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TheRaider.net Features Articles Raiders of the Lost Drafts: Chapter 5
 
Raiders of the Lost Drafts
by Bellosh - posted on January 16, 2001
 

Chapter 5

Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars... and a look into the future for Indy 4!!

I. Introduction

At the time of its release Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was described by Spielberg, Lucas and Ford as being the last Indy film. Spielberg had already once left the series, after Temple of Doom, to make more 'adult' films, but returned to fulfill his promise to Lucas that he would helm three Indy films. Lucas simply felt that he had no great Indy stories left to tell, and was concentrating instead on building up his Lucasfilm empire and raising his children. Ford was looking for more challenges as an actor. 

One of the reasons that Lucas felt the Indy films were finished is that each one requires an object of some kind for Indy to chase - the Ark, the Sankara stones, the Holy Grail. But after Indy had found the Holy Grail, and that other great archaeological relic - Henry Jones Senior - what was left that would top these? The answer came to him in the early Nineties, when he was once more beginning to think about continuing the Star Wars saga. Lucas loves to delve into his own past and mythologize it. The Star Wars prequels would tell the story of a young boy called Anakin, who grows up to do great things, and just like Lucas, was a boyhood racer - though Lucas raced cars rather than pods. If Lucas could continue the Star Wars saga by borrowing from his own past, perhaps he could do the same with the Indiana Jones series?

The idea and setting for the projected Indy 4 comes directly from Lucas's own childhood. The principal setting for this film is Fifties America, where Lucas grew up, while the purpose of the film is to encounter aliens in this setting - just as alien movies of the 1950's showed Men from Mars landing in Hicksville USA. Indy 4 would pay homage to the alien invasion films of the Fifties, which Lucas had loved as much as Flash Gordon and the adventure serials that had inspired Indy in the first place. And it would show the world he had grown up in, small-town America, complete with drive-ins, a fear of Communism, and the shadow of the H-bomb. The artifact that Indy seeks is similarly destructive, an alien bomb ticking away, though as we will see, it has links with ancient earthly civilizations, requiring Indy's expertise.

The draft of Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars that I have is described as a 'revised draft' and dated February 20, 1995. The date is significant; at the time The X-Files television series had become massively popular. Lucas was tapping into the public's fascination with the Roswell crash, aliens, and supposed Government cover-ups. The date is significant for another reason. Lucas began work on the script for the Star Wars prequels on November 1st, 1994, although he had probably working on the basic storyline and events for some time before that. A new art department for the prequels had been established at Skywalker ranch, and designs were being produced concurrently with the script. Might Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars be a rehearsal for the prequels by Lucas, a kind of test for himself? After all, he had not been involved directly in scripting and story work for a film for at least five years before this (Last Crusade). If the revised draft is February 1995, a first draft may have been produced months before, and the story probably first took shape before the November 1994 start date for the Prequels. 

The story is by Lucas and Jeb Stuart, who also bears the credit for the screenplay. Stuart is an experienced action film scribe, responsible for Die Hard and The Fugitive among others. His script collects all the basic ideas - a Roswell-like alien crash, Russian spies, action sequences - and turns them into a fast-paced exciting action movie that pays homage to the previous Indy films on almost every page. But would it have made a great Indy 4? Possibly not. If the Indiana Jones films were a long-running franchise like the James Bond films, then yes, it would have made an excellent entry in the series. But for the last ever Indy film, and one that utilizes the talents of Ford, Spielberg and Connery (yes, Indy's dad is back!), well, it's not quite right - it's just not quite special enough. But judge for yourself! A word of warning, though. Although it's extremely unlikely that this script will become the real Indy 4, elements of it, action sequences, characters and settings, may certainly find their way into it. All the previous Indy films borrowed from failed scripts - Temple of Doom borrowed sequences junked from Raiders of the Lost Ark, while Last Crusade did the same, borrowing scenes from Chris Columbus's failed Monkey King script (for information about those, read the previous installments of this article!). So spoiler-haters beware - your enjoyment of Indy 4 may be compromised by what you are about to read.


