Sunday, June 1, 2008

New Adventures

Last weekend, we went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.



I thoroughly enjoyed it. Great action, good versus evil, exotic locations, a touch of romance, riddles to solve - what more could you ask for?






Actually, my writer-mind kicked in and I started analyzing the story and the plot. I happen to especially love these history/mystery/adventure genre movies. In addition to the Indy movies, I'd also add The Mummy movies. Laura Croft and the American Treasure movies. The basic plot of all these has our hero on a quest to find some rare artifact, along the way a classic bad guy steps in, attempting to force the hero to use his unique knowledge to solve the unsolvable puzzle, otherwise the hero's love interest will die. The hero plays along to save the damsel, but then with wit and muscle escapes his predicament. The greed of the villian always leads to meeting an untimely end.


When I reviewed what I wrote, I realized DaVinci Code also falls into this category to some degree. BUT, the point of that book and the movie was not to have fun. The others are purely entertainment - we all know Nazis, Egyptian zombies and folks who would steal American artifacts are bad. Dan Brown picked characters who are less black and white and never gave us any reason to laugh. (except maybe at Tom Hanks' hair, but we have to blame that on director Ron Howard, not author Dan Brown)