I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 21

Day 21: Indiana Jones and the Paved Jungle

I think it's fair to say that the Truck Chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark ranks fairly high among the all-time great film action sequences. It's so wonderful that, among Last Crusade's other Requel-y tendencies, attempts to copy it shamelessly, replacing the truck from Raiders with a Tank in an attempt to 'up the ante'. The attempt failed, but it was still a thrilling sequence.

So when Indiana Jones and family found themselves tied up in the back of another covered Army truck, I was interested to see what kind of spin they were going to put on the sequence this time around.

Turns out that the twist this time around was 'preposterousness', and 'cheap effects'.

The chase ought to have been outright fantastic, as it involves multiple jeeps and trucks racing through a jungle while people shoot at one another and jump back and forth from vehicle to vehicle. It never really works, though, for a number of reasons.

Today I'll be covering the first. The 'opening shot' of the action sequence is when Harrison Ford finds an RPG in the back of the truck he's in, and uses it to blow up the Tree-Clearing-Contraption that's busy making a road through the middle of the jungle. An impressive, all-CGI explosion occurs, but it creates a question - if the large jungle-clearing machine was creating a road through the jungle, a road so narrow that only a single truck can drive down it at a time, then how did they manage to continue driving all those vehicles after it was destroyed?

Because, for the next 5-10 minutes of the chase, not only are two sets of vehicles able to drive alongside each other with absolutely no problems, and the road is so stable that people are able to stand up on the backs of said jeeps and swordfight with one another. Interestingly, in the earlier scene, set in the back of the truck doing around fifteen miles an hour, the road seems excessively bumpy, and who can blame it? Just seconds ago, it was a jungle. Later on, driving at 30 miles an hour through the uncleared jungle, people are able to move around easily. How's that for consistency?