II. The Saucer Men Script

The script begins with those magical words 'From the Paramount mountain WE DISSOLVE. . .to an identical mountain towering over a subtropical jungle'. We are in Borneo, 1949. Indy is on an archaeological expedition, on board a small steamer boat, drifting down a crocodile infested river, when he is attacked by pirates. The pirates, led by the suave Baldassare, are after a treasure map and a golden idol Indy has in his possession. A fight ensues, and the pirates get a fake map, but Indy and his native companion, Kabul, get away. Although it seems business as usual, Indy says he's getting too old for this kind of thing, and talks about retiring from field work. We also learn that Marcus Brody has died.

Indy was supposed to accompany a Princeton archaeologist, Dr. Elaine McGregor, on an expedition downriver to find a lost temple, but decides to tell her he's retired. However, when he goes to find her at a river wharf, and sees her ('early thirties and beautiful') he changes his mind... and falls completely in love. And so does she, despite being already engaged. We flash forward six weeks. Indy and Elaine are still in love, but in a jam - Baldassare and his gang have captured them and Kabul and left them tied up over a mound of army ants, who can 'strip an elephant to the bone in two hours'. They trick Baldassare into taking Elaine with him, then Indy and Kabul escape (in a great scene), rescue Elaine, and send Baldassare and his men over a vast waterfall, 'half a mile wide and a thousand feet high'! After which - read this twice - Indy proposes to Elaine.

We cut to Indy and Elaine's wedding day, back in the States (Elaine has dumped her boyfriend). Henry Jones Senior is disapproving of the speed of the wedding, but more than a little impressed by Indy's bride-to-be. The chapel provides some great visual comedy - Elaine's respectable family and guests are contrasted with Indy's 'more worldly group of friends'... including Willie Scott, Marion, Sallah and Short Round. However, just before the ceremony starts a man drives up in a dark sedan car, talks animatedly with Elaine, and they drive off together. Indy climbs into the wedding car, still with cans on the back, and a chase begins through Princeton campus, but Elaine and the mystery man get away.

That night Indy hits a bar to drown his sorrows, with Willie and Marion, who reminisce about the past, and don't exactly make him feel better. Indy sneaks into Elaine's office on campus, and finds a photograph of her and the mystery man, Bolander, in a military uniform - and their marriage certificate! It turns out both were in Army intelligence, and there is something else, a telegram, which says that 'a recent discovery requires her immediate attention'. . .at the White Sands rocket base in New Mexico. Indy heads down there on a DC-3 (with the now traditional map/plane montage!).

Indy shows up at 'Al's Atomic Diner', where the waitress knows Bolander by sight, and tells him to follow a line of army trucks up to the testing ground. Also at the diner are two cowboys, who follow Indy. Indy is denied entry to the rocket base, but gets in on horseback, and follows the convoy to a blackened, burned crash mark on the ground, a mile long. He is spotted and chased, and knocked out. He wakes in an interrogation tent, to be greeted by Bob Bolander, the man from the wedding. . . and apparently Elaine's husband. There is also a General there. Indy is asked what he's seen, and told he can't see Elaine; he tries to escape, but just then she walks in, and convinces them to let Indy go. Elaine is a linguist, and works for army intelligence.

We find out that during the war Indy was actually 'Colonel Jones', and worked for OSS (the forerunner to the CIA). Elaine tells Bolander and the General that she needs Indy to work with her, and despite Bolander's objections the General agrees. We (and Indy) find out that the mile-long crash mark belongs to wreckage which the Army believes to be from an alien spaceship. Indy is skeptical at first, but changes his mind when he is shown a small stone cylinder, covered in pictographs, cuneiforms and hieroglyphics... alien symbols which also resemble the writing of ancient cultures, Egyptian, Mayan, Sanskrit. All the writings refer to power, and when the cylinder is brought next to a radio and a light bulb, the radio bursts into music, while the light bulb and the cylinder glow with the intensity of the sun - even though the cylinder remains cold.

