Post by Nalkarj on Aug 16, 2018 17:33:40 GMT
Reading (or, more accurately, skimming) City of the Gods right now. I’ll tell ya what, it’s one helluva lot better written (and more faithful to the characters) than Monkey King, though Monkey King had some more interesting ideas. The character of the assassin, “The Thin Man” (a reconstituted Clyde Wynant, maybe? ), is appropriately Toht-like without being a slavish imitation, though unfortunately he’s killed off too early and, even worse, loses all his maleficence and menace right before that!
As @forceghostackbar noted, the sequence with a drunken Indy stealing the Raiders Fertility Idol is a hoot (and less unfaithful to the character than I’d thought when I first read it), and I genuinely enjoy the parody of Casablanca in which we’re reintroduced to Marion. (There has always been a Bogart/Huston/Hawks/Curtiz feel to Indiana Jones, but both Monkey King, with a character named Dashiell, and City of the Gods seem to make the inspiration even more obvious.)
Problems? It’s taken a long time for Indy to start adventuring, and the Crystal Skull has finally just been introduced, and unceremoniously at that. For the folks who disliked Crystal Skull’s opening, it’s pretty much the same, including the refrigerator (which I’ve never much minded, but—hey—that’s just me). What struck me as amusing, after having read about the making-of of Crystal Skull, is how Lucas got pretty much everything he wanted. ‘50s setting? Check. Nuking the fridge? Check. Aliens? Check. Crystal skulls? Check. The produced Crystal Skull, which ties the aliens in with Orellana and El Dorado, at least mitigates one of Harrison Ford’s criticisms of Lucas’s concept, that the plot doesn’t really fit in with Indy-as-archaeologist.
In fact, City of the Gods doesn’t really tie in much with Indy-as-archaeologist either, though it ties it in more than with some of Lucas’s original concepts, which involved making it like a b-sci-fi flick. The script has its problems, including a kind of fan-service cutesiness (“look, it’s the Fertility Idol! Look, one character says, ‘Back then, adventure had a name’! Look, we’ve got Sean Connery slapping Ford and Karen Allen punching Ford again!”), but I think that some of its better elements would have worked.
As @forceghostackbar noted, the sequence with a drunken Indy stealing the Raiders Fertility Idol is a hoot (and less unfaithful to the character than I’d thought when I first read it), and I genuinely enjoy the parody of Casablanca in which we’re reintroduced to Marion. (There has always been a Bogart/Huston/Hawks/Curtiz feel to Indiana Jones, but both Monkey King, with a character named Dashiell, and City of the Gods seem to make the inspiration even more obvious.)
Problems? It’s taken a long time for Indy to start adventuring, and the Crystal Skull has finally just been introduced, and unceremoniously at that. For the folks who disliked Crystal Skull’s opening, it’s pretty much the same, including the refrigerator (which I’ve never much minded, but—hey—that’s just me). What struck me as amusing, after having read about the making-of of Crystal Skull, is how Lucas got pretty much everything he wanted. ‘50s setting? Check. Nuking the fridge? Check. Aliens? Check. Crystal skulls? Check. The produced Crystal Skull, which ties the aliens in with Orellana and El Dorado, at least mitigates one of Harrison Ford’s criticisms of Lucas’s concept, that the plot doesn’t really fit in with Indy-as-archaeologist.
In fact, City of the Gods doesn’t really tie in much with Indy-as-archaeologist either, though it ties it in more than with some of Lucas’s original concepts, which involved making it like a b-sci-fi flick. The script has its problems, including a kind of fan-service cutesiness (“look, it’s the Fertility Idol! Look, one character says, ‘Back then, adventure had a name’! Look, we’ve got Sean Connery slapping Ford and Karen Allen punching Ford again!”), but I think that some of its better elements would have worked.