about it.
I don’t hate the aliens in “Kingdom”, they are just something of little consequence stuck at the end" Shia LaBoeuf is more worth of contempt as something truly useless.
But where “Raiders” had humor (pulling the gun in a sword fight, “I’m making it up as I go along” line, “Snakes…very dangerous-You go first” and “Crusade” had the Ford and Connery pairing, "Kingdom has two hours of frantic action that gets tiring quickly with some dialogue in between.
