The details are kept under seven keys, but what is already known for sure is that The fifth Indiana Jones film will begin filming shortly at Pinewood Studios in London.. At the ripe old age of 78 years old, Harrison Ford He’ll put that old worn leather jacket back on. The moving music of John Williams, even though this time Steven Spielberg will not be in the executive chair. That task fell into the hands of James Mangold, the director behind the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line And the drama in overdrive over the racing world Ford Vs. Ferrari. Spielberg will serve as executive producer on the film, which is set to premiere in July 2022.
The question, of course, is if a new movie is really a good idea. There is a danger that the legacy of the series will be tarnished by an unnecessary late addition. Will Mangold have that light touch, improvisation ability, wild humor, and relentless spirit that Spielberg brought to the original Indiana Jones films?
Ford can be expected to deliver a Sean Connery-like performance as Professor Henry Jones, Indiana’s father, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989. Which means that he will use comic cunning and timing to make up for his waning athletic powers. The main tests will be left to a younger co-star, whose identity has yet to be revealed (in a recent interview, Ford seemed to suggest that Chris Pine could become involved).
40 years have passed since Raiders of the lost ark (1981), the first title of the cycle. On a celebrated weekend at the beach, the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas mentioned to Spielberg that he had a project “about an adventurous archaeologist who went out in search of the Ark of the Covenant.” When Lucas added that the story was “like the old serials,” and that the hero would wear “a fedora hat and have a whip around his waist,” Spielberg, as he related to biographer Joseph McBride, was “completely hooked.”
The history of the conception of Raiders of the lost ark has received extensive attention. Lucas and Spielberg enlisted copywriter Lawrence Kasdan to work on the script. They brainstormed together in which they appealed to John Ford’s westerns, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies, Casablanca, old Howard Hawks rom-coms, the serialized adventures of Flash Gordon, Zorro, Tarzan, and just about anything else that came to mind. The film would be set in the mid-30s. There would be Nazi villains, mysticism, and outbreaks of slapstick comedy.
A little over a decade ago, a 1978 conference transcript emerged discussing the project, then titled Indiana Smith. “It’s a spaghetti western, just that it takes place in the thirties. Or is it James Bond and it takes place in the thirties. Just that James Bond tends to be a little bit outrageous at times. Let’s take the less realistic side of it all. , to make it look more like Clint Eastwood westerns. The point with this is that we want to make a character that is very believable … “, Lucas energetically remarked about his ideas for Indiana Jones. His words, however, were treated by fans as if they were Gnostic predictions issued by a mystical seer.
Harrison Ford was chosen for the title role primarily because the first choice, Tom Selleck – the rough-looking heartthrob who starred in the hit TV show Magnum- I was not available, and Nick Nolte wasn’t interested. The filmmakers took particular pains to distinguish the character of Ford’s Han Solo for Star Wars: they certainly didn’t want the new movie to be seen as having something to do with that galaxy far, far away.
On paper, the film must have seemed youthful, self-indulgent to the extreme. It was a fantasy that fulfilled the dreams of the kids, a high-budget film that had roots in the shared obsession of its two creators with movies and class B serials, even ruffles or despised in the industry. However, thanks to his alchemical cinematic powers, Raiders of the lost ark it became the highest grossing film of 1981. It was recognized by critics as an instant pop culture classic, and by audiences as one of the most entertaining films they had ever seen.
Raiders of the lost ark he has aged remarkably well, without his occasional moments of jingoism getting in the way. It is one of the few titles of the era that has been in permanent circulation ever since. By a beautiful irony, a film that preached nostalgia is today the object of the same nostalgia. Just as Spielberg and Lucas looked back at 1930s serials and matinee adventures with such delight, when they review the early 1980s fans remember The hunters… with a similar affection and indulgence.
