News came out yesterday that director Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford would return for a fifth (and I’m presuming last) Indiana Jones film. It would be the fifth film and follows the monetarily successful but critically panned Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls.
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg return for Indiana Jones 5 in Summer 2019
I say “presuming last” film in the Indiana Jones series because -and brace yourselves here- Harrison Ford will be 76 years old when the film is being made and be turning 77 when the film is actually released.
Mind you, Mr. Ford has maintained himself very well -if only everyone could look as good as he does when they reach that age!- but the reality of seeing a 76 year old man in a high octane action film, frankly, makes me wonder.
Years ago I wrote the novel Cold Hemispheres, a story set in The Dark Fringe universe which features an elderly protagonist on what amounts to his “last” hurrah.
For many, many years the idea of presenting one “last” story for a “hero” has intrigued me, well beyond my writing Cold Hemispheres. The concept is not unique, of course.
Mythologies are full of heroes who have one last adventure. There are story finales involving Robin Hood, King Arthur, Don Quixote, El Cid, and Beowulf. Robert E. Howard provided a magnificent ending, in poem form, to Solomon Kane. In comic books, there have been story finales offered (though they are called “elseworlds” or “imaginary” tales) for Batman (Frank Miller’s original The Dark Knight Returns) and Superman (The Alan Moore written Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow).
Whether tragic, exciting, humorous, or depressing, every story featuring a strong protagonist eventually ends and, if the protagonist appears in multiple stories, there is a temptation to explore their mortality and where it all ends.
Many years ago I took a sequential art (ie comic book storytelling) class with comic book legend Will Eisner. This was somewhere around the time or shortly after the full release of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
When my friend and I left one of the classes we wound up taking an elevator ride alone with Mr. Eisner and I gathered my courage and asked him if he ever considered writing/drawing one last Spirit story. I noted The Dark Knight series (again, it was very much on most comic book readers’ minds at the time) and wondered if he ever considered making such a story. I further stated if such a story were considered and created, it didn’t need to have quite as large a page count as Mr. Miller’s Batman story but rather could fit in with the usual Spirit stories which often ran no longer than 7-8 pages.
Mr. Eisner, at least to my mind, was either intrigued with the notion or, more likely, had been asked this question many times before and rather than shoot me down politely stated something along the lines that it was an interesting idea but that he had other works he was more interested in pursuing.
Mr. Eisner would ultimately pass away in 2005 and, to my knowledge, never did create a formal “finale” Spirit story.
Following the critically reviled Kingdom of the Crytal Skull, Mr. Spielberg and Ford are given a second chance to create an Indiana Jones finale (unless they feel they can make yet another Indiana Jones movie after this one!). I hope with this film they create something magical thought I will admit beyond Raiders of the Lost Ark the other Indiana Jones films are, IMHO, lesser works.
Regardless, I’ll most certainly be there to see!