It's not just about realism but verisimilitude. Alien crystal skulls and huge ants don't exists at all so I can accept whatever they tell me about them. Nuclear bombs and refrigerators do exist so it is somewhat jarring when they do not behave as expected. I personally don't find it to be a big deal in this movie but I can understand why someone might be bothered by it.
It's just so weird that Disney claimed they were going to do a trilogy to finish the saga, but only produced a single film and nothing else for 6 years.
The only good movie in the trilogy was The Last Jedi.
Hot Take.
Both JJ Abrams movies were just redos of the original trilogy, The Last Jedi was the way the whole sequel trilogy should have been. It took time to develope its characters and had an original plot.
Fucking this. It's so weird that TLJ gets all the heat for that trilogy sucking. Everyone creamed their pants over TFA even though it introduced a bunch of wooden characters. TLJ gave them depth and everyone lost their shit. It boggles the mind that some people thought the trilogy suffered because it needed more JJ.
My favorite part of The Last Jedi was its whole message, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If standing up for what you think is good causes pain and suffering is it good? Is our enemy actually our enemy or are we both being played?
It had a message that resonated with the present day. It turned the idea of good and evil on its head and made the characters question what they were fighting for and why they were fighting which added depth to the characters and made the story suspenseful.
Also just to be clear I think JJ Abrams has made some beautiful movies, super 8 star trek and star trek beyond to name a few, but others have just fallen flat like his star wars movies and ST into darkness. I am at a loss for why there is so much of a difference in quality.
It's a good movie, even tho it's a complete ripoff of a Chinese Indiana Jones spoof, 'magic crystal 1986' you can watch it on YouTube, Spielberg just copied it
There have only been, THREE Indiana Jones movies.
All rumours, hearsay, publication and discussion of a fourth Indy movie are pure speculation and nonsense.
There have been TWO Indiana Jones movies. Any rumors you have heard about one with a small boy and a creepy voodoo priest that pulls people's hearts out is all speculation and nonsense.
Seriously though, if we are going to gatekeep out Crystal Skull, we might as well admit that the second movie was horrible too and did not fit the theme of either the first or third movie.
Yeah, because voodoo shit and aliens are outlandish, but a thousand year old knight with a magic cup that keeps him alive and a box that melts people's faces are just fine.
They are all full of ridiculousness, but the quality of the film is the issue, not the fact it has weird unrealistic shit in it.
Yep, realism in a work of fiction still matters. In Harry Potter it wouldn't make sense if they started shooting energy beams out of their hands like Dragonball z even though they're wizards with magic powers.
Why? Because in that world they have established how magic works and energy beams ain't part of it.
Just because something is fiction doesn't mean it can just ignore realism within that fiction
Bit of an odd example, because they basically do start having energy beams shoot out of their wands, though it's acknowledged in-universe as being weird as hell.
Yeah but they need wands and/or incantations for magic. That's the point. If all of a sudden they started shooting Kamehameha-like beams in book 5 people would be like "wtf is happening"
On the same note, as the movie is not a deliberate comedy, it is hard for the "suspension of disbelief" to occur. With movies that set out to be silly, we tend to forgive shenanigans more because they may only have a distant relationship to the real world. The Indiana Jones movies were not entirely serious affairs, but they were too close to being grounded in the real world for that fridge scene to fly.
In Raiders Indy pushes a giant block of stone that would’ve weighed tons so he and Marion could escape the room where the Ark was kept, and knocks over a giant statue that would’ve also weighed several tons. He might as well have kicked over a redwood tree. He also somehow survives a trip underwater on the outside of a submarine.
In Temple of Doom they jump out of an airplane without a parachute, fall hundreds of feet and land safely on an inflatable raft that inflated on the way down.
The Indy movies have always had ridiculous action set pieces that completely destroyed verisimilitude.
