Which of the Indiana Jones sequels is the best?

And then we can stop going back and forth on this endlessly on every other movie thread.

Well when you put the choices like THAT...

... it's STILL "Temple of Doom"

Pretty certain we already settled this

Hmph: Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

Too much white noise clouding the debate.

Loved it when Indiana hid inside Chicago Bears legend William Perry.

... it's STILL "Temple of Doom"

― WHEY AHR MAH DREGUNS? (DJP), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:56 PM (2 minutes ago)

Oh, and also the poll got it wrong.

if lucas and spielberg can both agree that temple of doom was bad, it's like getting bush to agree that iraq was a bad idea, so it's practically settled law by now.

Including the Phantom Menace entry for kicks.

I lied. I included it because it's not the worst entry among these three.

everyone who isn't totally insane thinks the first is best

mmph.

The 2s almost always have it: Frankenstein, Superman, Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek etc.

I used to think Temple of Doom was awesome. But Willie and Short Round just make me u_u now. that being said, Kali Ma is pretty fkn cool. and the eyeball soup and whatnot

but it's probably Junior.

I never said I wasn't insane, Morbs.

The second is the best and Kate Capeshaw is one of my favorite post-screwball screwballs ("Ohh I broke a nail...").

last crusade 4 lyfe

Apparently the only way I like screwball is it if's accompanied by chilled monkey brains.

Gimme your poll.

Why?

Cuz I'm gonna THROW IT UP IN IT

Apparently the only way I like screwball is it if's accompanied by chilled monkey brains.

A hair away from the out of context thread.

ahhhh

snake SURPRIIIIZE

oh yeah but that snake/elephant trunk was p lol

hmm I remember a lot more funny things from Doom than Crusade

but then again

JOONYAH

I don't remember Sylvester Stallone in Last Crusade

last crusade is hell boring

Whenever the indentikit valkyrie Nazi is on screen I hope the zeppelin falls on her ("See? Gittee as a schoolboy!" argh fuck you DIE).

Love all three (refuse to acknowledge the existence of The Fridge), going Last Crusade because I saw it in the theater and it blew my mind.

Aryan femme fatale was a babe.

seems her name was Alison Doody.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lq359wGhnY1r1xri8o1_400.jpg

if lucas and spielberg can both agree that temple of doom was bad, it's like getting bush to agree that iraq was a bad idea, so it's practically settled law by now.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they both said The Crystal Skull was "the best Indy movie yet!"

Say what you will about Crystal Skull, there were at least a dozen truly memorable indignities on the franchise I could've used in "The Refrigerator"s place.

The 2s almost always have it: Frankenstein, Superman, Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek etc.

Morbz is OTM here, in general (left out Batman lol)

'I'm pretty sure they both said The Crystal Skull was "the best Indy movie yet!"'
spielberg thought it was so bad, he said the refrigerator was his idea to protect lucas.

I guess Morbs counts The Godfather Part II as a chapter in one movie.

Nah, just that the first is better.

Would not be surprised to find that the hoi polloi don't agree with Morbs on the 2's theory.

The 2s almost always have it: Frankenstein, Superman, Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek etc.

Morbz is OTM here, in general (left out Batman lol)

no, only on rare occasions do sequels clearly surpass their predecessors. agree on frankenstein and star trek, but that's about it.

are you serious?

Superman II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Bride of -- leagues better than their predecessors.

http://i2.listal.com/image/264049/600full-step-up-2%3A-the-streets-poster.jpg

superman and superman ii both suck. empire strikes back and star wars are both great. alien is better than aliens.

agree about bride, as i said.

