Ignoring sequels
I must admit it’s not a good sign. Two weeks into my new blog and I can’t think of anything to write about. Well, I can’t think of anything sciency to write about anyway. The problem is that I’m still not used to looking for fun science news to cover in the blog, rather than the more serious stuff that I usually write about, or to find the science angle to other topics. So this blog piece is going to have no science angle to it whatsoever, although there will be a bit of science fiction. Instead, it’s going to be about ignoring film sequels.
The inspiration for this piece is that the new Indiana Jones film – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – is released in the UK on Thursday. Now, I mentioned last week that I’m a bit of a film buff. Well my brother is as well and he’s fantastically excited about the new Indiana Jones film, already having booked his ticket for the opening night. But I just can’t get that worked up about it, even though the first Indiana Jones’ film – Raiders of the Lost Ark – is one of my favourite ever films.
Partly I think this is because I’m just too old to get worked up in anticipation of a film anymore. But it’s also because I’m not anywhere near as fond of the other two Indiana Jones sequels as I am of Raiders. I do enjoy Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but I’m really not that fussed about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In my view, however, neither of them can hold a candle to Raiders, which is why I can’t get overly excited about another Indiana Jones sequel.
Raiders, though, I just love. Perhaps this is simply because I saw it in the cinema when I was 10 and it made a big impression on me. As the film critic Tom Shone says in his book Blockbuster: ‘If you were 12 years old – or thereabouts – when Raiders came out, you probably left the theatre, floating lightly about a foot above the sidewalk, thinking: right, that’s it. Everyone can go home now. Someone has finally cracked it.’ But I saw Star Wars in the cinema when I was five and that made an even bigger impression on me, essentially instilling my love of films, and I’m not as fond of Star Wars now as I am of Raiders.
It’s just that Raiders is an absolutely thrilling film that is still a joy to watch as an adult, whereas Star Wars remains very much a film for children (which is what it was originally intended to be). It also helps that Raiders is a superb send-up of the James Bond films.
Many of the conventions of the James Bond films are present in Raiders, but up-ended. There is the famous scene in Cairo when Indiana Jones simply shoots a sword-wielding foe rather than engaging in the expected drawn-out fight. He also falls asleep during the sole love scene and knocks out a Nazi guard to steal his uniform only to find that it doesn’t fit. Finally, he doesn’t actually do anything at the film’s climax, being tied to a stake throughout the whole thing. Instead, the Nazi villains are destroyed by the ‘wrath of God’. This link with James Bond was recently confirmed by the film-maker George Lucas, who said that he specifically intended Indiana Jones to be ‘an Everyman version of James Bond’.
But my love of Raiders means that I tend to ignore the sequels and kind of assume that Raiders is a stand-alone film. I do this with quite a few other films as well, such as The Matrix and Die Hard. These are all perfectly self-contained films and I don’t think that the sequels really add anything much to the story or the characters (although an argument can be made for Last Crusade). Of course, initially they were all meant to be self-contained films, which is why I think it often proves difficult to move the story on in the sequels. Everything was wrapped up so neatly in the first film that there’s not much to work with in the sequels, which either simply repeat the first film (Die Hard) or tie themselves up in knots (The Matrix).
Even when the first sequel does match or surpass the original film, subsequent sequels tend to fall foul of this problem. This is the case with the Godfather films (I and II were superb, but III wasn’t) and the Alien films. Indeed so great are the first two Alien films, with Aliens being perhaps the best sequel ever made (logically following on from the first film but going off in a completely different direction), that I simply refuse to accept that the other two Alien sequels exist. As far as I’m concerned, Ripley, Hicks and Newt survived and lived happily ever after.
So, unlike my brother, I can’t get really excited about the new Indiana Jones film. But I still want to go to see it.
