Thanks for this. I want to know as little as possible about the film but you saying they didn't fuck it up makes me genuinely excited.

"They didn't fuck it up."

Talk about damning something with faint praise. I get the feeling that if they'd knocked the ball out of the park, you'd've said as much... which confirms my feeling that this film is probably the sort of thing that would earn a C+ if turned in as a paper.

Naw, that's not faint praise. That's geek-speak for they got it right. She wouldn't be a happy geek any other way.

Geeks only care that "they didn't fuck it up."

Look at Bionic Woman revamp, fer example. They fucked it up, and no one watched it. Look at Joel Schumacher. What he did to the Batman series was a serious fuck-up, and beforehand he wasn't that bad a hack director. Look at the downward slide of the Star Trek franchise. Rick Berman and Co. kept fucking it up, and it ended up going to J.J. Abrams, who has a chance to fuck it up his own way. And do try to remember how geeks felt about Lucas when he gave us Jar Jar, and got it in his head that Greedo shot first (perhaps the ultimate "they fucked it up" ever).

All apologies for the f-bomb. I was channeling Mamet there for a moment...

I agree. Not at all faint praise, and a huge relief to us all! Can't wait until Thursday!

Sorry, but as a serious geek I dispute the notion that "they didn't fuck it up" equates to "this is really good". In my geektionary, the geek equivalent of "they got it right" is "they got it right". We don't describe success as the absence of failure, because there is no bright line dividing success and failure. There are shades of grey in between. "They didn't fuck it up", in my vocabulary, translates into marginal success or outright mediocrity.

When Lucas changed it so that Greedo fired first, that was a serious fuck-up. Did serious Star Wars geeks forgive Lucas, saying "Well, it's George Lucas and he can do whatever he wants"? No. And did we forgive the very existence of Jar Jar Binks or even young "Annie" Skywalker? No. Serious geeks rebelled against Lucas' not-so-sudden transformation of the Star Wars universe into a kids' playground where the good guys are always good guys and called him on his BS.

Personally, as I've said before, I'm of the opinion that this fourth movie was completely unnecessary, especially considering the "riding off into the sunset" ending used in The Last Crusade. Even if they did knock one out of the park, the fact of a 17 year gap makes this whole exercise seem like just another excuse for George Lucas to make some money now that the Star Wars franchise is over.

Oh, crud: Forgot about the really amateurish-looking Clone Wars movie that's coming out this summer. Silly me...

I've been knocking around your site for years, and have got my friends reading it too - i just received this from one of them about Indy...

"That said, flick filosopher, who can and does get it wrong, is also pretty fair despite geek bias, and that green light from her means a lot to me."

Same goes for me - thanks for the heads up.
Dave

Spider-Man 3 and Transformers also got green lights, unfortunately.

Hi there,

MaryAnn's "review" is definitely *not* faint praise. There was very faint praise this morning on the (German) radio, where the film critic said: "Well, I wasn't bored during those two hours, but the money invested into this movie could have been better used by building kindergartens."

My first reaction was: "Ten ways the money that went into the production of Indy IV could have been better spent."

Thanks for posting this, MaryAnn -- the reviews I'm reading across the internet have not been very positive. You've restored my hope.