Superman II, Empire, Batman Returns, and the Dark Knight are all better than their predecessors (disagree w Morbz re: Alien)

xp

and Godfather II is better than I

this sort of only applies to non-horror genres tho imho

okay, i'll grant superman ii, but it's not good enough to care about or haggle over, imo

http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Terence-Stamp-General-Zod-Photograph-C10101814.jpeg

"Why do you say this to me when you know I will kill you for it?"

i still haven't seen crystal skull. and haven't seen 2 & 3 since i was a kid. voted temple

Batman Returns, and the Dark Knight are all better than their predecessors

these are interesting cases. both of the batman sequels are longer, more ambitious and much more interesting than their predecessors. otoh, they're both a bit shapeless, narratively. i do like them better than what they followed, though they're both messes with GREAT detailing.

oh cool this thread turned into a kevin smith script

do I have to derail this thread with lame Dark Nought jokes

Dork Knight iirc

Short Round would need to ascend to annoying sidekick

I was told I have a very loud voice after a screening of this in a local beer theater. I shouldn’t have said “oh shit, here come the white people to save them!” so loudly at the end

I always remember Last Crusade getting a lot of (revisionist?) criticism for Last Crusade and what Jeffrey Boam et al did to the characters, but other than making both Brody and Sallah into more comic relief characters(when a lot of their screen time in the first one was to underline the gravitas of the situation), I can’t see it.

Last Crusade is the worst, most bloodless, and most worthless thing Spielberg was ever associated with. Including The Goonies

Last Crusade was terrible, there are two good Indiana Jones films only, the whole "explaining the hat / explaining the snakes" bit was terrible and unnecessary and created a terrible backstory-explaining precedent that was ultimately responsible for midichlorians and Prometheus

Doom revisionism baffling af itt

Last Crusade has plenty of fun set pieces to make the River Phoenix intro and "lol Indy and his dad banged the same Nazi!" forgivable IMO. (It was one of the first four grown-up movies I saw in a theater along with Field of Dreams and Hunt for Red October, my rose-colored glasses for all three will be forever undimmed. Also Star Trek V but I hated it even then.)

Love Temple Of Doom yeah.

Goose-stepping morons such as yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!

the best bit in the first one is how the ark death angels tidy up after themselves, now THAT'S what i call a secret weapon

not a bone in sight! It's like they're the workers who clean up airplanes as the passengers stagger offboard.

no wonder they're so vengeful

I watched Black Rain last night, noticed that Kate Capshaw was in it although not much. I love her in Temple though.

Didn't even know she was Spielbergs wife.

https://i.imgur.com/ebhJLnI.gif

My recollection is her part in Black rain is, based upon her role in Temple of doom, pretty solid subsequent typecasting.

I don't think TOD really steps wrong that much, unless you're not down with its particular "thing", which is understandable. Last crusade is a lot of fun but it's a film afflicted in a lot of key aspects by a lot of the most tedious blockbuster bullshit. For example I don't think turning Brody and Sallah into unserious comic relief characters is a small thing. Their sharpness and incisiveness and sober qualities in the first film really helped sell the whole damn thing. The River Phoenix prologue was pretty bad. The villains are pretty minor league and a lot of it just feels like an effort to overcorrect after TOD.

it's kinda like what was done with the Rise of Skywalker after Last Jedi, though I want to clarify that I think Last Crusade is a good and fun film and not a terrible and stupid one, unlike ROS.

I hadn't seen "Last Crusade" in eons. It's (even) sillier than I remembered it, but it mostly works because a) it's so remarkably efficient - covers all that ground in just 2 hours and seven minutes! - and b) Harrison Ford has absolutely impeccable comic timing. Little glances, half-smiles, furrowed brows, line deliveries and stunts, the goofiness and gags wouldn't work without him. Ford's skills on that front have been on display since the start, but the way he successfully sells everything in this one is just such a joy. My biggest reservations remain a couple of conspicuous FX or green screen shots that even back then probably could have been done better, or at least differently.

Anyway, Ford is 83, how long are they going to wait to give him his lifetime achievement Oscar?

Have you read that thing that does the rounds on bluesky every few years, about Tom Stoppard’s rewrite? It’s fun:
https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade-learning-from-stoppard/

I think a lot of that can be chalked up to Stoppard's script doctoring, but it discounts on-set changes and the film editing. Ford's always downplayed his contributions and does this grateful gravitas bit for most public appearances, but he's more of a whimsical ad-libber than he'd like to admit

hell of a job switching up the pacing and making a much better movie than the original script would have indicated, though

on bluesky every few years

Bsky And The Temple Of Doom

I wondered how Sallah devolves into a broader ethnic stereotype in Last Crusade. He refer to a tank as a "steel beast" and freaks out about replacing his brother's car as if in the first film he wasn't this sophisticate whom the Nazis considered the best digger in Egypt. Maybe it was Spielberg's punishment for Rhys-Davies becoming Thatcherite.

