Here’s what George Lucas has to say about the upcoming INDIANA JONES movie:
When you make a movie like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, people automatically expect the Second Coming. They set themselves up to hate it. I went through the same thing on Star Wars. Nobody is going to be happy. When you make a movie like this, all you can do is lose.”
Is it just me, or does that sound a bit defensive and even just play wrong? When you make a movie like a four INDIANA JONES film, all you can do is make enough money to fill several battleships. That hardly counts as “losing.”
Lucas goes on to explain that, because CRYSTAL SKULL is set twenty years after the previous film, it reflects movies from the 1950s era, rather than the serials from the ’30s that inspired the original RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Among the new influences he cites is KING SOLOMON’S MINES, the 1950 adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s novel. Actually, RAIDERS was clearly influenced by this archetypal adventure tale, so it seems odd to be pointing to this as an example of how the new films will be different.
The article takes a sympathetic view of Lucas’s defensiveness (access journalism rears its ugly head) and winds up by telling us that:
George Lucas is quite prepared for the negative reviews that are bound to come his way later this May. But he hopes that, after viewing a few of the films that served as inspiration for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you’ll have a little better understanding of its roots in 1950s B movie lore.
Got that? If the reviews are bad, they were bound to be, because “when you make a movie like this, all you can do is lose.” And if you don’t like CRYSTAL SKULL, it’s because you don’t understand its roots in 1950s B movie lore. So get with the program and stop complaining.