Eerie Indiana

So I recently began a viewing regiment for the Indiana Jones series in preparation for the upcoming sequel. I’ve channel surfed my way past Raiders several times over the years, but I probably haven’t watched any of them the entire way through since they were first released. My impressions of the series have changed a bit as a result of these repeated viewings, though.

First of all, and I’m sure this has been brought up repeatedly, but I have no idea how these movies are rated PG. There’s more murder and blood in these movies than some horror movies released these days. Indiana alone probably kills as many people per movie as a Rambo or a Jigsaw. And quite nonchalantly to boot. I could maybe understand if it was cartoon violence, but again, if a death is accompanied by blood, it no longer falls in the “comic mischief” category.

Secondly, I didn’t particularly like Temple of Doom. Most of the scenes I remembered, or thought I remembered, from throughout the entire series all wound up showing up in Raiders, which I thought was a good thing at the time. I thought “wow, now the other two movies are gonna be surprises all the way through!”, which would have been a good thing if the cheese meter wasn’t dialed up so high (I have yet to get Last Crusade, so I’m not sure how that one will turn out).

The Temple of Doom was sexist, racist, ageist, and some scenes just plain ignored several of Newton’s Laws. I wanted to shoot the love interest for ¾ of the movie, and the last quarter I wanted to shoot Indy for repeatedly saving her.

Quite honestly, as of right now I think that National Treasure is better than either of the first two films in the series. Raiders definitely beats out National Treasure 2 though. And Temple, well the list of things that beat out Temple is too long to put in one blog entry. I know I haven’t really written anything bad about Raiders to explain why I’d put Nat’l Treasure above it, but that’s because I don’t think there was anything bad. It was a great ride. I just had more fun with Treasure, partly because I liked Cage’s supporting crew more. It’s more of a peanut butter and jelly vs. peanut butter and jam type of thing. Both delicious, but given the choice you just gotta go jam.