Indiana Jones

People who know me well will know that I’m not generally fond of movies. I can think of maybe a half-dozen movies I’ve seen lately. Borat is the only one I can think of that I’d recommend. Most movies just turn out to be a waste of my time. So I’m maybe not the normal movie-watcher.

That said, I’d like to review the latest Indiana Jones movie, which I watched last night. I’ll keep it nice and brief: F Minus. Made no sense.

I’m not sure how it started, but I had recently read something about greywater recyling, re-using water from things like your washing machine (as opposed to something gross, like your toilet) for other uses. It’s sometimes done in small homes, diverting the drain from your shower into your garden or the like, but it’s also done in big commercial places in the desert, where it’s filtered more heavily and reused.

At times, Indiana Jones got boring enough that I pulled out my iPhone and started reading some pages on greywater recycling. Did you know that you shouldn’t store greywater for more than 24 hours? As the action picked up a little more, I’d put it away, only to become seriously bored again and turn back to reading about recycling greywater on Wikipedia.

I don’t recall the last Indiana Jones movie I saw, but I seem to recall him as being a sort of macho, wild west hero who rides horses, kills badguys with his six-shooter and a whip, and defends ancient historical sites. Good ol’ Americana that makes sense, albeit being totally unrealistic. (He must have had about 10,000 bullets fired at him, and not a single one hit him: no special skill was involved, he was just running away and somehow machine gun fire from many guns never, ever made contact with him.)

But this one ended with a magnetized quartz (huh?) skull turning into an alien, which formed a giant UFO-vortex that sucked up the evil Russian lady, and turned what looked a lot like Machu Pichu into an ocean. And then, the end.

If anyone’s thinking of seeing it, I’d recommend you instead stay home. Here is the Wikipedia page on greywater, which includes some good links. Sure, I can think of much more interesting things to do than read up on greywater recycling. But watching this Indiana Jones movie isn’t one of them.

Sure, it had a few scenes that may have beat greywater recycling, but on average, it was slightly less interesting than reading about greywater recycling and how the various plumbing codes in the US regulate it. (Spoiler alert: some plumbing codes permit it, some do not, and most allow it with heavy regulation that usually makes it neither cost-effective nor environmentally friendly.) But besides being slightly more interesting, greywater has the advantage of making sense. Halfway through reading about greywater, it’s not suddenly going to become a magnetic skull made out of quartz, and it definitely won’t spontaneously turn into an alien, form a giant vortex, and flood Machu Pichu, sucking the evil Russians “into another dimension, the space in between spaces.”

2 thoughts on “Indiana Jones

  1. (He must have had about 10,000 bullets fired at him, and not a single one hit him: no special skill was involved, he was just running away and somehow machine gun fire from many guns never, ever made contact with him.)

    That would be the first law of firearms in film. A thousand bad guys with infinite ammo will never strike the hero, but the hero, armed with a potato and a sock, can kill a thousand bad guys with a single strike.

  2. One thing about machine guns is that they are horribly inaccurate. One really has to make an effort to hit their target with one. Plus the pull horribly up and to the right. So while it is unlikely that all those bullets would completely miss it is not impossible. Now if people were taking careful aim and shooting in semi-automatic mode it would be more likely the good guy would get killed. But most of the poorly trained henchmen that movie villains use are not likely to do that. You’ll notice that the good guys are seldom shooting full-auto.
    The latest US military version of the M16 does not shoot real full-auto for just that reason. It shoots a three round burst which is a lot easier to control.
    On the other hand the good buy usually blows up a car with one well placed shot. In actual fact I have seen literally hundreds of rounds of ammo shot into a car without any flames at all. A group of several lucky shot may start a fire. I have seen that. First the gas tank is punctured and then a random chance occurrence causes a spark and a fire starts.
    The only time I saw a car blow up after shooting was when a carefully placed pyrotechnic device was placed in the car. Yes I am talking about shooting at cars, including with machine guns, from actual personal experience.

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