Indiana Jones - why don't you have a problem with this?!

Sluis Van Shipyards

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Everyone trashes the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the refrigerator scene. How about in Raiders when Indy climbs aboard the Nazi sub? I doubt the Nazis let him in, so what'd he do just hold on and hold his breath?
 
Everyone I knew trashed that scene when the movie first came out and still do


Everyone trashes the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the refrigerator scene. How about in Raiders when Indy climbs aboard the Nazi sub? I doubt the Nazis let him in, so what'd he do just hold on and hold his breath?
 
Wasn’t there a deleted scene that actually filled in the answers to this question? I thought I read somewhere that there was more to the scene and it made it more believable? Anyone recall this?
 
lashed himself to the periscope. The whip is still on the periscope when the sub is in the hangar.
 

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Indy tying himself to the periscope does nothing more to explain that scene than if KOTCS had shown him tying the fridge door shut. It's still a plot hole a mile wide.
 
Haha-- I guess he just had it on authority they weren't going to dive. To be fair, he did admit he was making it up as he went.

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Also, I thought this was going to be about Indy 5... which I don't think I am okay with.
 
Well...there is a real difference on the "Scale of Screenwriting Stupidity" that we are talking about here, right?

Indy lashing himself to a periscope and riding it for miles into a secret Nazi submarine pen? Highly unlikely but not all-out stupid in set-up.

Indy riding out a nuclear blast and being thrown miles while inside a Frigidaire and coming out without horrific life-ending injuries? That's just flat out idiotic.

It's really not the same at all in my humble opinion.

There is a clear relationship between the size of fan rage and the idiocy of execution of any film.
 
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Everyone trashes the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the refrigerator scene. How about in Raiders when Indy climbs aboard the Nazi sub? I doubt the Nazis let him in, so what'd he do just hold on and hold his breath?

Unlike a true submarine, which is designed to stay underwater. U-boats were basically surface ships that could briefly dive. They were faster while surfaced and usually only dived when conducting specific operations or when attacked.

The odds are that the ship would have stayed surfaced to get to where it was going ASAP. Indy's biggest problem would be exposure to wind/cold after being wet.
 
Unlike a true submarine, which is designed to stay underwater. U-boats were basically surface ships that could briefly dive. They were faster while surfaced and usually only dived when conducting specific operations or when attacked.

The odds are that the ship would have stayed surfaced to get to where it was going ASAP. Indy's biggest problem would be exposure to wind/cold after being wet.

This.

They ran on batteries when submerged, so to go any real distance they'd stay surfaced to run on diesel.
 
The sub ride is technically survivable and the fridge incident isn't. I will grant that. But the sub ride is still a long, long way from being plausible.

The exposure to sun & cold & wind would have sapped Indy's strength before long. He would probably have gotten sunburned pretty badly based on how bright it looked when he was climbing onto the sub. And for going at least 15-20 mph the whole way, he would have needed to literally be tied to that periscope so he could go totally limp and still stay there with his head above water. I'm sorry but that is not what the BTS shots show.

It would have taken maybe two dozen feet of rope because you can't just secure him by the waist or something. He would need to be held in at least two places, like maybe his chest & ankles. It might take 3+ places to prevent him from slumping down to a sitting position. The rope would need to be thick to avoid cutting off circulation and abrading his clothes & skin too much where it held him. All this means the rope would be big & heavy (where was it when he was getting onto the sub?). Indy's (magical length-changing) whip would not cover it. Then Indy would arrive at the Nazi island base in no condition to kick any more ass for a while. Etc.

Indy still fell from a plane and landed on a raft in TOD. They were tearing people's hearts out manually while they were still alive. This franchise has never respected the limits of the human body.
 
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For the same reasons why people don't complain about John McClain surviving the various physical stunts he undertook in Die Hard, but find the villains in Die Hard 4 to be completely unbelievable in the amount of punishment they take.

1. There's an overall degree of verisimilitude that permeates Raiders, and which (I gather) is lost in Kingdom.

2. The latter films make use of CGI to actually show you how he survives, instead of implying it and letting your mind fill in the blanks. That means your mind is forced to confront the unreality of the situation, instead of being able to just kinda skip past it and move on to the next scene. I actually think Raiders works better because you don't see the deleted sequence of Indy lashed to the periscope. But you can't not see the "nuke the fridge" sequence, so you have to mentally deal with it, and it's a lot harder to excuse it away based on what you do see.

3. The degree of unbelievability is much higher in the latter films. I mean, it's unbelievable in any case, but within the film universe and the in-universe "rules" established about what Indy and McClain can endure, you accept the earlier films. Both heroes take punishment and show it in a way that heroes in other movies might not, which is where the "verisimilitude" comes in. We expect our movie heroes to shrug off stuff that would take out a normal person; that's what makes them heroes. What makes Indy and John McClain heroes of a higher calibre is that they don't merely "shrug off" injuries, but rather persevere in spite of them, which makes them appear more heroic. But all of that is different from when people survive stuff that is patently absurd, like literally being hit by a car or cooked by the heat of a thermonuclear blast inside a lead-lined refrigerator while being hurled through the air and impacting on the ground multiple times and then wandering out to witness the mushroom cloud and take a deep breath of nuclear fallout. There's "suspension of disbelief" and then there's "complete and total bulls***."

4. The original movies are simply better, more entertaining films. In general, people overlook the stuff that might bug them (plot holes, inconsistencies, silly bits, etc.) if the core film itself is entertaining. They forgive a film's flaws if they're already entertained because they just aren't paying close attention to them. When a film isn't entertaining, for whatever reason, the flaws are more noticeable, because your mind is already disengaged from the film itself, and instead is "present" to nitpick things. The things we nitpick frequently (aren't the real underlying problems with the films; they're the things we noticed because of the underlying problems with the films. ANH has doofy, silly, or poorly written or performed moments in it, but we ignore those because it's a great movie on the whole. TPM? Not so much. Although, to be fair, in TPM's case, I don't think there's any way to "ignore" Jar Jar.
 
It's kind of goofy, but you guys covered it. He lashed himself to the periscope and hoped for the best. The U-Boat has no reason to fully submerge. They're going from somewhere in the Mediterranean to an island in the Mediterranean. It's not like crossing the Atlantic. Plus, I've got no problem with the fridge scene. Theses movies aren't exactly realistic.
 
No way in hell, Hypothermia can and will kill you, trust me on that one

Only if he got wet which based on what is in the film he doesn’t. They are above water at the start of the sequence and when they approach the island. It might have been a few hours for all we know. It’s certainly not a plot hole.
 
The fact that the Ark was put onto a submarine rather than a surface ship . . . it implies to the audience that there will be some submerging going on.

I know, this can be rationalized around. But still, the whole scene would have played a lot better if Indy & the Ark had simply gotten to the island on a surface ship. And the filmmakers went to some trouble to get a sub (from Das Boot) and film in a sub dock.
 
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