Someone sounds bitter about the critical lambasting delivered upon the Star Wars prequels.
More details are emerging about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the fourth installment in the legendary saga of a sardonic archaeologist and his swashbuckling adventures. Vanity Fair has an in-depth piece with comments from Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford, the Indy braintrust, on how they finally came around to making the fourth installment, and it's a very interesting read.
Lucas, however, is already assuming that the critics and fans will despise it.
Lucas is convinced he won’t please everyone. “I know the critics are going to hate it,” he says. “They already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re making another one. They’ve already made up their minds.”
At least the legions of Indy geeks will be pleased, right?
“The fans are all upset,” Lucas says. “They’re always going to be upset. ‘Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this?’ They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it. So you just have to stand by for the bricks and the custard pies, because they’re going to come flying your way.”
George, you've got a point, but writing off all criticism this way isn't wise. Then again, this is the guy who once said that The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the Star Wars films, "didn't need to be that good."
A bit of spoilery goodness for Indy 4 below:
The first building block of any Indiana Jones movie, according to Lucas, is something called the MacGuffin. The term, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object or goal that kicks the story into action and drives it to the third act.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will apparently nudge our hero away from his usual milieu of spooky archaeology and into the realm of (spoiler Code Red) science fiction. “What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit,” Lucas says. “So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing.”
