Just rewatched Indiana Jones and the last Crusade

[MissKittyFantastico]

Except that's not really what the evidence shows. The whole snake thing is set up and then paid off within Raiders. The snake shows up at the start: "Relax, Indy, it's just my pet snake," and then they open the Chamber of Secrets and it's literally crawling with snakes. "Snakes....why did it have to be snakes."

And he's clearly not deathly afraid of them since he went into the pit of snakes in order to retrieve the Ark.

True - it's not a missing element from Raiders or anything, but it does stand out as a character trait, this guy who's got balls the size of the one that nearly kills him at the start of the film nonetheless has a bit of a moment every time he sees a snake. It doesn't need explaining, it's just a gag, but it's something I feel you could wonder about, without in any way finding Raiders unsatisfying for not going into it. And I feel like the snake scene in Last Crusade is satisfying, because it's "So that's why he's got that thing about snakes," especially with the cute moment before of him calmly handling a snake the way he'd handle any other animal. Whereas Han's blaster, I never thought "So that's why that blaster's special to him" because it never seemed like it was - he could've dropped it by accident in the trash compactor, then grabbed a Stormtrooper blaster off a rack on the wall after they got out, and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

I won't argue that Last Crusade doesn't sometimes act too cute for its own good - Marcus for instance, I love Marcus in Last Crusade, he's frickin' hilarious, but he's very inconsistent with how he acted in Raiders when he may not have been quite as much of a man's man as Indy but he clearly had his act together. Yet nobody in TLC acts like Marcus has gone downhill in the past couple of years, it's like he's always been a buffoon and Indy's thoroughly used to it. But the references in the flashback opening are, I think, miles more satisfying than the attempt to pull the same trick in Solo.

[Yukaphile]

My point was the men were the ones in charge, so a female officer in charge like that doesn't seem very historically accurate, even though as you pointed out, there were probably rotten ones at the time. But then, it's fiction, what do I know? I'll drop it, like you asked.

[Madner Kami]

A) We are talking about Indiana Jones here. History serves a backdrop for the movies, but is hardly the foundation of the movies.
B) Women can be as bad as men are and frequently were and are so. That they rarely were and are in charge of men changes quite literally nothing.
C) Schneider and Donovan both were in cahoots with the SS officer Vogel. Neither was, technically, in charge of Vogel, who just went along with what they said to serve his Führer.
D) Do I need to remind you, that Schneider was the one sleeping with both Joneses and turned Jones Sr. over to the SS and was also the one who is directly and intentionally responsible for the rather gruesome end of Donovan and also is the one, who brought the Temple to collapse, ultimately loosing the Holy Grail forever and in doing so, killing herself? She's a piece of shit, through and through.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

My point was the men were the ones in charge, so a female officer in charge like that doesn't seem very historically accurate, even though as you pointed out, there were probably rotten ones at the time. But then, it's fiction, what do I know? I'll drop it, like you asked.

Well wait, do you say that it's offensive because womanhood had no part in Nazi, um, hierarchy, and that this movie insinuates that they did?

[Jonathan101]

I haven't seen those movies in years. Wasn't pleased they made the Nazi villain a woman in Last Crusade, but in their defense, she seems to not wanna go as far as the men do. And some people still want to insist German women were criminals. Idiots.

Ehh...there were plenty of German women who were Nazi's.

Heck their were female guards at Auschwitz, and many of them were sadists.

Yeah, the Nazi's were officially about "a woman's place is in the kitchen", but there were a surprising number of exceptions.

Probably the least likely thing about Ilsa is that she was a doctor and professional academic...but that was more because of the time period, not necessarily that she was a Nazi.

[Yukaphile]

I really don't wanna make this a debate about that after that last guy asked me to stop, but others keep bringing it up. Okay then. Here's my problem. That applies to party leadership. But it still doesn't ignore the fact the vast majority of the leadership and military positions and soldiers were male, and it was the males marching around smashing up stuff. I think a lot of this is... it's painting a false image of the average population of Germans at the time, especially the women who had no ties to the party leadership or the camps or in the military. Yet people like to treat them as if they're monsters anyway, when the state actively engaged in the most sophisticated form of brainwashing ever invented, when literally 90% of the news is false, to get the citizens to turn on one another. I do think those women were the minority, and in positions of leadership, were still secondary to the men. I know many Soviet soldiers who happened to be women were sadists too. But I don't see criminals and monsters when I look at the average German woman during that time. I see victims. Victims of their own state and then victims of the armies that came to town. Someone brought up how they were turning in Jews for arrest. Can't you see? In a police state where people disappear, where you're afraid and wanna be a good citizen, where the news is filling your head with lies so much that you internalize it, you will do that, to wanna protect yourself, do your civic duty, and so on. It's not right. But institutional brainwashing never is. You're talking 40,000,000 people. You can't just call them criminals especially given the damage they had to live with for the rest of their lives once the war ended. I think collective guilt is bullshit. What people think they are "guilty" of pales to what was inflicted on them they had to permanently endure until the day they died.

[Yukaphile]

You want me to drop this? Please, everyone else drop it. PLEASE.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Drop it like it's hot Yuka.

[Independent George]

I haven't seen the film in over ten years and I'm going purely from memory here, but if I recall correctly:

1. I loved the opening short on Junior's first adventure. This was supposed to be the last Indiana Jones flick of a trilogy; closing out the final adventure with a brief look at how it all started makes perfect sense, as well as very quickly introducing us to the relationship between Jr. and Sr. (and Sr.'s obsession with the grail). It was 'show don't tell' done right.
2. Dr. Schneider was an Austrian consultant, and not an actual Nazi (as far as we know). She was not their leader any more than Robert Oppenheimer was in charge of the Pacific theater. Donovan was the legitimate face to conceal the Nazi involvement, and the Nazis supplied the muscle.
3. Donovan, Schneider, and the Nazi (can't remember his name, or if he even had one) represented three different types of greed: the Nazis wanted power, Donovan wanted immortality, and Schneider wanted glory.
4. What the heck does her being a woman have to do with anything?

[Madner Kami]

You want me to drop this? Please, everyone else drop it. PLEASE.

Can't drop it, because you have a crazy warped perspective of a number of things and leaving it uncommented is a bad thing for various reasons, not least of which is your own sanity. Also, you keep inserting yourself and your warped understanding into pretty much everything, so you keep bringing this onto yourself, something which I commented on in a different thread, but it clearly fell on deaf ears.