Part of the film’s lasting pleasure lies in its familiarity. The audience had the feeling that they had seen all the sets, chases and action sequences somewhere else before. It was that way. Spielberg and his collaborators borrowed ideas from all sides without fault. The vibrant opening scene, in which Indiana Jones goes deep into the jungle and finds the temple full of traps, was inspired by a Donald Duck comic. The stunt where Indiana gets under a truck and gets towed was borrowed from the old westerns, with Hollywood stunt double Yakima Canutt doing similar tests under stagecoaches. Spielberg has publicly acknowledged his debt to Cecil B. de Mille’s The World’s Greatest Show, one of the first films he ever saw.
DeMille was known for his megalomania, a trait shared in part by Spielberg. There is a relevant moment in the documentary “making of” that accompanied the film in which the director is very disturbed because he discovers that he has only 2,000 snakes for an important scene. He tells his assistants that he needs at least another 7,000. “His assistants agreed that they had been asked to get tissues and two days later, pet shops in London and Antwerp had run out of reptiles,” says the narrator.
In the documentary, Spielberg is also exposed as a little tyrannical, pressuring actress Karen Allen to scream louder and show more terror. “When I say more and more, you give me more but in increments of millimeters instead of meters,” he punishes her.
Certain elements cause distress. There is not much sophistication or subtlety to be found in Spielberg’s description of the Arab world. In particular, the Egyptian characters are grotesquely caricatured. Whether in the Peruvian jungle, in the mountain bars of Nepal or in hidden tombs and vaults of Cairo, Indiana Jones treats any place he visits as if it were his adventure playground. The locals are to be chased, run away from them or, as is notoriously the case when faced with an Arab swordsman, to shoot them.
Spielberg was so determined to turn up the tempo that he never paid attention to the nuances of Kasdan’s script. “My feeling is that we should have edited the chase sequences a bit, to have time to properly establish the characters,” the writer later commented. Regardless, the frenetic pace is one of the film’s main glories. Spielberg and Lucas, then in their thirties, exploded with youthful exuberance.
The sequels were also immensely popular, but by the time Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premiered at the 2008 Cannes International Film Festival, there was a widespread feeling that the franchise was reeling. The fourth installment was very successful, but it fell under the weight of a new self-awareness. Ideas that had seemed spontaneous in 1982 aghora seemed overly thoughtful.
James Mangold is a distinguished filmmaker, but he is best known for dark and dramatic films, not matinee-style adventures. Raiders of the lost ark it had a magical innocence because Spielberg and Lucas endeavored to recapture the idealism of their own childhoods by going to see movies. It can be especially difficult to emulate that if Speilberg, the original circus owner, isn’t there to crack the whip.
The script for the new film was written by Lawrence Kasdan’s son Jonathan, who also worked on Solo: A Star Wars Story. Your daunting challenge is to breathe new life into the franchise without seeming unserious or cynical. Production designer Adam Stockhausen, who did wonders for director Wes Anderson in El gran Hotel Budapest (2014), will be responsible for the overall look of the film, and is likely to have dazzling visual ideas.
It is obviously absurd to worry about the possibility of a project being anticlimactic when it has not even started filming yet. The gap between The kingdom of the crystal skull and the new Indiana Jones is smaller than the one between The kingdom… and The last crusade released in 1989. Still, getting the band back together isn’t always the best idea. The problem with late sequels is that everyone gets old and out of shape. Be in sequels like Dumb and dumber 2 (released in 2014, 20 years after Dumb and dumb) or in dramas like heavy Texasville (1990), Peter Bogdanovich’s sequel to his 1971 film The last movie, the magic fades as the years go by.
The James Bond saga and superhero franchises, however, have continually managed to reinvent themselves. Yes Indiana Jones 5 it’s a success, there may well be episode 6. Of course, there are other spin-offs already. Lucas himself became deeply involved in the 1990s television series The Chronicles of Young Indiana Jones. Either way, the reports that the film “will open the way to multiple spin offs” are disappointing. They suggest that Indiana Jones, once the most refreshing character on the scene, has now become another Hollywood trademark. His new adventures are being planned with marketing opportunities in mind rather than with the goal of giving the public the blank knuckle trip that he memorably provided. The Raiders of the Lost Ark.
* From The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.
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