Kathleen Kennedy Now Knows Why Indiana Jones 4 Was Terrible
Kathleen Kennedy seems to think that Indiana Jones 4 didn't work because the story didn't resonate with fans.
Of course, nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie, but sometimes movies just don’t connect with an audience. Even if critics love them, audiences can sometimes reject a film, as was the case for the long-awaited Indiana Jones 4. Now, according to an interview Kathleen Kennedy gave to Empire Magazine (via Cinemablend), the Disney Studios executive believes that the story is the reason the installment for the famed adventurer failed to resonate with fans.
There were a lot of things that didn’t go over too well with fans of the franchise when Harrison Ford put the hat and whip on for the first time in nearly two decades. But Kennedy doesn’t point to Indy climbing into a led-lined fridge to survive a nuclear explosion or Shia LeBoeuf swinging through vines like a monkey as the problem. Instead, she says the story for Indiana Jones 4 could have been much better, pointing to the switch from battling Nazis or shamans to acquire religious paraphernalia to searching for interdimensional beings as the problem.
If one were to take a step back from the nostalgic expectations and look at the film objectively, through the lens of a complete series, everything about the movie would make sense. The latter two films (chronologically since Temple of Doom is a prequel) see Indiana Jones battling the Nazis, and they took place in the 1930s when the Nazis were all the rage; in Indiana Jones 4, taking place in the 1950s, he takes on the Russians to chase after aliens, which again, were all the rage. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, movies aren’t received through objectivity but are subject to our pasts, memories, nostalgia, and 20 years of expectations.
The comparisons between the newest installments and the original trilogy see an older Harrison Ford feeling not quite the same as his younger version; instead, it seems he has taken on the role of Sean Connery, the disapproving father figure of Shia Leboeuf’s Mutt. While fans grumbled about the impossibility of his surviving the nuclear bomb in a lead-lined fridge, they forget about the equal impossibility of him and two others using an inflatable life raft as an impromptu parachute to escape a crashing plane.
While they laugh at the ridiculousness of the fire ants chasing down angry Russians in Indiana Jones 4, they look beyond the equally ridiculous and still iconic pit of snakes that remains one of the greatest scenes of all time.
Regardless of whether the critics were correct in their Rotten Tomatoes score of 78% seeing the same things George Lucas saw in his pitch, or the fans were correct in agreement with Steven Spielberg’s dislike of the subject matter, Indiana Jones 4 was a success. The film earned three-quarters of a billion dollars, ranking it third among the series when adjusted for inflation.
With the crew retaining the talents of Mads Mikkelson as a former Nazi, it seems that the filmmakers are taking the same stance as Kathleen Kennedy and returning the story to Indiana Jones’ roots, a race against time to find a McGuffin before the Nazis.
