Hammer Time - Indiana Jones And The Nazis' Obsession With The Mighty Thor
Indiana Jones and the Third Reich have bickered over both the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. But, oh, the objects of religious power Spielberg, Lucas and Co. overlooked.. .
It would appear that what goes for Star Trek movies is also true of the Indiana Jones saga - the best films are the odd-numbered films.
In Dr Jones' case, the pictures in question have a lot in common. For one thing, our hero find himself at odds with the Third Reich. For another, both the Good Doctor and the not-so-nice Nazis are in pursuit of a religious object believed to possess great power. In the case of 1981's Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the parties are bent on recovering the Ark of the Covenant, the box which contained the tablets upon which God inscribed His ten commandments. Meanwhile, in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the obscure object of desire is that very old favourite the Holy Grail.
With the Ark “a radio for talking to God” and the Grail capable of making those who drink from it immortal - at least within the Jones universe - these are McGuffins of the highest order. Why, you wonder, did Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas opt to have Indiana seek out sacred Indian stones in Temple Of Doom and alien beings - for god's sake! - in Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull when they could just have plucked another object from the Nazis' religious icons shopping list?
There's certainly no shortage of artefacts to choose from. A quirk in Nazi philosophy that had been brought to the attention of Spielberg and Lucas by fellow filmmaker Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Right Stuff), the Third Reich was bent on acquiring sacred relics. To this end, teams of archaeologists travelled throughout Europe and Asia, looking for items that might improve their legitimacy and/or point up Hitler's theory that the Germans were in fact the offspring of a race of Aryan giants, who themselves might have been the original inhabitants of Atlantis.
Barking mad as this sounds - and, indeed, is - the Nazis dedicated serious resources to this project. Admittedly not as much as the History Channel and its dubious ilk would have you believe. Indeed, if recent documentaries are anything to go by, you'd think that the conquest of Europe and the Final Solution were of far less concern to the Fuhrer than retrieving the Spear of Destiny, the lance used to pierce the flank of the crucified Christ that Heinrich Himmler had it on good authority could be retrieved from a church in Austria.
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