Indiana Jones 5

They're cousins. The cross-pollination is manifest but they do ultimately settle for separate dispositions. Star Wars was always destined through amorphous stages to be or become this pièce de résistance with more moving parts, which has proved both its strength and weakness limitation. Being almost entirely in Draftsman Lucas' head it is more codependent upon abstract concepts & intentions, one part comic "space movie" the other part—a multitude of parts: Campbellian coding and arcane metaphysics and increasingly eccentric aesthetics reaching as far back and far out as Silent Film era expressionism and glyphic cave art reimagined through cinema pop-art. It's a tad corruptible in this respect; not right-vs-wrong, but a thing so big and shifting that is prone to countless little fractures. The Prequel Trilogy is as disharmonious with the Original Trilogy as it is harmonious and so too, even, are the installments within each respectively, at certain lengths (to say nothing of animated spinoffs, the EU...and Disney). Such is not a criticism but rather what I love about the Saga. Yet it also demands a particular mindset from audiences that audiences haven't always been willing to meet, and in turn has always been that much more removed from its elemental roots in Saturday matinee modesty ...enter: Indiana Jones.

Beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark but also establishing a continuum, the Indy series was never meant to be a masterpiece from Lucas nor especially Spielberg. It was the latter shedding in semi-regular intervals haughtier ambitions and much of his self-importance to simply perform as a filmmaking mechanism, driven forward more purely by his best instincts for pulp thrills and 'cowboy action' showmanship. Lucas meanwhile just got to sit back in his brainstorming chair and conjure up boyish adventure serial storylines and watch buddy Steven execute them onto celluloid. He "just wanted to see them get made" as he often says about the franchise regarding everything he loved as a kid. So there is for me a comparably more unstudied fidelity to the Indiana Jones movies while therein still replete with top-form artistry and thematic wit. They're more at ease with their internal ingenuity.

That's one reason, anyways. The other reason is that my proclivity towards space opera was never quite as innate as my proclivity towards 20th-century period earthly escapism. Ghost stories, horses and fisticuffs, globetrotting, old dusty places, Eastern exoticism, Nazi femme fatales, jumping onto the hood of a speeding truck... Basically, passport adventure through the eyes of a juvenile.

It looks like such a barefaced, wannabe Game of Thrones, with money pumped in, left, right and centre, like it was growing on trees; or like a model who has overdone it on botox. Then you've got all those preachy adds, begging you to watch it.

No thanks!