No one knows what the cylinder is, but Indy and Elaine race to decipher the markings. Meanwhile we cut to the New Mexico desert, where we see the two cowboys that we first saw in the Atomic Diner. They shoot two MP's at a roadblock; the cowboys are really two Russian spies, Veska and Cheslav. Cheslav, the older of the two is 'a charming, Russian James Bond', who we find out has tangled with Indy before. Back at the military encampment Indy and Elaine have made progress. The cylinder was found in the hands of one of the dead aliens, four miles from the crash site; Indy and Elaine have worked out that the alien was heading for Mt. Keemo, a distant mountain long associated with ancient Indian religions, where in 1525 the Spanish noted 'strange lights around the summit'. The cylinder's markings are mostly numbers, co ordinates of latitude and longitude, that correspond to the mountain and others like it around the world, all areas of supposed contact with extraterrestrial life. So the alien was trying to get to the mountain with the cylinder. . .and the writings warn of dark consequences if it is not returned, 'visits of fire-breathing serpents, monsters, dragons' and a tremendous power unleashed. The General is half convinced, but another scientist, Dr. Bernard, remains skeptical. Indy goes out of his tent to watch the dawn breaking, and sees an intense light in the distance - an atom bomb is being tested. Bolander appears, they talk briefly about the bomb; Indy is not a fan of the A-bomb, but Bolander's a true believer - 'the atom is our friend' he says.

Disgusted, Indy goes back into the tent but finds Elaine and the alien device in the hands of Veska and Cheslav, who plan to take it back to Moscow! There is a fight, but the Russians escape with the cylinder and Elaine, and set off explosions in the camp. Indy chases them to the missile base, and into a concrete bunker. He ends up locked in deadly combat with Veska on top of a rocket sled... which is about to be fired. The rocket sled is catapulted at 200 miles an hour down a five-mile track, with Indy and Veska clinging to the metal chassis (and still fighting), inches from the flaming rocket exhausts. Indy wins the fight, Veska gets fried, and Indy manages to sabotage the engine of the rocket sled. But now he is in the middle of the desert, alone and exhausted, when an ambulance and car approaches... with Russian drivers. They knock Indy out and put him in the trunk of the car. But these Russian spies aren't as efficient as Cheslav - they get lost and wind up in a strange town called 'Boomsburg', which doesn't appear to be on their map. The spies get out to find a phone, and Indy, who has sprung the lock on the trunk, gets out too. He goes into a house which is full of dummies, only to find that the whole town is a fake - a mock-up designed for a A-bomb test! At which point Indy says, you got it, "I've got a bad feeling about this..."

A civil defense siren starts to wail and the two Russian spies make a break for it, so Indy - get this - finds a two foot concrete hollow in the floor of a house and pulls a lead-lined refrigerator over him...! The spies meanwhile, have driven the wrong way, into the blast zone instead of out of it (the town is just outside). The bomb goes off and the two spies are incinerated, but Indy is saved by his refrigerator! (Although 'Boomsburg' is destroyed). A decontamination team turns up, scrubs him clean, and, well, it's a ridiculous moment that mars an otherwise good script. Back at the base Indy finds out that the numbers they deciphered on the alien cylinder have been fed into a computer; apart from the coordinates there are others that represent a descending scale. In other words, a countdown - the cylinder is a bomb! But then Bolander drops a bombshell of his own - Indy is placed under arrest on suspicion of espionage and taken to a hanger. He escapes, and sneaks around, to see one of the military scientists, Dr. Bernard, speaking in Russian, and supervising the loading of crates of spaceship debris onto trucks. Indy follows Dr. Bernard out of the military base to an airstrip in the desert, where he sees Cheslav and Elaine. A Russian Tupolev flying fortress lands and Indy sneaks aboard, after disguising himself as one of the Russian soldiers who have come in on the plane. The crates are loaded up and the plane takes off, with Bernard, Elaine and Indy aboard, but leaving Cheslav behind; Indy gives him a wave as the plane taxis past.

On board Bernard shows Elaine the alien cylinder. Two rings have changed color, showing that the countdown is in progress. Bernard believes that it's secrets can be unlocked by the Russians, who will rule the earth for centuries using its power. Indy meanwhile has been captured by the other Russian soldiers, and Bernard orders him to be thrown out of the bomb bay doors. But just as they're about to do so, something flashes past the plane and disappears into the clouds. It is a flying saucer, and it returns and holds the plane in a kind of tractor beam; they want the cylinder back! Just then two US air force jets arrive, and take on the flying saucer, scoring a hit with their missiles. The saucer releases the plane from its tractor beam, and destroys the two jets. On the Flying Fortress a battle has broken out - Bernard wants to try and shoot down the plane with a bazooka. Indy struggles with a Russian guard, the weapon goes off, blasts through the cockpit, and hits the saucer, damaging it. The plane too begins to crash. Elaine grabs the cylinder, but is sucked out of the plane. Indy grabs a parachute and jumps after her, catching her, and they are saved as the plane crashes to earth. The saucer, clearly damaged, returns and scans the wreckage for the cylinder, then flies off.