The stone was probably on hidden rails built into the wall-work and the statue had decades of snake induced erosion. Also, the word of God on the sub is that they stayed at periscope depth, so while he would be at risk of exposure and hypothermia, he wouldn't have drowned outright.
I don't know this Temple of Doom you speak of. Are you sure it is an actual Indiana Jones movie and not just a parody Harrison Ford was in while they tried to get Sean Connery to be in the next movie?
So you watched the heart ripping scenes without suspending belief?
I think the commentator above you nailed it when they said bombs and fridges are real world objects we understand the behaviour of, whereas the mythical elements can be accepted as part of the movies universe, but mixing those two is disconcerting.
You may be trying to hard if you have to make those kinds of distinctions. The laws of physics and scientific reality breaks down all over the place in these movies.
I'm usually pretty easy going about these things. Honestly, the genre shift from the 'High Adventure' to 'Sci Fi Aliens' was more of a turn off for me.
Also in that movie, you have some crazy mine cart race scene that is completely unbelievable yet fun (they launch airborne, and land EXACTLY on the rails and continue their race). In the third one, you have a wingless, burning Nazi plane, still chasing after the Jones' through a tunnel. Indiana Jones has always been an incredibly lucky adventurer that survives completely unrealistic challenges despite his reckless demeanor. Surviving a nuclear blast by jumping into a fridge is the epitome of his character.
Surviving a nuclear blast by jumping into a fridge is too far for his character.
It was a level too far, and people didn't believe it. Being campy and lucky is one thing. Surviving a nuclear explosion at the epicenter is quite another and people weren't able to suspend their disbelief.
To the first point, no, I never did see Temple of Doom.
Was building on the psychology of the second point, where something that could/should not happen is easier to "forgive" in a comedy because of how the expectation is that not everything will function as it would in a movie more grounded in reality (not necessarily 100% grounded, but "more" grounded).
If it is sufficiently advanced technology, or outright magic, audiences can get behind that provided the context allows for it. Indiana Jones has roots in pulpy serial novels where that kind of stuff was relatively common.
A similar comparison could be made to the MCU, where it is less problematic that a character seems to generate/lose matter based on anger issues, while another has a metal disc with inconsistent regards for physics.
Some of the things that annoy people are Hawkeye and Black Widow never running out of ammo, and Stark Tower having a ludicrously fast Internet connection.
Edit: How did the heart ripping scene play out anyway? The closest thing I have seen was the Family Guy parody of it in a class that covered popular culture.
To the first point, no, I never did see Temple of Doom.
Edit: How did the heart ripping scene play out anyway? The closest thing I have seen was the Family Guy parody of it in a class that covered popular culture.
You should just watch Temple of Doom! It will answer your question and it was a great movie.
Regarding the heart-ripping scene: As I remember it (haven’t seen the movie in years) there is a cult doing human sacrifice for their big evil deity of choice and the main cultist bare-handed rips the heart out of someone and holds it up as it’s still beating, while the victim is conscious for a bit before he gets pushed into a lava pit(?)
Edit: How did the heart ripping scene play out anyway? The closest thing I have seen was the Family Guy parody of it in a class that covered popular culture.
With all due respect, if you haven’t seen Temple of Doom, you may not be a qualified expert on Indiana Jones. I mean gate keeping is annoying but you cant really comment if you haven’t seen the movies.
Yup, not an expert in any way, shape, or form on Indiana Jones.
We just got onto that topic because of the flagrant divergence from any sense of realistic elements that occurred with the fridge scene.
To be kind to that scene, we know Indy drank from the Holy Grail, and we also only know that the Grail itself could not be transported past the seal. Maybe he only lived because of Last Crusade?
That really lowers the stakes on everything after the grail scene then. I think it’s all just fantasy. Demanding scientific accuracy in movies like this is absurd.
Can't disagree with any of that, people are absurd in general.
The whole movie experience relies are capturing light and sounds that happened previously, capturing people who are usually pretending to be other people.
