watching Indy Jones and the Crystal Skull in a bar and unlike the time I saw it in the theater, I can appreciate it as an attempt to recapture the original vibe

I can see exactly which setpieces and moments and shots they reverse-engineered the screenplay from

and they’re not far off from the originals, except drawing from 50s Americana imaginary and not America’s weird prewar imaginary (that was half missionaries meeting savages in the Global South and half rivaling Germany as the authentic Western heir)

but they’re weighed down because “a well-made pulp film” no longer means anything, it gets compared against the “blockbuster” form that IJ itself helped to establish and now audiences expect as standard

the inverse of Jurassic World

watching Shia and remembering the Chris in JW I’m like “huh, leather jackets and retro motorcycles meant something for a sec” and then I remembered all this upmarketed retro-scrambler-as-Americana stuff that showed up in LA in the late 2000s and I was like “but who’s gonna pay for that shit” and now ohh