^^^

I still haven't seen the last couple movies. Should I?

I haven't either, really can't be bothered..

#4 is worth it for Spielberg completists - similar to The Lost World, there are a couple of genuine glimmers of what made the earlier films great. But just a couple, and in between you get some dispiritingly weightless CGI action and some pretty lame narrative choices. You could turn it off around the time Indy heads overseas, and have seen most of the good parts (albeit not enough of Blanchett's enjoyably hammy villain performance).

Ha ha is it Raiders or Last Crusade where the lightning flash on the snake monument makes him yell "aggghhh!" in fright and then sheepishly apologise to Indy, the snake-phobe, who didn't flinch. I'm willing to go with Sallah having brontophobia maybe but c'mon.

(Probably not snake monument... big cat?)

it's this freakish gargoyle face suddenly illuminated by the lightning.

Alfred otm, this also applies in a different way to Brody, who is a vv levelheaded, wary, cool customer in ROTLA. He could have been advising George Smiley in another fictional life. i never really liked those two character shifts whatsoever, it was a really clear thing one can point to in terms of how a 1981 blockbuster might write its characters vs how a 1989 one might.

I liked the 5th one, certainly a lot more than the 4th. There was some criticism that the maguffin was unrealistic and I thought, ‘dude, have you seen the other movies?’.

I've not seen the 5th one and probably won't, it just feels ... unnecessary. Likewise I've only seen "Crystal Skull" the once, and while it was fine, the comparison to "The Lost World" is apt. I recall some years back falling prey to the revisionism and watching "Lost World" again, and no, it's just not that good. Spielberg is a virtuoso, so all of his films have their moments, and even his more middling efforts can still be captivating, but the few times he's off he's really off.

Speaking of screenwriting, Jaymc posted a great interview with Tony Kushner, mostly about the making of "Munich" but also containing the revelation that his initial script for "Lincoln" was 500 pages! Apparently Spielberg was elated, but he was essentially able to sculpt his story out of that solid block of screenwriting marble. Spielberg doesn't get credited as a writer that often, but clearly the guy has a knack for that, too. Just a natural born storyteller.

That article is great, very illuminating (since Last Crusade is a perfect movie and all).

Dial of Destiny fumbles its central human premise which is "If you could go back in time and live differently, what would you do?"

It is funny that Indy has become so dispirited with his life that his answer is momentarily "I'll stay with Archimedes and watch history unfold" and the villain, played by an underutilized Mads Mikkelsen, has decided that he should travel back to get rid of Hitler because while he was a grandiose fool, the reich was good actually

I think the casting for DoD was overall better. Toby Jones has one of those faces that was made to play a 1940s Indiana Jones ally

Ford's always downplayed his contributions and does this grateful gravitas bit for most public appearances, but he's more of a whimsical ad-libber than he'd like to admit

This is true and was even confirmed on The Fugitive. Jane Lynch said they completely rewrote their scene together right before they shot it because he didn’t like the script.

original Star Wars dialogue is probably patient zero for Ford ad-libbing after Carrie Fisher showed up and flat-out said "I'm not reading that" followed by them workshopping their scenes

Apparently Julianne Moore was supposed to be a love interest in "The Fugitive," but Ford nixed that because it made no sense for a guy out avenging his wife to get involved with another woman.

lol such an obviously terrible 90s blockbuster studio note. you can easily imagine that movie and it stinks, both for the reason you outline and because it would clearly drain the momentum out of the movie. interesting that the director's next project, Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction, revives the "romance on the run" idea.

it would definitely have ended w/Jeroen Krabbe holding a gun to Julianne Moore's head, maybe her kicking him in the balls or something, he releases her, TLJ drops him with a shot.

