Did Indy dumb down Movies?
I recently read an essay about the Indiana Jones movies being responsible for the dumb box-office thrill ride films that preceded it . Carrie Rickey in Sundays Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that she wasn’t a fan of the films and hated what happened to films after the Indy films were released. I had to think for a moment and really wonder if this was true. Rickey says that “she cannot muster enthusiasm for a franchise that has done so much to dumb down movie scripts, ramp up movie tempos, perpetuate colonialist stereotypes, and marginalize women”. Does she have a point I wondered and so I went off and did a bit of research to see if she was right. Raiders was released in 1981, and I was still in high school. When it came out I thought it was one of the best films I had seen in a while. Of course I was 17 at the time, and my tastes for the cinema were that of action adventures and horror films. There were several other films in 1981 that fascinated me and entertained me such as Arthur, ...