InfoDroid said:
Is it? I'm not so sure. At least Temple didn't have watered-down characters, a convoluted plot and zero sense of peril.
All good points, but for all its sins,
Skull maintains a more or less consistent lighthearted, nostalgic tone, whereas
Temple veers wildly and painfully between goofy slapstick and disturbingly gruesome. So, my theatrical vote goes
Skull, any day.
InfoDroid said:
It suffered from too much rather than not enough. It's easy to cut when you've got too much...not enough isn't quite as easy.
A good point has been made in Jones1899's thread about the climax of the film. Indy has no involvement whatsoever in what happens. He doesn't have anything to do. It was really bizarre how it was written... How do you fix fundamental problems at the conception stage like that through editing?
I see what you mean... I suspect that the central debate is about tone. You
wrote "my goal is to make the movie feel much more like it belongs in the Indiana Jones world." But while
Temple, as you've shown, can be
Raiders-ified,
Skull might not have that potential. I've always thought its tone was irrevocably light, which is why I inveighed against tweaking the colors: the golden tones suited the levity, and I've always thought that trying to force a darker, grittier palette on it would just make the non-
Raiderness of it all stick out even more.
If I were editing
Skull, I'd do my best to curtail the worst excesses (Tarzan-ing, the endless,
Terminator-ish fight fight) while leaving the tone more or less as is. And I'd use the non-
Raiderness as an excuse to have some fun. (That's why I suggested
shamelessly hacking out the jungle chase; it didn't fit in the
overall movie anyway.) In my
Mummy Returns edit, I'll be doing a similar trick: because the franchise is based on Fraser's goofiness, I've felt free to yank out nearly the whole bus chase by dropping in an intertitle saying "The tumult rages throughout London!" And I think the movie benefits from such overt meddling, because at that point in my edit, another action sequence, however finessed, would just be oppressive, while the intertitle mirrors such
Mummy-esque self-referential humor as Jonathan's great (but cut) line "where
is all this written?"
So, maybe the best way to approach
Skull is to treat as more of a
Mummy movie than a
Raiders one. :wink: