I hate to award mediocrity - there’s still a missing apostrophe.
In the first three Indy films, the MacGuffin was diety sourced power(s). It fits the time-theme, as we today think of those folks back then as being more religous.
In the 50’s, science fiction became more the rage, and UFO and alien storys begin to replace religion as a means to show beings of great power.
Was the switch to ET’s in the fourth Indiana Jones movie supposed to reflect that thought and/or shift in our culture?
I remember how the suspension of disbelief was tested in Last Crusade. It was actually clever. Indy has to cross a chasm to get to the grail. It’s got to be a “leap of faith”. He crosses himself, steps forward and doesn’t fall.
At the idea on an invisible bridge, there was a sudden hush in the audience, and you heard a guy’s voice somewhere behind me say “No way.” Just as the audience was on the verge of disgust for the movie going too far with “magic”, Indy moves and it’s revealed that bridge is a trompe-d’oeuil king of thing. A normal bridge painted to look like it’s not there. Suddenly it’s back to plausible and the audience got all excited again. It was actually a great moment in the theater.
The audience when from “you’ve gotta be shittin’ me!” back to “Oh, awesome!” in a heartbeat! So the appearance of a centuries old knight didn’t even phase us.
CGI gizmos don’t have anything really rooted in reality and you don’t need to actively participate in filling in the information holes. For the trompe d’oeuil, you kind to be engaged in the movie to figure it out and have your own little “A-ha!” moment. First you think “What the hell? Indy’s not falling!” You lean closer and he camera moves and you figure it out “It’s… painted! It’s an optical illusion! Ingenious!”
There was no dialog to explain it. It was purely show-don’t-tell. You figure out the trick with Indy like you’re a silent partner or something.
With CGI stuff dancing around, you’re just waiting for stuff to do its thing. Yeah it looks cool, but you’re still just waiting. It’s the difference between trying to figure out how a magician does his clever magic trick, and waiting for a stripper to finish peeling so you get to see boobies. Either way the sequence will have a payoff, but trying to figure out the magic trick that’s fooling you requires more engagement than just waiting for the stripper to unbutton her blouse. No one really cares about her little dance.
Wait… it’s a trompe-d’oeuil thing that works no matter what distance or angle you look at it from – even camera positions that are radically different than any position from which a human would ever see it? I think a straightforward magic bridge is more believable in a world that contains Nazi-melting artifacts, villains who can rip your still-beating heart from your chest without leaving a hole, and magic grails and anti-grails.
No, it’s very clear that it’s trompe d’oeuil. (The kind that doesn’t exist, but it is supposed to be non-magical, non-divine.) Of course, what’s past the bridge is the actual real Holy Grail complete with ancient knight which saves people’s lives and makes them immortal and destroyed a great big temple when somebody tried to remove it. But that doesn’t mean that the reveal in the bridge scene isn’t awesome.
The point is, the ONLY magical thing is the Grail. That’s it. Not a billion things in the movie. Everything else plays by the rules.
Technically, all the other grails are magic, too, in the sesne that they’re all booby-trapped.
No, you can see the difference at different angles. That’s how Indy, and the audience figure it out. When the camera moves to look at it from different angles.
But as Zsofia says, for the brief moment everyone thought Indy was suspended in mid air, or on an invisible bridge, everyone was a bit peeved that the movie “broke its own rules” and inserted real “magic” where there should have been a trick. The reveal was great — it really was just a trick after all.
Even the “real magic” wasn’t all CGI hocus-pocussy most of the time. We mostly get to see the effects of the magic and not the magic itself, which is actually more awesome and scary. Choose poorly and drink form the wrong cup, you age a thousand years in just a few seconds. Look directly into the Ark, your face melts off. Take the Grail past the seal in the floor and the temple falls down around you.
The pissed of, Nazi-stomping, ghosty spirits of Raiders is the most flat-out, undeniable, explicit magic we really witness in the entire trilogy. The rest is mostly unexplained or unseen phenomena, which I think works better. A least by the end of Raiders you’ve been carefully groomed for something more, so the smokey spirits work.
