About every six months for the last decade or so, some well-meaning acquaintance of mine has come rushing up, breathless with the news that there’s going to be a fourth Indiana Jones film. My reaction has always been something to the effect of, “I’ll believe it when I see the credits roll…”<\/p>\n
Well, it looks like I might have to start believing. The news broke across the InterWebs a few days ago that the three men at the creative heart of the Indy franchise — George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford, for those who haven’t been paying attention — have finally found a script they all like and are ready to proceed. I’ve heard variants of that one before, though, so I still didn’t lend much credence to the story until I read that there’s been an official press release<\/a> issued. According to it, the cameras are scheduled to roll in June of this year with a planned release date in May of ’08.<\/p>\n I should be enthused as all get-out for this project. After all, the Indy movies are among my top three all-time favorite entertainment properties (along with Star Wars<\/i> and Star Trek<\/i>, if you couldn’t guess), and they’ve all been very important to me at various points in my life. Even Temple of Doom<\/i>, believe it or not. As I type this, Indy’s scruffy viasge is smiling down upon me from a framed Last Crusade<\/i> one-sheet, and it is not a coincidence that in most of the photos taken of me in England 13 years ago, I’m wearing a fedora. Yes, Indy is one of my Main Men, right up there with Han Solo and Jim Kirk. <\/p>\n I’ve got many reasons, but they all ultimately boil down to two things: timing and faith. Time plays into the equation in a number of ways, most obviously in regards to Harrison Ford’s advancing age. He’s 65 years old, three years older than my dad, who just in the past year has suddenly started seeming rather elderly to me. Dad’s not frail, to be sure, but he’s having some problems and he doesn’t bounce back from them the way he used to. I certainly couldn’t imagine him out wailing on Nazis at his current stage of life, and I have a hard time picturing Harrison Ford doing the same. I have heard rumors that Lucas plans to use some kind of CGI trick to make Harrison appear younger, and also that the script will address<\/a> Indy’s “mileage,” but I’m not terribly confident that either of these possibilities will pan out. That’s not to say that you couldn’t<\/i> make an effective film about Indiana Jones, a man whose entire life has been defined by physical action, struggling to deal with the fact that he’s slowing down. A large part of why Star Trek II<\/i> was such a special movie (and the best of that long-running series) is because it successfully blended action with a realistic treatment of Kirk’s own efforts to come to terms with his encroaching middle age. But I’m afraid Indy IV<\/i> will be less like Star Trek II<\/i> than Star Trek V<\/i>, in which pretty much the entire cast embarrassed themselves by not acting their age<\/i>. And that’s where faith comes into matter.<\/p>\n The sad fact is, I no longer have much faith that Lucas, Spielberg, or even Ford will make the right creative choices for this project. Ford’s last few films haven’t exactly been stellar, in part (I believe) because he’s been trying to continue doing the same old thing and he’s no longer believable in those parts. Spielberg seems to have lost his knack for making “popcorn pictures” in the wake of Schindler’s List<\/i>; pretty much everything he’s touched since then has been slathered in a self-conscious longing to be Taken Seriously. And Lucas… well, we all know what we got when he decided to revisit that other<\/i> beloved franchise that he created. The Fanboy Prequel Wars are still raging in some corners of the Internet, and even those who, like me, didn’t think the prequels were all that bad still can’t muster a lot of genuine love for them.<\/p>\n
\nBut I can’t help but think that making another movie about him is a really bad idea.<\/p>\n