"I didn't kill my wife"

"I didn't care then, Richard. I care now."

what if he said "my wife" Borat-style the whole movie

peaking of screenwriting, Jaymc posted a great interview with Tony Kushner, mostly about the making of "Munich" but also containing the revelation that his initial script for "Lincoln" was 500 pages! Apparently Spielberg was elated, but he was essentially able to sculpt his story out of that solid block of screenwriting marble. Spielberg doesn't get credited as a writer that often, but clearly the guy has a knack for that, too. Just a natural born storyteller.

The "sentimental" material in A.I. is Kubrick's, the harder stuff is Spielberg's. I always thought his screenwriting credit was decorative but, no, apparently he reshaped the script and wrote the dialogue almost entirely (his other writing credits include Close Encounters and The Fablemans, the latter again with Kushner).

And "Poltergeist"! Spielberg has a mean streak, that's for sure, lol. It was his muscle that enabled "Gremlins" its edge.

For reference, Spielberg in a 2002 interview: "...all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalising were all Stanley's. The teddy bear was Stanley's. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley's. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film – all the stuff in the house – was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision... eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up... but in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me. I'm the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That's why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, 'This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own.'”⠀⁣⁣⁣

I remember everyone (in life, not critics) hating the movie when it came out for a variety of reasons. It was enough to dissuade me from seeing it until much later. I had mixed feelings initially, but as I got older and more mature, I went back to it every now and then and grew to appreciate it each time. I think by 2015 or so, I came around to it altogether, and Spielberg really was the right director for it - it's easily my favorite of his films and a masterpiece. I'm not alone in that regard, but it probably still has more detractors than supporters and I wish more people could see how brilliant it really is.

The critical tide has considerably turned. The 2000s were Spielberg's best decade.

and Kubrick, not much of a writer, often claimed screenplay credit for things.

We talking "A.I."? Even if I didn't think it was a masterpiece, it's been a long time since I've seen any serious negative criticism of it and not some knee-jerk immature reaction. It reminds me of a time I was working at a summer camp with a bunch of normies. One night off we all went to see "Unforgiven," and iirc everyone (but me) hated it. "Too slow!" "Not enough action!" Whatever.

I don't agree that the 2000s were Spielberg's best decade, or at least not that they were any better than the previous decades, but it sure has been an interesting run of crowdpleasers and personal detours, huge spectacles and smaller films alike, just about all as deftly made as (if very different from) his formative films.

The teddy bear was Stanley's … The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film – all the stuff in the house – was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision...

motherfuckers act like they forgot about Brian

The 1970s is still Spielberg's best decade IMHO, but the 2000s isn't that far behind, partly because he was more prolific:

The 1970s in total: Duel, The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters, and even the underrated 1941 (flawed but wonderful set pieces)

The 2000s: A.I. (again my favorite hands down), Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can...but The Terminal is very disappointing (though I have a soft spot for the use of jazz history), I absolutely hated War of the Worlds, have mixed feelings about Munich (some great scenes though), and don't care for the fourth Indiana Jones movie (not as terrible as some make it out to be, but still worthless).

I'll add that Spielberg was a great producer before he decided to make worthless junk out of crappy cartoons like the Flintstones and the Transformers, and I've even preferred the films he's produced over the ones he directed concurrently: see Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis's earlier movies, even minor films of merit like Batteries Not Included.

Re: Kubrick's writing skills, I don't find anything wrong with his writing at all. I would emphasize he's a brilliant interpreter of strong literary works, and that he typically worked with strong collaborators when coming up with a script (Terry Southern, Arthur C. Clarke, Jim Thompson, Michael Herr, etc.) IIRC the only time he's written original material was for his earliest (and very low-budget) films, minor works compared to his first great and fully realized film, The Killing (which was an adaptation). It's very possible he could have come up with a much better and original story later on, but I don't think he ever had any interest in doing do once he could afford to purchase the rights to literary properties.

Morbs is smiling down today

I absolutely hated War of the Worlds

what??? come on

I wouldn't want a Spielberg filmography without The Terminal even if I don't care for it. I'll take the '00s because he put all he'd learned about how editing and interpreting good scripts into A.I, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, Munich. If Crystal Skull's the worst of the lot, that's an incredible run.