Script Review: Darabont’s Indy IV

I dashed this off while at work this morning.  I’ll clean it up later.

 

First a quick history lesson for those of you not in the know.   The fourth Indiana Jones film was a long time coming.  Once the principles involved with the film series (Director Steven Spielberg, actor Harrison Ford, and creator-producer George Lucas) decided to go ahead with a fourth film the task of getting a script commissioned was next.  The script went through a number of hands and prominent screenwriters Tom Stoppard, Jeff Nathanson, and M. Night Shyamalan all took a look at it at some point.

But the fanboy legend revolves around a draft written by Frank Darabont, writer-director of The Shawkshank Redemption and also a writer on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tv show.   This draft, titled Indiana Jones and City of the Gods, was positively received by Spielberg and Ford.  However Lucas didn’t agree that this was the direction that Indy IV should take so it was scrapped. 

Keeping in mind that most of the fanboy population really has it in for Lucas over his Star Wars prequels and now add in the tepid fanboy response to the finished product of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and you have a lot of blame being aimed right at ‘ol Georgie boy.   And now that Darabont script, the one that might have been, had quickly become the holy grail to fanboys everywhere.

I had read on slashfilm a while back that Darabont script wasn’t dead though.  There was a quote from someone from Vanity Fair who had interviewed Lucas and said that according him the Darabont script “wasn’t the one we wanted tell at this point in the Jones story,” or something to that effect (I’ll get the direct quote and update).   So whatever it was Darabont had done, it might still see the light of day.

Well that was killed when the Darabont script itself leaked online last week.  While the script has been pulled down from all sites linking it, the file is out there and I’m sure not hard to get. 

First things first, this script is just another version of Crystal Skull so there’s no way that this is going to be made as Indy V.   I read it over the weekend and personally I think a lot of people who have read it will have to face harsh reality: George Lucas was right. 

The finished script (by David Keopp) was a better choice to go with than Darabont’s version.  That’s not say City of the Gods isn’t without it’s charms, but personally I prefer the one they chose. 

All of the things that most fanboys cringed at in Crystal Skull are still there.  Jones still hides out in a lead lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear blast, there’s still man eating ants, too many waterfalls (in fact here there’s four) and worst of all there’s still a Tarzan act!  The main difference is that instead of seeing youthful Shia LaBeouf embarrass himself by swinging on vines, we would have had to endured 65 year old Harrison Ford do it. 

Marion Ravenwood is still there and here she is used to better effect.  Cate Blanchett’s evil Irina Spalko and Ray Winstone’s awful character of Mac have sort of been combined in the Darabont version.  The man villian is Yuri, a Russian spy who starts out as Jones friend. 

Henry Jones, Sr. does appear for a minute in a bit that’s a little familiar and sappy for my taste.  He slaps junior again and we all instantly think, didn’t we see that already in Last Crusade?  Okay I guess it’s just me but still, it’s been done.   Sallah has a bit at the very end at a wedding scene that’s too small to even waste time discussing. 

Professor Oxley (John Hurt in Crystal Skull) is in this version as well.  Here he’s more of a primitive man and kept in a cage for a good part of the script.  The story is still about crystal skulls and aliens but to it’s benefit the alien aspect is bit more sinister. 

There are a few good action sequences including a fight in a clock tower at Jones’s college campus and a very exciting airplane sequence.  However the script gets bogged down in to many characters once the scene has shifted to Peru (much like in Crystal Skull).  Here we have Yuri the Russian spy, the President of Peru (El Presidente!), Marion’s husband, and a former nazi all gunning for City of the Gods not to mention a slew of other secondary characters.  In the end there’s a good eight people showing up for the supernatural climax.  Though here Jones ends up taking more control of what happens in the end than in Crystal Skull where he’s reduced almost to spectator like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

One thing that I missed in this script was LeBeouf’s character of Mutt Williams.  Personally I liked him and thought he was a great addition.  Instead more of that time is given to Marion, which isn’t a bad idea.  But it’s not a better one.

So for me at least I’m going to stop complaining about what might have been, because in the end, it might have been worse.