Indiana Jones And The True Values Of Life

I first saw “Indiana Jones” in my early twenties. I wasn’t pleasantly shocked by the movie, but I somehow liked it. At that time I was interested mostly in art films, with a twist for Russian directors and I think my all time best movie was Stalker by Andrey Tarkovski. The difference between movies like “Indiana Jones” and “Stalker” is huge, but somehow “Indiana Jones” made it to my list of preferred movies. I always had a good feeling about it, despite the fact that some of my friends still think this is a movie for people under the age of 12.

Well, I don’t think that. Although there are a lot of compromises made for box office, the movie has something very real and true. Its huge success must have something beyond the Hollywood hype. You can’t just assume that hundreds of  millions of people liked the movie only because of the special effects or big budget production. You can’t also put it only on Harrisson Ford, although he made a pretty decent job. There must be something beyond all those commercial constructs, something that made the movie so highly popular.

Today I saw “Indiana Jones 4” in full HD. I did see the movie before, but that was on the plane for my trip to New Zealand. Seeing a movie on a transcontinental plane is not quite a cinematographic experience, but mostly a boredom killer. Seeing it today in a very friendly and technically upgraded environment was a pleasant experience.

And I started to recall all of the similarities between the various sequels of “Indiana Jones” over the time. There are quite a few things almost identical in all those movies, a part from Harrisson Ford being Henry Jones, of course.  I’m sure those things repeated again and again are responsible for the constant success of the movie. Some of them are just “fast food media”, as I like to call them, like fighting and big machinery. But some of them are carrying very deep and perennial values.

This post is an exercise to describe the “real life values” in “Indiana Jones”. I don’t want to make a movie review, there are a lot of other places where you can find that type of content. I also don’t want to put Steven Spielberg on a pedestal here, I think he’s a very good movie man (director, producer, etc) but I won’t hold him responsible only for the good stuff. The things that I’m going to talk about are so deep in the human nature that they just had to find a way to express., regardless of the person who made them possible.

In fact, I’m going to use “Indiana Jones” as a pretext for something much more difficult to digest. If you’re ready, I’ll start right away with the appetizers: (more…)