It’s sad, but that’s life. One of the things that let me knew that George and I weren’t destined to be happy together was when I read that he’d put Indy IV on hold, after rejecting a script from Frank Darabont. It felt like a bad decision at the time, and it still does now. I’m so over the whole Lucas thing that, until last night, I hadn’t even seen Indy IV; and nothing I’d read about it made me want to, particularly. Yes, the ache of nostalgia had almost got me to the box office: but dalliances with old flames are never good, and I’d managed to resist. Too much baggage, too much water under the bridge, too many consequences. Then, this script appeared on the internet. Darabont’s script, allegedly. The script I’d been waiting three years to read of a film I’d waited 10 years to see – but never will… Indiana Jones and The City Of The Gods. I wanted to look at what I could have won. And I did; and then I went to look at what we actually got. What a shame. But, if this isn’t Frank Darabont’s version of Indy and The Aliens, then we should track down the person who put this together, and give him or her a job. They’ve got talent, and what they has provided us with is a wonderful variation on the central themes of the movie that actually got made; in many ways excelling it. It feels wonderfully right, the genesis of a movie that shouldn’t have finished as far away from this as it eventually did. Most of the tentpoles of Lucas’ story (for it is his story) are still present and the bookend set-ups and payoffs remain; the opening still takes place in New Mexico, the warehouse, the rocket sled and the fridge still feature. Here Winstone’s ‘Mac’ is ‘Yuri’, and Blanchett’s female psychic is a far more reliable Indy-standard Nazi – dispatched early in a great University-based set-piece fight, replacing the motorbike chase. What’s really missing in this script in the whole Son of Indy plotline; a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Here our hero is our hero – the lone, grouchy old wolf we know and love – but with a real sense that his best days are behind him. Here Indy’s tired and reluctant to be drawn into the action – but is put in peril far more realistically than the way he is dumped before us in the actual film – no matter how cool as the ‘shadow’ reveal is (copyright George Lucas). The key to Darabont’s script is that what’s happening is no longer the norm for Indy, he is not the man he was 10 years ago – but he draws on his resolve and patriotism (something that’s far more stressed in this film than any of the others) to rise again. What we get instead of Shia ‘bloody’ LeBeouf, is more of the wonderful Marion Ravenwood. Now, this is a very good thing. It’s what I, as a fan of that first movie (and her as by far the strongest female character Lucas has created since Leia) want. The progression of her relationship with Indy here is far more believable than the rather fawning fayre we get in the final film; she’s married for a start, and she’s happy, until Indy arrives back in her life. This is where City of the Gods excels; it’s never a sure thing that the two will end up together – OK, well, it is… But at least they make it more like the kind of match-up you’d expect between two feisty characters – far from the ‘you were always the one’ stuff in Crystal Skull. Here, Marion has a purpose other than to deliver up a continuation for the franchise, an heir to the thrown, she’s more than the breeder we see in the finished product. Here, she’s, well… Marion. Feisty, and fighting the whole way – especially in her classic introduction, and a nicely scripted and mapped-out Bi-Plane chase that begins the middle section of the film dumping the team unceremoniously in the Peruvian jungle – another set-piece I would’ve loved to see. Here, happiness between the two is not sealed until a twist that ends the second act. From the start of City of the Gods, there is sense that this is the end, whether Indy lives or dies. He’s implicitly, and explicitly a museum piece – he actually has to retrieve his satchel from behind glass – and he knows it; he and we know that this is the last crusade. What Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does in contrast is provide the Hollywood ending, inasmuch as it leaves a door open. City of the Gods closes the book on Indy in fine style. Unlike the final film, it offers him a genuine choice. A real temptation in its final act, a real choice and a really rounded set of nemeses to deal with and contrast him against… It cuts to the core of why Indy picked up the hat and whip in the first place, and what would make him put them down. I could give you a treatise on Lucas and his treatment of female characters – but I think you’ve probably read it all before. But here is a classic example of how to remove all of a character’s best moments, thus reducing her to a totally functional role and belittling her interactions and role in a film. Poor old Padme Amidala, poor old Marion Ravenwood: they could have had it so much better. They could have been more than just babymakers. City of the Gods probably isn’t the finished article, it’s not the perfect Indy script, it needs cooking a little longer. However, if this film were a meal, City of the Gods would be like cooking the same recipe with better quality ingredients. Certainly something to chew on.