It is now dusk. Indy and Elaine head for a tiny town. Indy leaves Elaine in an old Indian trinket shop and goes to look for a 'phone. The whole place is eerie and deserted. Suddenly the saucer returns, and we get what might be this film's 'phobia scene'; we've had snakes, bugs, rats, in the Indy films, and now aliens. An enormous spidery alien enters, reaching towards Elaine with seven-foot long arms. Elaine runs, but another appears behind her. So far, so scary, but the thing that would really have freaked the audiences out is when it begins to speak and says: 'Mookaarahhh...' Yikes. A stray dog attacks the alien and Elaine seizes her chance to escape. Her and Indy dive into an old pickup and drive like blazes. They hide out in a drive-in that's showing - you guessed it - a cheesy Sci-fi alien movie. Elaine watches the film with informed interest while Indy calls the base, then goes back to the pickup... and to blend in with every other couple they begin to make out. While the cinema screen shows an alien armada landing the real flying saucer floats over the cars, finds the cylinder with its scanner, and silently picks up the truck with a tractor beam. Indy and Elaine, of course, are too busy to notice. They finally realize what has happened when they are far out in the desert sky.

The saucer gently puts the truck down and lands, and a small bug-like creature emerges. Elaine explains that the ones back at the trinket shop were different, kind of like soldiers. The creature sees the cylinder and utters the same word that the other alien used: 'Mukara'. Elaine realizes that it is frightened of the device, and suddenly realizes that the word 'Mukara' means 'dangerous' in Sanskrit. She begins talking to them (!) and they (Elaine and Indy) offer to give them the device back, but the aliens don't want it! They're scared! A second later explosions rock the area, and Indy and Elaine look up to see the hills surrounding them and the space craft are ringed with military vehicles. They open fire, hitting the spacecraft, which tries to take off but explodes into a mountainside in a fireball. The army come down and Bolander orders Indy and Elaine to be arrested. Indy tells a concerned General that the army have made a big mistake - the small space craft was an unarmed ship. Meanwhile the rings on the cylinder are continuing to light up - time is running out.

Bolander, of course, doesn't want to know. Indy and Elaine are loaded into a troop truck, and we (and Indy) see that one of the army sergeants present... is Cheslav, in another jeep. All around, the clouds are boiling, lightning is flashing, and something else - a saucer is following them. Indy and Elaine manage to overpower the guards in the truck then Indy climbs into the cab ('Don't worry, I've done this before', he says...) Or rather, he attempts to climb into it, but slips, and it's up to Elaine. She grabs a gun and points it at the driver through the window behind the cab. Elaine and Indy take over the truck.

The General orders an attack on a small saucer sitting upon a ridge, and the whole of the army open fire on it. It seems to be damaged, but then we see that the saucer is really the top of a much larger saucer hidden beneath the desert, which rises up and destroys the whole army in a massive sandstorm. Bolander makes a run for it with the cylinder in a jeep, Indy and Elaine follow him in the troop truck, and the General is buried along with his forces. Indy leaps into Bolander's jeep, slugs him, and they reach the summit of Mt. Keemo at dawn. A stone cairn tells them they have found the right place. Three saucers come up the side of the mountain, and Indy places the cylinder on the rock cairn. Suddenly a voice shouts at him to stop! It is Cheslav, holding Elaine at gunpoint! But instead Indy steps away from the stone pile, which begins to glow. Now Bolander reappears, and knocks Cheslav down, then grabs the cylinder. For a moment, he is exultant... maniacal... screaming 'Bow down rulers of the universe for I have the power!' The saucers fade momentarily as if their energy is being sapped, then glow brighter. White light erupts from the device, and Bolander points it at Cheslav, who is zapped and melts instantly before our eyes. Then he aims it at the saucers, but it has no effect, and instead Bolander himself is split in two by a beam of energy, and 'crumples in a melting mass'. The device is held suspended, as the ground glows white, then suddenly there is a sound like an incredible thunderclap and the saucers disappear. The mountain is whipped by furious winds, then silence. Indy and Elaine are alone.

