Slashfilm says Lucasfilm has registered six possible titles with the MPAA:

• Indiana Jones and the City of Gods
• Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds
• Indiana Jones and the Fourth Corner of the Earth
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Gold
• Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Covenant

My comments and speculations on the possible meaning(s) of these titles.

Wow. I just noticed these pics taken at Comic-Con a week or two ago. Note the presence of the Ark of the Covenant AND a Mayan temple.



This page also gets into some of the intriguing possible viral marketing that has been done with websites based on the two serial numbers that appear on the various crates: There is 9906573 on the crate that currently appears on the IndianaJones.com home page, as seen in one of my posts above, and there is the similar but not exactly identical 9906753 on the crate in which the Ark of the Covenant was deposited at the end of Raiders. Typo? (In which case maybe the two crates are supposed to be one and the same.) Or not? (In which case... who knows?)

Short Round turns 35 today. 35!! You know what that means?!?! It means I'm 40... something!! It means he's probably the same age Indy was in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! 35!!!! This guy.......!

Says a friend:

"The best part about the whole trip was that I peeked into an enormous sound stage where they had built a set for the new Indiana Jones movie. There were tents and jeeps and jungle things and tents and vines and tropical, flowering shrubbery. So, get ready for that."

He's in L.A., finishing his last semester of college as part of the Los Angeles Film Studies Center (via Geneva College, in PA). Seems like a neat program...they had to read Jeffrey's book before the semester started. Regardless, the quote seems to hint at jungle-y environs. Hmmm....

The photos posted at http://www.harrisonfordweb.com/ seem to indicate there will also be a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican elements in this film -- which either confirms the existing rumours, or just shows you how far Lucas and Spielberg are willing to go to throw people off the scent.

Hmmm...hope it's not too National Treasure-ish, by making connections between unconnected cultures.

Looking at those pics, I'm still thinking along the lines of a plot related to alien visitation:

1) Ancient hieroglyphics depicted the "chariots of the gods," didn't they? And those statues with the paper over their faces have suspiciously Roswell-ian dimensions.
2) That crater is just oozing Close Encounters potential.

It's Official Now! The title is . . .


INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL


The official Indiana Jone site has announced the title. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you're a Mormon (which I am not), your religion would teach you that the religion and culture of Central America has been heavily influenced by the "lost tribes of Israel ™"

Temple of Doom - polytheistic paganism
Lost Ark - Judaism
Last Crusade - Christianity
Crystal Skull - Mormonism???

But it is probably something completely unrelated.

So whereas the previous movies all went for increasingly shorter titles, this new movie's title is the biggest mouthful of all.

RAI - DERS - OF - THE - LOST - ARK (6)
TEM - PLE - OF - DOOM (4)
LAST - CRU - SADE (3)
KING - DOM - OF - THE - CRY - STAL - SKULL (7)

Hmmm, I wonder...

A - NEW - HOPE (3)
THE - EM - PIRE - STRIKES - BACK (5)
RE - TURN - OF - THE - JE - DI (6)
THE - PHAN - TOM - MEN - ACE (5)
AT - TACK - OF - THE - CLONES (5)
RE - VENGE - OF - THE - SITH (5)

Yup, the fourth Indiana Jones movie has the longest title of all the Lucasfilm franchise films, assuming we zero in on just the distinctive portion of those titles (leaving aside "INDIANA JONES AND THE..." and "STAR WARS: EPISODE ..."). Although, if we INCLUDE those bits...

STAR - WARS - EP - I - SODE - VI - RE - TURN - OF - THE - JE - DI (12)
IN - DI - A - NA - JONES - AND - THE - KING - DOM - OF - THE - CRY - STAL - SKULL (14)

Yup, the fourth Indiana Jones movie has the longest title, period.

Yes, but did you ever consider that the longer the title in the (original) Star Wars franchise, the longer the running time, whereas the shorter the title in the Indiana Jones franchise, the longer the running time?

A New Hope
121 minutes / 3 syllables = 40.33 = minutes per syllable

The Empire Strikes Back
124 minutes / 5 syllables = 24.8 minutes per syllable

Return of the Jedi
134 minutes / 6 syllables = 22.3 minutes per syllable

Raiders of the Lost Ark
115 minutes / 6 syllables = 19.2 minutes per syllable

The Temple of Doom
118 minutes / 4 syllables = 29.5 minutes per syllable

The Last Crusade
127 minutes / 3 syllables = 42.3 minutes per syllable

If the pattern holds, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, being 7 syllables, will run approximately 194 minutes.

That is so demented. I love it!

That's at 27.7 mps (and leaving out the "the" in each).

If you use the full titles ("Indiana Jones and the..."), adding 5 syllables to each, that would project running time for IJ&TKOTCS of a whopping 225 minutes, at 18.76 mps (assuming the mps increases linearly). Of course, Raiders can be evaluated with or without the prefix.

