Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Indiana Jones and the inaccurate depiction of pre-Columbian America


       Quite to my surprise, I found out that the new Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull movie which premieres in the US tomorrow, opened here today, so I got to see it at one fifth the price of what it would have been back in the states... and free arabic subtitles to boot.  
   Some of the linguistic aspects of the movie were a bit laughable to be honest.  First there was the combination of ancient Mayan and modern Quechua, which are not from the same areas at all.  They seemed to be intending to mix the Norte Chico civilization of the 3rd millenium BC with the Incan empire (both of Peru), and then throwing in some random meso-american nonsense (is this where they got the strange alien connection).  There doesn't seem to be any record of a pre-Incan (written) language, despite the fact that the Andes were one of the world's 6 indigenous developments of civilization.  The stereotypical quest for El Dorado reminded me of the strange and dare I say creepy Werner Herzog film "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes" (Wrath of God).  

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

it seems like the recipe of a good Indiana Jones film would be 1 part Nazis and 1 part biblical artifact... the Soviet army does a pretty good job of replacing the Nazis, but the other ingredient...

Anonymous said...

Indiana Jones and the inaccurate depiction of

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