In the final scene we are back at the Princeton church. Indy's dad is disbelieving of the flying saucers ("Doesn't this world hold enough mysteries that you don't have to go out and make some new ones?"). The marriage takes place and Sallah, Willie, Marion and the others throw rice. Indy and Elaine climb into their wedding car, and Short Round turns around in the driver's seat. He asks him, "Where to, Dr. Jones?" and Indy replies, you guessed it, "The airport Shorty, and step on it."
  The End!

Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars is a great, fun read, especially for adventure starved Indy fans. Whether it would have made a good film is another question. While it's full of action, there's nothing in it on an emotional level to compare with Indy's search for his father in Last Crusade, and the rekindling of their relationship. The love affair with Elaine is convincing but shallow. Their relationship begins on one level - true love - and stays there. True, Indy knows less about her than he thinks, but finds this out as information. He doesn't learn about her character from her behavior. The action sequences are well-written and the film itself is tightly plotted, and it's fun to see an Indy script focusing on a great modern legend instead of an ancient one - the flying saucer scares of the Forties and Fifties, and the rumors of US Government cover-ups. But there's just not enough there outside the action to interest a director and actor of the stature of Spielberg and Ford. It is easy to see why Lucas came up with the idea; he gets to revisit his own childhood in Fifties America. But for Spielberg, making the film would have been a retrograde step, taking him back to territory he had explored amply in E.T. and Close Encounters, while Ford would have found little to challenge him in the role as written. And Henry Jones Seniors cameo appearance, while well-written, would have been a criminal misuse of Sean Connery's time.


III. Indiana Jones 4?

So where is Indy 4 going to go? Saucer Men almost certainly won't be it. There have been many rumors floating around on the Net, but precious few hard facts. Short of breaking into the safe in George Lucas's office, none of us is going to know anything until - and if - it starts shooting. However, based on the production process for the previous Indy movies, it's certainly possible to make a few educated guesses, first about the content and then the plot of the movie.

All the Indy scripts since Raiders of the Lost Ark have reused ideas from previous scripts and previous drafts. The mine car chase in Temple of Doom was originally in Raiders, while the speedboat chase and tank sequences in Last Crusade were originally borrowed from Chris Columbus's failed Indy 3 script (see the earlier installments of Raiders of the Lost Drafts for details!!). That script also featured a fight on a riverboat in the jungle with pirates, and a similar scene finds its way into the opening of Saucer Men. I wouldn't be surprised if it crops up again in Indy 4. As for the villains, many have speculated that they could be Russians; Cheslav in the Saucer Men script is an excellent character, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him again. One thing's for sure, the villains will be Europeans, Americans or Russians; after Temple of Doom was accused of racism and stereotyping, we aren't going to see any non-white peoples as bad guys. For the same reason, I would be surprised to see native people's of any kind playing a big role, unless they're completely friendly and not foolish and villainous in any way, but that would make Indy's job much easier and hence reduce dramatic tension (Saucer Men gets around this by showing a native people's that have a capacity for both stupidity and villainy... Americans!). The idea of Indy finally getting married is a good one, if unimaginatively handled in Saucer Men, and I think it's likely to be revisited in the final Indy script.

The next Indy film is not going to get made if the only challenges it provides are to ILM. Last Crusade only got made because the idea of showing the relationship between Indy and his father was one that captured Spielberg's imagination, and Ford's. Spielberg was able to consider father-son relationships within the context of an action movie, including his own with his father. The obvious next step would be to show Indy in a relationship with his own child. Examining such a relationship would be interesting for Spielberg, who himself has children, and perhaps for the legions of Indy fans who first saw Raiders as children - and would be taking their own children to see Indy 4! 
The fan-script Sons of Darkness imagined that Marion Ravenwood had had a son by Indy, called Abner. While this script was a fake (a pretty good fake, in some respects, except for its depiction of Joseph Stalin as a lovable old grouch) it's interesting that Lucasfilm slapped an injunction on it when it first hit the net. True, LFL is pretty zealous about defending any possible copyright infringement, but perhaps the idea of an Indy Junior had them worried as being close to an idea that was already being knocked around. More recently there have been rumors that Natalie Portman has asked, or been asked to play Indy's daughter. If Indy was to have a kid, who would be the mother? Obviously, it would have to be Marion or Willie. Now the fan choice would definitely be Marion, but Karen Allen would be unlikely to return, having fallen out with Spielberg after Raiders. While the fans would hate it, Kate Capshaw is the most likely to return, not least because she's Spielberg's wife. There have also been some rumors suggesting her involvement. And finally, the rumors of M. Night Shyamalan's co-option onto the project (which probably amount to no more than a preliminary meeting of some kind, a getting-to-know-you session with Spielberg) might indicate some kind of relationship between Indy and a child, given Shyamalan's obvious facility for scripting adult-child relationships. He's also a HUGE Raiders of the Lost Ark fan.