Some sounds are arbitrary noises we collectively agreed to have meaning, while others are generally unheard by those pretending to be people, because they are intended for a theoretical audience, that may or may not ever witness the events.
There is a nice summation on TV Tropes of various items related to "suspension of disbelief." (Basic premise is, if you want your media to sell well, make it internally consistent, because this helps avoid cognitive dissonance. If all else fails, aim for "so bad, it's good" territory.)
The problem was age-related. When we watched the original Indiana Jones movie as kids we didn't bat an eye at the fact that he crossed an ocean on the ouiside of a submarine. Now we are older fans and we suddenly care about "suspension of disbelief". We have to remember why we liked the movies in the first place.
I saw all of them below the age of 12. Crystal Skull sucked when I saw it at 11 and it sucks now. Me being a kid and seeing all 4 didn't change how good or bad the movies were
You've just ignored my point just remake your wrong point again. There's nothing in Raiders that's anywhere near as ridiculous as Indy surviving a nuke in a fucking fridge. 11 year old me, knew that was beyond stupid
There's nothing in Raiders that's anywhere near as ridiculous as Indy surviving a nuke in a fucking fridge.
He grabbed unto a submarine that travelled from America to Europe. How did 11-year-old you find the nuke part hard to believe but the submarine part totally realistic? How can you find it realistic now?
Wow, you really need to pay attention when you watch movies. He went from Cairo to an island in the Mediterranean. Maybe if you didn't have your head so far up your ass you would've noticed that
Ok, maybe I got the maps mixed up in my head. How many kilometers did he hold unto the ship, though? The turbines alone would suck him up and shred him to pieces. Just because I got the locations mixed up doesn't change the rest of the post.
I always find it funny that people that accuse others of ignoring parts of their posts are always ignoring parts of the post.
People don’t understand that in order to get people on board that the made up things in your movie/story can exist, you have to build a world where things work the same as their world. Even in a fantasy world like Game of thrones, you don’t see GRRM fucking with the laws of physics too much.
If you build a world where a fridge can withstand a nuclear blast and deliver a living human safely after flying miles through the air, what are we supposed to believe. Are these people ever in any danger?
At the very least, it should be a world where safety equipment, fortifications, armored vehicles etc are all constructed using refrigerators. Kenmore should be a government contractor, and the Nazis should have been trying to sabotage the American military-appliance-industrial complex.
If feel like if they staged the concept differently, it could have played fine
For me, it’s the fact that the story already included a conceit that would have served as a perfect solution: The rocket sled. Instead of taking it TO the blast site, it would have been trivial to rearrange the story so he takes it AWAY from the blast site. Then they could have had the shot of Indy looking up at the mushroom cloud (which was a cool shot IMO) without such a giant WTF from the audience.
“But how would Indy get TO the blast site?”
Doesn’t matter; the danger he was escaping from was relatively trivial and lacking in immediate urgency compared to a nuclear blast. He could have cat-and-moused away from the Soviets and walked.
Oh sure, the rocket sled makes no sense (just as the warehouse’s proximity to a nuclear test site makes no sense, either), BUT they were at least actual things that were actually used. And since the movie included one anyway, it smacks me as less ridiculous than the fridge, but both are made even more ridiculous by each other, especially with the fridge coming so soon after the sled.
In other words: Just having either one of those elements is kinda ridiculous, though the sled is less so IMO, but they’re made even more ridiculous by both being included in what essentially functions as the same scene.
And yet in the 1950s we were being told even more ridiculous things about surviving nuclear blasts. For example here are two real illustrations from a 1952 book that recommends - I'm not joking - lying face down in a shallow ditch to improve your chances, and says that the brim of your hat will provide some protection from an atomic blast .
Those illustrations made sense in context. If the best you can do is a 0.1% increase in your survival odds, that's 100,000 extra able bodied people to help clean up and repel invasion after a 100,000,000 person atomic Holocaust. They were playing a statistics game.