The aliens just don’t. It’s too jarring within the guidelines that have been established up until then. I could have dealt with more smokey ghosties (which were a little over-the-top), but CGI aliens? Indy may just as well have shaken hands with Roger Rabbit.
But by then you’ve been trained by the movie that all magic so far is really just (barely plausible) ingenuity. So there will always be that nugget of doubt: What if all the cups are poisoned and only the Grail is not? Is the knight really that old, or is he just some guy from a long line of guys that spanned generations who show up to take over the job form the old dude who is retiring. Except for the Raiders spirits, the bulk of the magic we see still has at least some tenuous connection to people doing incredibly clever things.
That’s what makes the “real magic” effective when something truly inexplicable happens. So when the Nazi drinks from the wrong cup, it’s freaky as sht when he ages, and freaky as sh when we see specters in Raiders.
The aliens went too far. You have three movies that have incredibly elaborate booby-traps and marvelously improbable human feats of engineering built by ancient peoples to protect very precious things tied to the very core of their belief system. With CGI aliens, it stopped being human myth and ingenuity, and became “there were no ingenious people building elaborate machines, there’s no magic either, we didn’t do this, it was alien technology all along.” That’s disappointing.
I’m still not seeing it.
The bridge is invisible when seen from Indy’s POV looking across it, looking straight down, from the opposite POV, and from the side. If it weren’t, there would have been no suspense when Indy took the step (not that we thought he was going to plummet to his death, but I certainly don’t remember anyone at the time saying, “Oh, look, there’s a bridge.”)
ETA: It’s visible when he’s standing on it of course, but that’s clearly part of the magic as when he reaches the end, it’s again invisible, from yet a different angle.
I always thought that the bridge was designed to look invisible when seen from certain angles. It’s like putting a piece from an exact copy of a portrait of my face over the portrait it was copied from. It was built to look exactly like the valley looked sans bridge.
What scene are you guys watching? Before Indy steps on to the bridge, it’s invisible from multiple POV, including at least one angle from which no human would reasonably be expected to see it.
Indy did not “figure it out” by looking at it from a different angle. If he had, there would have been no reason for him to take a “leap of faith” (his words), breathing heavily and with his eyes closed.
As he walks on the bridge, it becomes visible from the same angles from which it couldn’t be seen before. When he steps off the bridge, it’s invisible again.
Personally I was OK with it. I mean technically, they weren’t even outerspace aliens, they were interdimensional aliens. And given the time frame, it made sense to update the serial movies of the 50s which would have been either aliens or giant ants. I vote for aliens.
I think more people had problems with nuking the fridge and swinging monkey vines though.
Personally I enjoyed the hell out of it.
I definitely think so. Indy 4 was filmed around twenty years later from Indy 3, so it was either keep Indiana Jones in the 1930’s, which would have been jarring since Ford has grown so old, or make the movie take place in the 1950’s. With the film set in the 1950’s, the sci-fi theme makes a lot of sense, at least on paper.
No, he clearly figures it out by looking at it from a different angle - namely, straight down, while he’s standing on it. The difference between this trap and the previous two is that he doesn’t figure out what the trick to it is until he’s already in the middle of it - he takes the “leap of faith,” then figures it out.
I do think the scene cheats just a little bit, in that there’s a couple places where, from the angle of the camera, the illusion shouldn’t work for the audience. But the intent is to make sure the audience doesn’t figure it out before Indy, so I don’t see this as a big deal. Indy is the POV character for the scene, so we’re just shown stuff he’d be able to figure out from where he’s standing, even if our literal point of view is off from his by a few degrees. It’s a shorthand to improve the storytelling, while still allowing for an interesting scene composition.
There was only one trap before the Leap of Faith. Three traps in total.
And three shall be the total. No more, no less.
No, two - the leap was the last one, the first was the Breath of God and the second was the Word of God with extra credit for spelling.
That’s doesn’t make any sense. There is no J in Latin why is that letter even there.
You’re right, of course. I forgot about the spelling bee one. The thing I don’t like about that one is that all it takes is some asshole dancing around fucking it up to ruin the tests for the next contestant.
Well, in a way it’s like somebody’s already crossed out some wrong answers for you. 