You could use the average mps value of 13.15 resulting in a more believable--but still improbably long--running time of 158 minutes (again, using the full title). The partial title calculation based on average mps would result in 243 minutes of film.

Minutes per syllable is such a spotty metric. I prefer minutes per letter.

There USED to be a spoilerific story here -- including the identity of the Cate Blanchett character -- but apparently it's been yanked, so now you'll all just have to settle for the fragments quoted at Ain't It Cool News.

Oh, and Jim Broadbent basically has the Marcus-Brody-equivalent role.

And George Lucas explains why the movie is better without Sean Connery.

Spoilers now here and quoted here...including Blanchett's role.

I noticed the other day that even Ain't It Cool News has apparently been convinced to take the spoilers down from their website. Interesting.

"I'm not sure how it all ties in, but sure enough... as rumored (and I never really believed it until now), on a soundstage in Downey... they've evidently built a reproduction of the warehouse from the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and they're staging a sequence there even as you read this."

George Lucas to MTV News:

While Indy's Holy Grail "Crusade" gave him a taste of immortality, and his "Temple" quest for Sankara Stones brought him a glimpse of "fortune and glory," those relics are stuffy museum pieces compared to the power of the crystal skulls, Lucas asserted.

"I think this is actually better, it's up there with the Ark of the Covenant," he declared of the fourth film's "McGuffin" (a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an object which drives a film's plot). "Sankara Stones and the Holy Grail were a little tough, but I think this time we've really got a great one.

"The skulls themselves are real and a lot of the stuff in the movie is real, just like in the other movies," Lucas continued. "We don't base it on a lot of phony-baloney stuff. It's all based on at least true mythology that exists today that ... a certain amount of the population actually believes in."

An encouraging report.

The outline for the teaser? An "insider" says it looks "legit".

I

have

chills.

Wow.

That is one effective little script.

You know those rumours about how this film will deal with aliens and stuff? They just got a little weirder. If what the guy at MovieWeb says is true, then it looks like George Lucas sure wasn't kidding when he said last year that this new film might be "a little too 'connected'".

Nothing here but confirmations of the rumour mill, really, though we do find out the name of Cate Blanchett's Soviet villain:

- - -

First look: Whip cracks over new 'Indiana Jones' movie
Now that the poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been revealed, some details from the super-secret plot also can be officially exposed. . . .
The artifact of the title is inspired by real quartz sculptures of disputed origins that are carved in a way that defies the natural structure of the crystal.
"The theory is they are shaped by higher powers or alien powers or came from another world, or an ancient Mayan civilization had the powers," Marshall says.
USA Today, December 10

John Hurt talks to Premiere.com and doesn't confirm, doesn't deny that he's playing Abner Ravenwood.

I hadn't realized that the guy who gives young Indy his first fedora in Last Crusade was originally named "Abner Ravenwood" in the script.

Whoa!!

Vanity Fair's got juicy photos and quotes!

You left out the best part, Jeff -- the part where Lucas answers the question I raised at my blog one year ago:

Needless to say, the world was a very different place in the 1960s than it was in the 1930s; the Nazis were gone, and so was the British Empire (seen in Temple of Doom). So in what context could this new film take place? The original movies were nostalgia trips to the days of Saturday-matinee serials -- but could that template work for a movie set two or three decades later? How could this new movie possibly be "of a piece" with the other films?

In this Vanity Fair article, Lucas reveals -- for the first time, near as I can tell -- that the new Indiana Jones film will NOT be following the template of the '30s Republic serials.

Or, hmmm, maybe the best part is this other photo, which would seem to confirm one or two of the other rumours that have been floating around this film:

Man, I hope I look as good as Karen Allen when I'm her age (notice I did not say, 'I hope I look like Karen Allen when I'm her age').

*** SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T FOLLOWED THE RUMOURS OR WHO DON'T KNOW THE LORE AROUND CRYSTAL SKULLS ***

Oh, heck, let's get the money quote out here on the table:

And then (spoiler warning) Lucas gets a little more (spoiler alert) specific: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will apparently nudge our hero away from his usual milieu of spooky archaeology and into the realm of (spoiler Code Red) science fiction. "What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit," Lucas says. "So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, 'Well, maybe we shouldn't do a 30s serial, because now we're in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?' So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we're doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I'm talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing."

In this light, it's interesting to recall that Frank Darabont wrote one of the earlier drafts of this film, since Darabont wrote the 1988 remake of The Blob (as well as The Fly II, which was sort of a remake of the '50s sci-fi movie Son of the Fly).