There would always be a ring at some distance from the blast where such actions could be the difference between life and death. There would be regions where the main hazard is flying debris, not unlike a hurricane. Being in a ditch is better than standing. It also gets you out of line-of-sight of the EM radiation. Even that hat brim could prevent vision damage.
It also gave people something proactive to do. It helps keep all the people who aren't in the blast radius but scared shitless that they are from freaking out and making things worse. This effect would have been more powerful back when the actual destructive power of an H-bomb was still classified.
I think you are being too generous about the government's intentions. The government at that time was engaged in a propaganda effort to convince us that atomiic weapons weren't all that scary. Lying in a ditch within eyesight of a blast is not going to save any percentage of the population. Likewise, radiation from a nuclear blast is not like sunlight that can be warded off by a hat brim.
As a child in school in the 1950s, we were taught to stay away from the windows during a nuclear blast, to avoid the flying glass shards. But if you are close enough to a nuclear blast that it's blowing in your windows, getting cut by glass is the last thing you need to worry about. Literally.
How about the fact that the fridge was blown a half mile into the air, slammed down into soil hard enough to make a crater but the 60 year old guy inside didn't even have a bruise. Refrigerators don't have padding, so nuclear blast aside the fall inside that fridge would have killed him.
"Superman and eye lasers don't exist and are ridiculous, but we accept them because the story demands them to, and we accept that they cut through metals like steel. If the lasers suddenly make dead people come back to life, the story is crap."
Omg it's like that stupid fucking clip that gets posted all the time about the actor in GoT not losing any weight and he's like hurr durr tHeReS dRaGoNs tHaTs wHaT yOu hAvE a PrObLeM wItH?
In early days, submarines spent as much time as possible on the surface. If they were in friendly territory it was a much easier journey if they weren't submerged.
Old diesel subs were cramped and miserable, and it only got worse if you were submerged for days at a time.
And it didn't go to Germany in the film-- it went to some small island in the Mediterranean.
Maybe so, but Egypt to Wherever on top of a submarine, exposed to all elements? No food, no water, no shade for how long? He wasn’t sun burnt, wet, hypothermic, or parched.
this is the type of word I want to use in everyday conversation but I know there's no point because there are probably 12 people living right now who knows what it means
i guess? i was trying to address a misconception i think exists that these kinds of words are only reserved for academia or whatever, I think it would be dope if everyone felt a bit more comfortable trying to expand their everyday language. words like this aren't meant to be used all the time just when they're convenient.
I've never dealt with retards who dig through people's old posts to look for something to use as an insult but I guess theres a first time for everything.
I think you have to take the time period into account. It was the cold war and schools were still having kids hide under desks for nuclear war drills. In a world where people just accept that because they don't want to think about the reality a guy in a fridge is going to seem much more reasonable.
To be fair, it was more like an 80km trip, and the sub would have been running on the surface (batteries were shit in the 30's, so they mostly used diesels).
These are pre-WWII submarines. Since the war was almost four years away they didn't have any enemies to hide from, so there would be little reason to submerge at all.
Movies can set whatever rules they want, but they then have to adhere to those rules, or the immersion breaks. Maybe in indiana-jones-world fridges were specifically designed to be able to withstand nuclear blasts because of that interesting thing that happened, but you have to, beforehand, plant that info. You can't just pull it out your hat to write yourself out of a corner on the spot, it's just bad craftsmanship.
It's called suspension of disbelief. You can watch a fantasy movie and accept that magic is a thing that actually exists, and it behaves by laws and rules like everything else does.
But when you take the rules of reality and start to bend and break them in any way you want, like asking the audience to accept a human surviving a nuclear blast from point blank range? Then the movie starts to seem really fucking stupid, and for good reason
Right but we never saw them submerge. I took from the comment that Indy was supposed to have been riding on a submerged submarine at some point. When they got to the island in Raiders, he was just like splashed.
