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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle


Udvarnoky

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3 hours ago, Laserschwert said:

DOD didn't suffer from too little marketing, but from being a terrible film.

Whoa... shots just got fired. I'm just gonna have to completely agree to disagree with you on that one. I thought it was a wonderful film and a great send off for Indiana Jones. It brought something new to the table for Indy, all while keeping things adventurous and very true to the character. They even managed to dance around most of the modern tropes which could've weighed the movie down. Maybe it could've been half an hour shorter, but I'm surprised that someone could call it terrible. And I'm usually very critical about movies, especially modern sequels to classic films.

The Great Circle stuff on the other hand... I'm not feeling it.

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I don't think the failure of Dial had to do with the quality of the movie or the marketing (though I certainly question the expense of a Rolling Stones song as the calling card for the trailers and TV spots).

 

As a movie property at least, Indy just doesn't have a lot of currency among people beneath a certain age, and Skull already Hoover'd up the "long-anticipated revival of a legacy franchise" money. Skull was impervious to word of mouth -- the last memory of the series was the beloved Last Crusade, so everybody wanted to see it for themselves to form their own opinion. In addition, the idea of Spielberg/Lucas/Ford joining forces again still kind of meant something as a marketing hook in 2008, even to younger audiences. Dial was in just the opposite position. In some respects, I suspect Dial was left to settle Skull's check.

 

Besides which, Disney/Lucasfilm did practically nothing to keep the property active since Skull's release, whereas by contrast they've been outright overprinting Star Wars, with oodles of movies and TV shows. Left unexploited, Indy firmly became Dad Movie material, and there was no multi-generational Top Gun: Maverick situation in the wings because Skull already got to fire that bolt. Combine that with all the weird, manufactured internet narratives that began before the movie even started shooting, a box office era that has proven time and time again to be merciless to movies that skew older (and the demographic data showed that Dial did), and a COVID-inflated budget, and you have all kinds of fine reasons for this to have failed before you even consider the movie itself. I'm not suggesting creative moves weren't made that might have turned audiences off, but an audience has to see a movie before they can hate it.

 

I for one am pleased that Disney made this financial mistake, because I think, arguments over quality aside, it finishes the series on a much more appropriate note than Skull did. Future marathons are going to be a lot more satisfying now. Disney's balance sheet is somebody else's problem.

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I saw some well received fan attempt at an animated series treatment for Indy and it put everything so firmly into a kids entertainment space I had trouble buying it as the same franchise. Not to say Indy is for grown ups, but more that part of the appeal is the fact that it takes pulpy all-ages a venture tropes and infuses them with a touch of more complex humanity and “realism,” and you’re just inevitably going to lose some of that when you stylize everything for animation 

 

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I think Fate of Atlantis gets away with feeling so much like a real Indy story in part because everything is so low res and tiny. Theres never a close up on a stylized face, the voice acting is scratchy and low res. My brain can take the presented outline of a story and its pacing and globe trotting map and postcard views, and imagine the Spielberg movie running on top of it. There aren’t a bunch of stylistic signifiers on top of it signaling to me “actually, this is something other than what your imagination is telling you it should be.”


Great Circle looks like it will have its own vibe - inevitable in a conversion to another medium and of course being first person - but it’s still trading in the language of live action cinema, even though it’s a 3D video game, which excites me for an Indy product. 

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That's what makes me so curious about what Iron Phoenix would have looked like had it actually gotten made. I suspect it would have been very close to The Dig, where the majority of the game would have inclined toward a relatively realistic style akin to Fate of Atlantis, but with the cutscenes being significantly cartoonier. The storyboards we have look a lot like the FMV stuff in The Dig to me:

 

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