Anyway, Lucas's comment here raises some other interesting questions. Given how much emphasis there has been on doing this movie old-school -- making it of a piece with the first three movies in look (see the bit about cinematography in Jeff's last post) and so on -- one still wonders how much continuity there can be in look and feel if the franchise is moving away from its '30s Republic-serial roots and towards something more '50s sci-fi-ish.

What's the light source? And why do they need a torch?

Maybe it's a really, really powerful torch? (A Magtorch?)

Skylight. Duh.

Probably the flash bulb from the on set photographer's camera.

Via MTV Movies Blog:

Chills.

I love how even the crates have cobwebs. The spiders are EVERYWHERE, man.

Y'know, I'd be curious to know what the rationale was behind the original warehouse shot/sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark. From a plot POV, I've always kind of assumed it was just a way to explain how the Ark of the Covenant could have been discovered again without anyone ever hearing about it in the 45 years since then (i.e. the gap between 1936, when the story takes place, and 1981, when the film came out) -- the government kept it secret! Plus it was effectively kind of spooky in its own right -- the Ark was buried and hidden before, and now it has been buried and hidden again. And for film-school brats like Spielberg and Lucas (the former of whom actually OWNS the Rosebud sled and has it on display at his production office), there was also the fun of making a visual allusion to Citizen Kane.

But those are pretty cursory reasons for coming up with that ending. So I find myself wondering if the ending of Raiders was just a gag that the filmmakers tossed off -- and tossed off well -- and if they now find themselves thinking, "Man, we never thought we would actually base a STORY on that gag, with actors and subplots and action sequences and everything!"

I always read the scene to mean that, while Indy and everyone else risked their lives to get the Ark, it was just one of many 'magical' trinkets that the gov't had, to the point that it could just be tossed in with the rest.

I remember thinking that last shot was so full of wonder. If the Ark is just a number in a huge warehouse full of stuff, what adventures might be waiting in all the OTHER boxes? (It's a visual version of that wonderful closing of the Gospel of John.)

Of course, it's also a wonderful contradiction to Indie's mantra "this belongs in a museum", isn't it? Apparently, he really HAS learned to respect if not God, then at least the "other", and that some things really belong hidden and unrevealed. It's a recognition of human limitation.

Doomsday campus protests? LeBeouf as a full-blown lost-generation 'Rebel' type? Talk about your archetypes...

I think your first point is pretty much my reaction when I watched this film growing up.

As for your second, I think that is more summed up when Indy tells Marion to close her eyes and the "Angel of Death" kills the Nazis. Because when Marion and Indy are walking down the steps, Indy is visibly annoyed that the government is just locking it up and won't tell him what they're doing with it. He says "They don't know what they've got in there!" to which Marion responds, "I know what I've got right here" or something to that effect. So I wouldn't say Indy is at peace with the Ark locked away, which fits that in the new film he'd be more than happy to get it off the government or what-have-you.

Anders wrote:
: So I wouldn't say Indy is at peace with the Ark locked away, which fits that in the new film he'd be more than happy to get it off the government or what-have-you.

But once he gets it off the government's hands (and it is possible that, in the new film, he has no intention of taking it away from the American government, but rather merely means to protect it from the Russian government), whose hands would KEEP it? The whole "it belongs in a museum" thing was added to the character in Last Crusade, IIRC, and does not come up in either of the previous films -- and I wonder if the Indy of Raiders would really WANT the Ark to be put in a museum. (If memory serves, Marcus Brody talked about STUDYING the Ark and its incredible power, and I personally think that Brody's approach, with its modern scientific analytical bent, would have been just as wrong as anybody else's; I have wondered for some time if Indy agreed with Brody on this point, or if perhaps he had moved to a more sacred or mystical understanding of the Ark.)

But Indy's deal with Brody was that the museum would get the ark.

Alan Thomas wrote:
: But Indy's deal with Brody was that the museum would get the ark.

Back when he didn't believe in "magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus," yes. (Although interestingly, in that scene, Brody DID seem to believe in the "boogie man", yet at that point in the story he was apparently still fine with handing the Ark over to the museum.)

You both seem to be assuming that Brody was being entirely above board with Indy when Indy asked about the museum and Brody said, "Oh, yes." It's always seemed to me that Brody may have been somewhat bluffing here, telling Indy what he knew Indy wanted to hear, though he wasn't at all sure what the fate of the ark would be, and possibly what it should be.

Wanna see the Crystal Skull? (SPOILERS!)

I guess that settles it, then. Can't say I'm thrilled, but we'll see.

I'm a bit late to this, but apparently Lego went public with some of its Crystal Skull-themed toys back in December ... and at least one of these sets contains a curious item or two that might be kind of spoiler-ish.

Sure looks like little aliens in that last shot. I really don't like for the direction this one is going after, the whole sci fi thing just is too un-archaeologist-y for me.