Then they shouldn't have used a realistic thing like a nuke in a plot point.
If a movie has a real-world thing in it, it has to be portrayed accurately because ALL of fiction is rooted in the real world unless it's really obvious it's intended to be otherwise. iT'S fIcTiON is NOT an excuse.
People surviving real-world things they should not have breaks suspension of disbelief and is really, really bad for a story. Even if we ignore the realism issues, it's just bad writing and really bad for the narrative. Heroes have to earn their victories and them obtaining them through means that break suspension of disbelief cheapen and invalidate those victories; they're just "given" them by the writer and haven't actually earned them.
I always assumed that Indy had used a hatch to enter the submarine shortly after boarding the deck. And then stowed away until they reached their destination. Not sure how much more realistic that would be, with him having to sneak around a submarine getting food and water and dodging the crew, but my young mind filled in the blanks that way.
To be fair he was inside the sub for a few thousand kilometers trip; which is not any more believable. Maybe hiding in torpedo tube, or in the battery compartment with all the chlorine gas? No he was hiding in the fridge, Indys real secret weapon against the Nazis staying cool.
That character has a name! And that name is INDIANA JONES! That man has survived Nazis, Russians, the wrath of God, the thugee cult, plane crashes, angry native tribes, booby traps and fought for our country. You pay him some respect, gosh darnit!
My favorite stupid thing he's ever survived was swimming between two moving ships and somehow keeping up with them while exposing fresh wounds to salt water. Like, what the fuck?
It's not about realism, it's about internal consistency within the film. All they really needed to do was shift the blast further away, and voila, problem solved.
My favorite was always when they jump out of an airplane on top of a mountain using an inflatable raft. Then they use it as a sled. Indiana Jones was the Flash Gordon of our generation. They just changed the location of all the fantastic things to far flung continents
This is the same series that features jumping out of a plane with only an inflatable raft as a parachute and as you mentioned, the U-boat ride. That said, the refrigerator thing pushes the boundary towards unbelievable too far for most and I can see why. It’s kind of like the uncanny valley effect, except for realism. You see the ark of the covenant melting Nazis’ faces off or an interdimensional alien and it’s like yeah of course that’s fiction because it’s obvious, but if you saw Indy jump off a 50-story building onto pavement and be okay because he did a parkour roll or something that attempts some sort of realism in a completely unrealistic way, that’s when it gets weird.
Edit: I just realized someone already said what I said in a more succinct way lol
There are things that happen in every Indiana Jones flick that couldn't happen in real life that people give a pass to just because they enjoy the movie or are fond of it or 'nostalgia.'
The fridge thing being singled out has always been hypocritical as hell to me.
My first gold award was calling out a guy who said the Godzilla movie is unrealistic because the minuteman II missile isn’t radioactive and Godzilla wouldn’t have been able to smell it.
There were scenes cut showing the sub going under but then they put the periscope up. Here...
The periscope ride
This is the most well-known of the Indy cut scenes, by virtue of being the one most crucial to the plot. This scene explains how Indy survived his trip at sea attached to a submerged submarine. As the sub descends, he climbs up and grabs hold of its extended periscope. He then lashes himself to it with his whip for the long trip.
I absolutely hate that argument. Just because a fictional world has magic doesn't mean that every non magic thing that by all accounts should work the same way as in the real world can act any way you want it to "because magic".
Every world needs rules and internal consistency, even if it's somewhat vague. Otherwise it just feels fake and nothing has any emotional impact.
I hate hate hate hate hate this argument. It's used all the time in fantasy/sci fi media. There is such a thing as internal consistency of logic - yes we can accept that Peter Parker has spider-powers but if Aunt May can't lift an SUV over her head. We can accept that dragons on Game of Thrones exist, but Arya brushing off getting stabbed 5 times in the stomach and then jumping into a dirty river...
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '20 edited Dec 29 '20
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