So far, so good - we know nothing, but we've been able to make a few educated guesses. What about the plot, the quest, the magical object that Indy pursues - what will he be looking for in Indy 4? There are two contradictory statements on this. Spielberg has been known to remark that the next Indy film will concern a search for the Biblical Garden of Eden, and a possible title has been touted: Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life. As George Lucas said after Last Crusade, coming up with a big important artifact for Indy to chase is difficult after the Holy Grail (and Dad). Saucer Men attempts to deal with this by having an extra-terrestrial artifact for Indy to go after. The Garden of Eden would be a suitably important focus for the film's plot. I think this is one of the top two contenders for the next film's central concept.


Jimgrim novel cover.

And the other one? I have a theory, and it goes right back to Indy's origins. Way back in the first chapter of this article I suggested that Indy was strongly inspired by a 1920's pulp action hero, Jimgrim, hero of about a dozen novels by the cult author Talbot Mundy. Lucas was introduced to them by his friend Phil Kaufman, who helped to come up with the original storyline for Raiders. The Indy films share many things in common with 'Jimgrim', such as the settings (the Middle East, The city of Petra, Cairo, Alexandretta, Nepal, India), and the sense of ancient civilizations and threats being reawakened in the present; they also borrow wholesale from the novels. Sallah, Short Round, and Marion all bear a strong resemblance to characters from the Jimgrim stories, while Temple of Doom borrows VERY heavily from a novel called The Nine Unknown. Having used so much Jimgrim material already, I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas borrowed the premise of Indy 4 from the last Jimgrim novel (titled 'Jimgrim'), the only one he hasn't touched yet. It concerns the lost city of Atlantis...

We have all heard the rumors about Atlantis being the storyline for Indy 4, and dismissed them as being somehow mixed up with the Infernal Machine game. But the very existence of so many rumors might suggest something concrete behind them. In any case, if Lucas follows the pattern of 'borrowing' heavily from Jimgrim and Talbot Mundy, then Atlantis is a definite possibility. That last Jimgrim novel is about a madman called Dorje, who has discovered the remains of the fabled civilization buried deep within the Gobi desert (a buried city is one of the last great adventure settings that the Indy films have not utilized yet, and besides, Lucas loves the idea of an underground city - something similar was lined up, but dropped, for Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and pre-production art exists). In the buried city Dorje finds Atlantean secrets preserved in scrolls in synthetic gold tablets, written in a language closely resembling Chinese - and holding the secrets of fabulous, destructive weapons...

Now this is a great scenario for an Indy film, and one that could also utilize elements of the Saucer Men screenplay quite easily. After all, Atlantis has often been connected with extraterrestrial life in various legends and theories. Parts of the Saucer Men script are pretty good, especially the first 45 pages or so, and feature some killer action sequences, notable Indy's fight with a Russian spy atop a rocket sled. The arrival of the Flying Fortress plane provides a means by which the action could move from the New Mexico desert to almost anywhere. And a buried city deep under the Gobi desert would be classic Indy territory. Who knows? Indy's daughter, Atlantis, Flying Saucers... All this is guesswork on my part, but at least it's informed guesswork, based on a study of how the previous Indy films were developed. 
One's thing for sure, a bad script would be worse than none. On the other hand, Lucas, Spielberg and Ford have the opportunity not just to end the saga on a rousing finale, but to do something really special with the character of an older, wiser, remorseful Indy (thinking of all the mistakes he's made, the people he's hurt...). They could provide modern American cinema's greatest hero with the kind of coda that an ageing Clint Eastwood gave his gunfighter character in Unforgiven, and turn an action legend into an American myth.

That's all folks - hope I get to write the sixth chapter of this article in a few years time, looking at the early drafts of Indy 4, the real Indy 4. Adios, amigos!

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