Indiana Jones sequels on a budget

By ROGER BARTLETT

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a few weeks back. I thought it was neither terrible nor good. It was entertaining in parts, but disappointing in the main, about on par with Last Crusade. The fight on army vehicles moving through the jungle was silly. Why were the Russians driving so fast? There was no plot justification for it; it was just Spielberg trying to make the scene more urgent and exciting. They could have all just stopped driving and taken their time shooting Indy and his friends.

This gave me an idea: if the plot mirrored day-to-day reality, the Russians could simply shoot Harrison Ford point blank from a stationary jeep directly after the opening credits and feed him to ants. The rest of the two-hour screen time would show the ants gradually picking him apart, running off with crumb after crumb, until there was nothing left. That would avoid any cynical speculation from critics about leaving the story open for a sequel, and I wouldn't have to waste two hours of my valuable time.

In fact, the Indiana Jones films might've been made for a fraction of the billions Lucasfilm Ltd. has shelled out in production costs, if only:

• Indy had been crushed by the giant rolling ball in Raiders
• Indy's arm had been caught by the descending stone wall in Temple of Doom and he'd died of thirst like that annoying woman in The English Patient
• Elderly Indiana Jones in Crystal Skull had survived the atomic bomb but suffocated inside the refrigerator
• Indiana Jones and that annoying kid had contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from eating the monkey's brains in Temple of Doom and been involuntarily committed
• Young Indy had been eaten by the lion on the train at the beginning of Last Crusade

This last item also puts paid to the whole series of films, and also renders redundant the several series of Young Indiana Jones.

In fact, Spielberg could do worse than model any future Indiana Jones films on a variation of the plot used in the Hammer Productions' Dracula series with Christopher Lee: at the end of the first movie Dracula is killed and, in seconds, his body turns to dust. In the sequel, a henchman pours this dust into an empty stone casket, pours in human blood, and Dracula is resurrected to become a continual menace until the end of the movie, when he is again turned to dust.

Let's say Raiders of the Lost Ark were to be rewritten to take advantage of this money-saving idea: Harrison Ford is flattened by the boulder, the treasure he was holding is retrieved by Belloq, and his body turns to dust. The next two hours could be taken up with trivial details such as Indy's friends sitting around drinking and bemoaning his absence, Belloq regularly gloating, and following the Germans' endless digging in Egypt looking for the Ark. At the very end of the movie, someone works out how to resurrect Indy from the dust, and he stands up, whip in hand, ready to fight again in the sequel. At the start of Temple of Doom he is promptly killed when the kid drives into a pole, and the cycle repeats.

The benefit of this approach is that each movie is very cheap to produce, since there are no stunts, fights or set-pieces to stage, and the audience is continually coaxed to come back for the sequel, with the promise that the heroics will finally begin. By my estimation, the next sequel could be made for about $10 million dollars, not including promotion.